Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much. On behalf of Hillary and myself, I want to say how glad we are to be in Japan and how much we…”

“Thank you very much. On behalf of Hillary and myself, I want to say how glad we are to be in Japan and how much we appreciate Ambassador and Mrs. Armacost inviting all of you to come here and to meet us. I want to keep my remarks brief because I hope we can have more time for personal visiting. I do want you to know that I just had a very good meeting with Prime Minister Miyazawa, and we discussed a whole range of issues. I would say, the most important are that I was able to reaffirm the commitment of the United States to the security relationship that exists between our two nations and the continuing involvement of the United States in a security relationship in Japan and Korea and across a whole broad range of issues that face us as a people. Secondly, we had a good discussion about our efforts at the upcoming G-7 summit to promote a higher rate of economic growth throughout the globe, to open more markets to trade through the Uruguay round, and finally, to try to secure a democracy and market reforms in Russia, something that Japan has been very helpful to the United States on and for which we are very grateful. And lastly, we discussed negotiations which are still ongoing in our attempt to establish a framework of basic principles for a new agreement about our trading relationships. Perhaps we can have more to say about that in our personal conversations. The United States thinks it is absolutely critical for the imbalances to be reduced.…”