Correspondents' Correspondence

...Interestingly—and again typically—on the same day news of a $150 million deal for the first Arab takeover of a British private bank—Bates—was deemed worthy of only inside coverage in most London papers...

...The Japanese are truly skilled professional pedestrians, but I see a great similarity in the way they like to stand in the middle of a sidewalk or crowded area and schmooz...

...It is a fake 18th-century six-bedroom country residence 23 miles outside London, one of numerous estates owned by the British Royal family...

...they cared enough about their young people to keep them busy with a variety of programs...

...But there can be no question that energy supply lines bind closer than building leases or hotel bills.-Eliahu Salpeter Tokyo vs...

...When I phoned him, the charge d'affaires refused to confirm or deny the account, and my first inclination was to dismiss it as typical Amin nonsense...

...While the effect of these measures remains to be seen, it was at least an immediate psychological compensation for the Tokyo bureaucrats to hear the reactions of their New York counterparts to the city...

...Havana still has its hands in the troubled infant republic, and its presence has drawn a mixed reaction in Africa...

...Tokyo...

...He then declared that Somalia was ready to join the fighting in Rhodesia together with some other members of the Organization of African Unity (OAU...

...Their growing list of imports ranges from a five-year, $100 million contract to provide catering and recreation facilities for 10,000 Saudi pipelineconstruction workers, to ultramodern weapons bought by the United Arab Emirates for reshipment as a kind of protection payment to mightier but poorer "revolutionary brethren...

...In an absolute sense, Britain seems to be the main target of the petrodollar...

...The municipality hopes as well to raise lottery ticket sales from $21 million in 1975 to about $30 million...

...From the helicopter, the city's lack of open space is dramatic, but the Japanese seem to compensate for it with this ability to make use of what room they have...

...Now, though, as Kissinger shuttles in search of a peaceful solution to the Rhodesian deadlock, the Russians have become one of the major arms suppliers to the Zimbabwean nationalists fighting against Ian Smith's white minority government...

...Although Ethiopia has traditionally been among America's closest African allies, its twoyear-old Socialist military regime has been looking increasingly to Moscow...

...Complete hospitals and mobile clinics arc to be constructed, and para-medical training programs are to be established—all equipped, staffed and run on a turnkey and postturnkey basis...

...People in Tokyo, like people in New York, seem to enjoy the city," said William H. Whyte, director of New York's Street Life Project...

...They have the same problems as we do with crowded conditions, but I saw a lot more happy faces here than sad ones...

...When the urban-affairs specialists compared the severe financial problems both cities face, they noted some advantages of the Japanese capital's situation...

...When I traveled by freight train through the remote southeastern corner of Rhodesia last year, an engaging old salt of a stationmaster noticed my American accent...

...With the value of the pound low, goods are relatively cheap there...

...Now I know I haven't left home...

...By then, the Belgian firm should complete construction of a huge liquefication plant in Algeria paid for by a $125 million credit from Distrigaz and $200 million loan from Belgian banks...

...Once again, it seems, the USSR has keenly sensed the African mood...

...Donna Shalala...

...Moscow, meanwhile, is creating a string of militarily powerful clients across Africa...

...The USSR is also active today in adjoining and rival Ethiopia, already the possessor of black Africa's second largest standing army (Nigeria's is first) and one of its strongest air forces...

...what impressed me was not so much the design, which was rather ordinary, but the quality of the construction and most of all the way people interacted...

...In addition, the Zimbabwean guerrillas have already been joined by some Mozambican soldiers and Maputo's role in the conflict is expected to grow...

...Seeing a Japanese neighborhood...

...Anybody who wanted to insure that the Saudis are not obliging the contractors to participate in their favorite anti-Jewish discriminations would face a difficult task, indeed...

...The extent of its influence in newly independent Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique—a result of the aid it gave the revolutionary groups in those former Portuguese colonies—is of course well known...

...Since Tokyo has been an urban center for about 150 years, the largest collection of kibbutzim in Asia seems secure.—MICHAEL BeRGER...

...they have on-the-spot health clinics, commercial shopping and all necessary social services...

