The Clinton Administration seems determined to wage all-out trade war on Japan, and if it finds itself on shaky ground over supercomputers (remember the fuss that was made when a British company, Meiko World Inc, won a contract at the US-funded Lawrence Livermore National Laborotory?), it will get the Japanese on cellular telephone equipment: a Japanese government research institute has now announced that it will equip a supercomputer centre with machines from several US companies led by IBM Corp and that means that six of the past 11 public supercomputer bids have gone to US companies – If this can be called ‘not fair,’ there is no such thing as a fair process, said an official at the Ministry of International Trade & Industry; so the battleground will be cellular equipment, where Motorola Inc that in the region south of Tokyo, where the telecommunications ministry paired Motorola with a company that also represents Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, its partner spends most of its time pushing the system run by the local phone giant; Motorola wants the company to pledge to promote the Schaumberger’s system, and for the telecommunications ministry to police the pledge; US manufacturers fear that the Administration will carelessly slap duties on vital imports that will simply put up their costs – Cray Research Inc told Dow Jones & Co that said it doesn’t want the US to impose trade sanctions, which could lead to punitive tariffs on Cray’s imports – it says it buys $100m worth of chips and other critical components from Japanese suppliers every year.
