FROM SECRETARY OF STATE
Prime Minister
CONFIDENTIAL
MY VISIT TO JAPAN
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1. I shall be visiting Japan from 9 - 11 September. will be the highest level visit by a British Minister since your visit of September 1989. I shall be holding talks with my opposite number, as well as calling on Prime Minister Kaifu and attending the launching of the UK90 Festival. The Japanese Foreign Minister came here last year, and it is my turn to visit him, in fulfilment of our now established pattern of annual Foreign Ministerial talks. The timing is fortuitously good. The meetings will follow almost immediately on my tour of the Middle East and on my way back from Tokyo, I shall spend 3 days in Moscow for the 2 + 4 session and bilateral business. So the Gulf and East/West issues will naturally bulk large in my talks.
2. More broadly, however, I intend to use this visit to build up our already good relations with Japan. Since our decision in 1987 to reorientate our strategy so as to place more stress on the political relationship compared with the traditional emphasis on trade, UK-Japan relations have greatly improved. There are now no bilateral trade irritants worthy of raising at Foreign Ministerial level, and the various programmes of cooperation - cultural, scientific educational, inward investment - are all flourishing. But more substance can be infused into the relationship not least to take advantage of Japanese ambitions now to assert a more independent political voice on global issues. My emphasis will be on areas of cooperative, or parallel action.
3.
There are a number of obvious areas where progress can be made:
As you know from your own discusions with Kaifu, the Japanese are interested in cooperating with us over know-how for Eastern Europe. Lynda Chalker also pressed this idea in her talks in Tokyo in July. It is an area of which they have little experience, but they have now expressed willingness to consider joint funding of specific technical assistance projects. I hope to secure their agreement in principle to UK/Japan cooperation on know-how funding: there is much scope for both joint activity in particular areas, and complementary work in spheres in which we are not heavily involved;
T12AEL
CONFIDENTIAL