...Most of the New York visitors came away convinced the Tokyoites' lifestyle helps them to cope remarkably well with a generally ugly urban sprawl...

...In Somalia, the country that strategically monopolizes Africa's Indian Ocean "horn," 2,000 Soviet military advisors have turned the Army and Air Force into formidable military organizations...

...who got his look at the city by jogging through narrow streets at 7 a.m., felt that "many of our assumptions about mixed land use seem to have been refuted in Tokyo...

...Columbia University political scientist and Treasurer of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, wondered at the outset: "How can people all over the world live in great cities like this...

...The fastest walker in Manhattan is just average in Tokyo," he noted...

...The Soviets have played their hand more subtly, and should they merely seem to be supporting African troops in a contest with whites, few here would oppose them...

...Later that same week, however, the Somali Vice President and Minister of Defense, Mohamed Ali Samantar, returned from Moscow amid a spate of rumors that the Kremlin had asked him to mobilize his Army in the guerilla war against Rhodesia...

...And neighborhoods, as one Japanese delegate observed, are in effect, "a series of villages, each with its own variety of shops, restaurants and services, often side-byside with larger business enterprises...

...New York Tokyo—Looking down on the lapanese capital from a helicopter and seeing a freeway lying unfinished because of protests by local residents, New York City Planning Commissioner Alexander Cooper smiled...

...The Soviet charge d'affaires in Kampala was said to have told President Idi Amin that his country wanted to rebuild Uganda's air and ground forces so that they might help in the struggle for the liberation of Southern Africa...

...State Conservation Commissioner Peter A. A. Berle...

...But ouside intervention is a delicate matter here under any circumstances, as the Cubans, who fought for the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), have found...

...And manufacturing is not the only sphere in which the Arabs are active...

...The OAU would have no choice but to add its battle cry, and the prestige and influence of the Soviet Union in Africa would soar to new heights.Roger Mann Petrodollar Invasion Brussels—Fort Belvedere is no Buckingham Palace, not even a Balmoral Castle...

...Apparently the estate is considered a proper occasion for cries of patriotic anguish, but spreading Arab influence in the British economy is a subject polite people aren't supposed to talk about...

...Uganda's Soviet supplied Army is larger than the combined forces of its more populous neighbors—pro-Western Kenya and truly nonaligned but Socialist Tanzania—and its Air Force has three times the striking capability of theirs...

...Technically, an anonymous "Arab businessman" is only taking over the remaining 78 years of a 100year lease given to a cousin of Queen Elizabeth...

...By the end of her visit she had mixed feelings: "At a housing development we saw...

...What they and perhaps most others outside Africa fail to realize is exactly how painful the very existence of white majority regimes in the South is to all free Africans—not simply to the pontificating and often hyprocritical politicians, but to the underemployed man in the street and the subsistence farmer who earns barely $100 a year as well...

...Though he dislikes the idea...

...said Cooper, "gave me the feeling of a kibbutz...

...Throughout the continent, Africans are impatient with the OAU for not taking military action against minority rule in the South...

...I hoped there would be less repetition of American mistakes, and a little more of Japanese culture reflected in their city planning...

...Until recently, its only claim to a small niche in history rested on having been the place where King Edward VIII signed his letter of abdication after deciding to marry Wallis Simpson...

...Indeed, many here view this as being largely responsible for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's present belated initiatives to bring about majority rule in Rhodesia and SouthWest Africa through negotiation: And the feeling has been heightened by the negative reactions of vocal conservative Americans to the Secretary's efforts...

...Yet the fact remains that while it is questionable how much real mischief the Arabs could perpetrate by substituting khoumous and shishIik for pate de foi gras and Chateaubriand at Claridge's, the huge contracts with British industries do represent a formidable leverage on a government trying hard to hold down unemployment...

...Even less attention was paid to an open-end, 20-year contract signed recently by Belgium's Distrigaz with Algeria's national Sonatrach company for the purchase of 3.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually, beginning in 1979...

...During the eight years Governor Ryokichi Minobe has been in office, the city's payroll has grown by about 60.000 to more than 280.000 workers...

...West Germany, and the U.S...

...I'm struck by the lack of vision here...

