He's at Home With Trade Figures--and Essays, Poetry, Piano : Japan's Uno Brings Array of Talents to Center Stage

By SAM JAMESON

June 1, 1989 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

TOKYO — After the toasts were finished at a black-tie dinner in January, 1988, at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Washington, Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita announced that he wanted to reveal “a national secret.”

Foreign Minister Sosuke Uno, he said, is an expert harmonica player--and had brought his harmonica with him.

Uno entertained the guests with a medley of four traditional Japanese and American songs, including the theme song from the old John Wayne movie, “Stagecoach.” His audience that night included five members of the U.S. Cabinet, among them James A. Baker III, then Treasury secretary and now secretary of state, and Clayton K. Yeutter, U.S. trade representative who is now agriculture secretary.

It wasn’t the first time that Uno had made diplomatic use of his “secret” talents, which include kendo (wooden sword fencing), playing the piano, painting, writing books and essays and composing poetry. During a visit to Seoul, he accompanied South Korea’s leading singer, Cho Yon Pil, on the piano in a scene shown on television.

Indeed, during 29 years in national politics Uno has relied so much on his many talents, a pleasant personality and an outgoing manner that critics call him kuchi-hatcho, te-hatcho-- literally, a man with “a big mouth and big acting.”

In a nation that prefers leaders of few words and subdued actions, that is not meant as a compliment.

The question now is whether those talents will pull Uno through his toughest challenge: being prime minister of Japan.

On Friday, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, in a caucus of members of both house of Parliament, will choose him as party president. Then, the party will use its majority in Parliament to elect him prime minister.

Seldom has a Japanese leader come into office facing the mountain of problems that will confront Uno at home and abroad. And seldom, if ever, has a new leader had so little support.

U.S.-Japan Ties Ebb

U.S.-Japan relations have not been so low since President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1960 trip to Japan was canceled two days before his scheduled arrival because of anti-government demonstrations. The United States angered Japan, and Uno personally, last week when it formally branded its alliance partner an “unfair trading nation.”

And never have the fortunes of the ruling party, in power since 1955, appeared as bleak as now after 11 months of revelations of a $7.7-million influence-buying scandal.

Uno’s selection was made without any welling up of support within the ruling party. Elder statesmen opposed his appointment, while the party’s faction leaders merely acquiesced.

Takeshita picked him virtually single-handedly after his first choice, Masayoshi Ito, 75, chairman of the Liberal Democrats’ executive board, turned down the job.

Like Takeshita, Uno was born into a sake-brewing family. And like Takeshita, he started his political career in a prefectural (state) assembly, winning his first election at 28. The two have been friends for 30 years.

But while Takeshita passed through World War II with only a year of service in an army flight squadron that never saw battle, Uno was conscripted into the army in 1943 and was captured in Korea by Soviet soldiers in August, 1945. They sent him to a Siberian prison camp. His 1948 book on the experience, reprinted in 1982, was the basis of a movie.

For nearly two years, guarded by Soviet soldiers, Uno worked with ax and saw in a deforestation project. Productivity, he recalled, determined food rations. About 70,000 Japanese prisoners died in the camps. On Oct. 15, 1947, he boarded a ship to return to Japan.

“The cold rinsing water in my mouth felt so good, and it refreshed all my body and my mind,” he wrote. “I looked up in the sky toward the south (toward Japan) and clapped my hands. The echo of my clapping hands made me recognize that I was finally released. I felt like I was touching God.

“I shall go home. I shall go back to Japan.”

Has Held 5 Cabinet Posts

While serving in the Shiga prefecture assembly, he met Yasuhiro Nakasone, who was to be prime minister from 1982 to 1987. Nakasone introduced him to the late conservative strongman, Ichiro Kono, and Uno became Kono’s secretary.

With Kono’s backing, he ran for a seat in the lower house of Parliament in 1958 but lost. Two years later, he won and has been reelected nine times, rising in the faction that Nakasone took over after Kono’s death.

He has served in five Cabinet positions--as head of the Defense Agency, the Science and Technology Agency, the Administrative Management Agency, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Foreign Ministry.

Uno has held important second-echelon posts in the ruling party, but none of the party’s four major positions, as previous prime ministers have done.

Some Japanese diplomats reportedly fault Uno for not tackling tough trade issues. He is given good marks by his subordinates, however, for being outspoken and understanding foreign affairs.

Uno has left a few marks on Japanese policy.

He was instrumental in establishing Japan’s version of the Peace Corps. And as science and technology agency director, he negotiated a sensitive agreement with the United States that gave Japan the right to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, which produces material that can be used for the production of nuclear weapons.

Uno and his wife, Hiroko, have two daughters, both of whom are married.