
	     


			 THE WHITE HOUSE

		  Office of the Press Secretary
		     (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                          April 8, 1994     

	     
		     REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
			   TO THE POOL
	     
	     
			 Marquette Hotel 
		      Minneapolis, Minnesota  


2:36 P.M. CDT
	     
	     
	     THE PRESIDENT:  I wanted to mention a couple of 
things today.  First, this morning, pretty early, I had a 
conversation with Prime Minister Hosokawa in which he told me 
that he was going to resign and that he hoped it would help the 
cause of political reform.  He said he was very proud of the work 
that he had done in his term as Prime Minister in trying to 
promote reform within Japan and in trying to reform Japan's 
relationships with the United States, and that he intended to 
keep working on that, and that he hoped that I would continue to 
work on the Japanese-U.S. relationship with his successor.
	     
	     I told him that I was personally very sorry to see 
him step down, that I thought he had provided amazing leadership 
to the people of Japan, and that he had made them believe in the 
possibility of change and that it could help the people.  And I 
thanked him specifically not only for his work in political 
reform, but for opening the Japanese rice market for the first 
time in history, and for engaging us in a lot of other issues, 
and for his support in Korea and in a number of other areas.
	     
	     It was a good conversation and I'm very grateful to 
him for that -- for what he did.
	     
	     Let me just mention one other thing, if I might.  I 
called today the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and 
my National Security Advisor and had extended conversations with 
all three of them about the situation in Rwanda.  And I want to 
mention it only because there are a sizable number of Americans 
there and it is a very tense situation.  And I just want to 
assure the families of those who are there that we are doing 
everything we possibly can to be on top of the situation to take 
all appropriate steps to try to assure the safety of our citizens 
there.  But it is a difficult situation and we should all know 
that.
	     
	     Q    Mr. President, there are some people, even 
within the administration, who feel that this really marks a very 
bad turn for U.S.-Japanese trade talks and economic policy.  
There's been little progress until now, and now there is even 
less hope that it can be concluded successfully.
	     
	     THE PRESIDENT:  I'm just not sure.  We certainly 
don't intend to change our economic policy or our trade policy.  
But one of the problems that the Prime Minister had was that the 
coalition that he heads as presently constituted contains a small 
minority that can, in effect, veto what a majority of the 
coalition might want on economic reform.  So while I think, 
clearly, he was as committed to the kinds of changes in the 
modernization of Japan's economic policy as any person who has 
ever headed that government, I think what he hopes is that in the 
end there will be a realization without him that there must be a 
majority coalition for change.
	     
	     So I think what we're going to have to do, frankly, 
is to stick with our policy and then see how it shakes out in 
Japan, how it works itself out.  They're going to have to work 
that out.
	     
	     Q    But, Mr. President, in the past we've been 
pretty hard on Japan.  In the last year or so we've been very 
rough on them.  When the talks broke down you said you didn't 
want to paper over differences with rhetoric.  Do you think 
there's a chance maybe we were a little too hard on Japan and it 
might be a time to kind of step back and let this kind of settle?
	     
	     THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I don't -- those two things 
are not inconsistent.  I think we should stick with our policy 
and be firm about it.  We also tried to support Japan in many 
ways.  And as I said on my trip there, I think that our policy is 
in the best interest of the Japanese.  A more open Japanese 
market means that the Japanese citizens won't have to pay almost 
40 percent more for their consumer goods than they otherwise 
would.  And I think it means more jobs and a more prosperous 
economy in Japan.  And I think we should keep pushing for that.  
But I think plainly the Japanese are going to need a little bit 
of time to constitute a new government.  
	     
	     The United States-Japanese relationship is a 
complicated one in the sense that it has many legs.  It has a 
security aspect, a political aspect, an economic aspect.  But I 
do not expect there to be a marked deterioration in our 
relationships with that country.  We're too important to each 
other and to the rest of the world.
	     
	     Q    With Prime Minister Hosokawa stepping down, is 
there a sense in your White House that the administration is 
going to have to start from scratch with Japan on trade?  It's a 
whole new picture now.
	     
	     THE PRESIDENT:  I don't think so.  I don't think so.  
We started, interestingly enough -- it's easy to forget now, but 
the agreement itself, the framework agreement was negotiated with 
Mr. Miyazawa before he left office, with the concurrence of at 
least a sufficient number of the people in his government in the 
LDP, which would normally be thought of as more resistant to 
these sorts of changes.  So -- and we have kept up -- we have had 
a good relationship, our administration has, with a number of the 
Japanese political leaders in this coalition.  And we'll just 
have to see what comes out of it.
	     
	     But I'm not -- I would not assume that the cause of 
economic and political reform will suffer an irrevocable setback.  
If you listen to the Prime Minister carefully in his public 
statement, he made it clear that while there were these personal 
questions which were raised which he took, I think -- to use his 
words -- personal and moral responsibility for, he also talked 
about the importance of having an effective governing coalition 
and the need for the reform movement to come to grips with its 
internal contradictions.
	     
	     So I wouldn't write the epitaph of change too 
quickly here.  I think Mr. Hosokawa believes that he may be able 
to continue to push for it and be a force for it, and I think he 
believes that we may wind up with a Japanese government with a 
little more capacity to change in some areas than perhaps the 
present coalition does.  We'll just have to wait and see.
	     
	     Q    Might it complicate the situation with North 
Korea and with China?  You've got some big decisions regarding 
Asia in the next two months.
	     
	     THE PRESIDENT:  Well, we do.  My belief is that the 
-- that any successor government will keep working closely with 
us on North Korea, and keep in close touch with us on China and 
keep working with us with China on North Korea.  I believe that 
will happen.  I would be surprised if that did not happen.
	     
	     Q    Which way are we going on Bosnia right now?
	     
	     Q    The Perry way or the Christopher way?
	     
	     THE PRESIDENT:  We're going -- no.  That's a -- let 
me just say, I think that's a great overstatement.  I talked to 
both of them in each of the last few days about a number of other 
issues.  But I don't think that there ever was a real difference 
between them.  And our government position is clear, and we'll 
keep trying to work for peace in Bosnia.  We'll make our air 
forces available as part of the NATO strategy, as part of the 
UNPROFOR strategy to protect the forces that are there.
	     
	     They were both trying to say in different ways that 
we might -- we certainly wouldn't rule out the use of our efforts 
around Gorazde, but that there is a process that triggers those 
efforts, which you know well and which has to be followed before 
we can bring our force into play.  So I do not believe there is a 
difference between the two of them and I -- frankly, my instinct, 
having talked to both of them at some length, is that there never 
was a difference between the two of them.  So we are together; we 
have the same policy we always had and we're going to keep trying 
to make it work.
	     
	     THE PRESS:  Thank you.

			       END2:45 P.M. CDT