...and that the trains and subways are crowded, but efficient, clean and graffiti-free...

...At the same time there have been increases in the amount and quality of social services, including day-care centers offering 9-5 facilities for about $30 a month, or less...

...For just as there is much that we cannot understand about them, they find it difficult to comprehend that Western democracies cannot exercise control over the activities of their citizens...

...He told me the last "Yank" to pass through his tiny railway outpost of Mbizi was a huge Vietnam veteran from Texas who claimed he had come to Rhodesia "to shoot niggers...

...This summer Fort Belvedere acquired another distinction: It became the first Royal-family property to be bought by Arabs...

...Living in homes and apartments that are tiny by U. S. standards, they socialize in public places...

...The next day the Somali Ambassador to Kenya, Hussein Haji Ali, praised the support the Socialist countries have given to African liberation movements and added, "Free Africa is dutybound to take part in the liberation of the rest of the continent and the liberation of Southern Africa is very close to our hearts...

...Here in Belgium, for example, few people have heard about the $715 million deal with a consortium of nine Belgium companies that will provide full-scale health service facilities for the Saudi National Guard...

...Governor Minobe has also reversed his antigambling policy, permitting a few revenue-producing horse races...

...The New Yorkers learned that the major security problems in this city of roughly 11.6 million are earthquakes and fires, not crime...

...Regrettably, the description was too typical of the only kind of Westerner many Africans ever get to meet...

...South Africa...

...Relatively speaking, however, Arab business may be playing a more important role in the economies of some smaller European countries, although little is said or written about it in the local press...

...Japanese pop-culture scholar Hidetoshi Kato called it "buying time and space—like the way we pay 300 yen [about $1] for a cup of coffee in a small shop, yet we get all the time we need for socializing or doing business...

...he remarked...

...The United States and Britain have of late been countering all this with a diplomatic peace offensive...

...Challenge in Africa Nairobi—In late August Uganda's government-operated radio station announced that the Soviet Union had offered to replace the 11 MIG jets blown up by Israel in its dramatic raid on Entebbe Airport...

...It is unlikely that getting some of their gas from Algeria will suddenly make the Belgians ardent Arablovers...

...Given their Soviet logistical backing, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that if the Kissinger undertaking ultimately fails, Somalia, Uganda, Nigeria, and possibly other countries will take up arms against the white minority regimes...

...But Africans doubt its sincerity when they read that Tom McCarthy, a recruitment officer for the Rhodesian Army and a former British soldier, said on British television that 70-80 per cent of the new white recruits in the Army are foreigners, primarily from Britain...

...Cooper was here recently with a group of New York urban-affairs specialists who were meeting with their Tokyo counterparts in the last of a series of colloquia on the two cities sponsored by the japan Society...

...a municipal employe explained, "will never go bankrupt because in our system, the strong national government comes to our assistance...

...In addition, the Arab rich always had a penchant for British pomp and respectability, and British tutelage of obscure sheikdoms conveniently encouraged confidence in London banking when the discovery of oil turned the sons of scruffy sheiks into billionaires...

...Hundreds of Belgian firms will provide X-ray machines, metal furniture, laboratory equipment, motor vehicles, sheets and towels, pots and pans, telephones, vaccines, and tens of thousands of other items...

...They seemed happy...

...But in practical terms he made a purchase, and as with all stories about Arabs buying a royal lodge or a famous downtown hotel, the $360,000 Fort Belvedere transaction received front-page treatment...

...In West Africa, the Soviet Union is successfully cementing close ties with the military governments of Ghana and Nigeria...

...It's a shame the physical form of things often doesn't support that human spirit, but if the Japanese solved their housing problems, began staying at home all the time and lost their marvelous sense of being together, that would be a real shame...

...The Tokyo Metropolitan Government plans to cut its projected $480 million deficit for fiscal 1977 down to $70 million in fiscal 1979 by pushing for stiffer real estate, corporate and special taxes, including penalties for owners of vehicles that do not meet lowpollution emission standards...

...that industrial pollution is under control, though vehicle exhaust problems are serious...

...Whyte filmed rush-hour traffic at Shinjuku Station, one of the largest in the world, and was overwhelmed by the action...