`Japanese Are Not Ants' -- Sound Trucks Blare Against French Prime Minister

The super-amplified sound trucks that are the trademark of Japan's right wing have removed themselves from their regular posts outside the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo to flail away at a new foe.

"The harangues are so deafening you can hardly think," grumbled a diplomat at the French Embassy, the latest target of nationalist outrage at French Prime Minister Edith Cresson's vitriolic criticisms of Japanese economic encroachment on Europe. "Everyone here has a splitting headache."

Outside the Tokyo embassy, the loudspeakers atop the black trucks were cranked to top-decibel level, and screaming orators raged against France's first female prime minister: "We are not little yellow men! We are not thinking of ways to screw Edith Cresson!"

Cresson has characterized the Japanese as "ants" and "little yellow men" who "sit up all night thinking how to screw us." By "us," she has said, she means the United States and Europe, which, in her view, should devise a "combat strategy" to defeat a "common enemy . . . whose strategy is world conquest."

Such views have offended Japanese across the political spectrum but have especially enraged the right. The sound trucks have been blaring outside the French Embassy since mid-June, and Tokyo police have tightened security in the vicinity of high-profile French businesses, some of whose offices have been defaced by graffiti.

Vandalism is exceedingly rare in Japan, but two weeks ago an angry red scrawl appeared across the window of a Peugeot dealer in a swank district of Tokyo. "Don't take Japanese people for fools," it said. "Japanese people are not ants."

Cresson has also antagonized and offended the Japanese mainstream, no easy task in a society that dotes on anything French, from the handbags of Louis Vuitton to Impressionist paintings. Television newscasters begin their reports on the prime minister's latest verbal volleys with grimaces and loud sucking of teeth, a Japanese mannerism that can denote irritation.

Headlines refer to her as kanateko o motto jossei - roughly, the Crowbar Lady, because of her bashing of Japan. The term was once reserved for Carla Hills, the U.S. special trade envoy whose sardonic comments on Japan's trade policies raised hackles.

Meanwhile, in France, an organization representing the manufacturers of prestige products bought heavily by the Japanese has publicly called on Cresson to cool it.

"Japan is an important market for us," said Alain Boucheron, president of the Comite Colbert, an association of 70 so-called luxury houses that includes Chanel, Dior, Hermes and Bollinger champagne.

"Madame Cresson's intemperate remarks could be prejudicial to us, because in Japan there is a code of speech and behavior that has to be observed," Boucheron said.

While Cresson complains bitterly of Japanese seeking to "swallow the world economy," French manufacturers note that the Japan market accounts for 37 percent of all French exports.

Makers of French luxury goods depend even more heavily on the Japanese. Louis Vuitton, for example, sells about 50 percent of its pricey, prestige luggage in Japan or to Japanese traveling abroad.