Staff writer

Nobuo Matsunaga, a former Japanese ambassador to the United States, made a secret visit to Taiwan and met with President Lee Teng-hui in the fall of 1995, informed sources said Wednesday.

The trip by Matsunaga -- who at the time held the ministerial-level post of a government representative -- marked a clear deviation from the government's long-held policy of imposing strict limits on official contacts with Taiwan. No Japanese Cabinet minister has visited Taipei.

Matsunaga made the secret visit to Taiwan -- with which Japan has no diplomatic ties -- in a desperate attempt to resolve the dispute between Taiwan and China over who should represent Taiwan at the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Osaka in mid-November 1995, according to the sources.

Taiwan expressed a strong desire to have top leaders -- either President Lee or Deputy Premier Hsu Li-teh -- come to the APEC summit, apparently as part of its increasingly vigorous diplomatic drive to end its isolation from the global political stage.

Some pro-Taiwan lawmakers of the Liberal Democratic Party also pressured the government to accept Taiwan's request.

But Beijing vehemently objected to having Lee or Hsu represent Taiwan at the APEC summit in Osaka, putting Japan -- the summit host -- in a difficult diplomatic position.

In 1994, Hsu became the highest-ranking Taiwanese official to visit Japan since Japan severed diplomatic ties with the island in 1972. Despite strong objections from Beijing, Tokyo allowed Hsu to visit Japan for the Hiroshima Asian Games in the fall of 1994, but only as the head of Taiwan's bidding committee for the 2002 Asiad.

The U.S. administration of President Bill Clinton allowed Lee to visit Cornell University in June 1995, a move that infuriated Beijing. In an act of saber rattling, China conducted military exercises on the Taiwan Strait and fired missiles near the island in the runup to Taiwan's first direct presidential election in the spring of 1996.

At the time, the United States dispatched two aircraft carriers to waters close to Taiwan as a warning to Beijing. Lee won a landslide victory in the presidential election, which culminated the island's democratization drive launched in the late 1980s. Lee will step down as the island's top government leader following a new presidential election scheduled for March.

Taiwan was eventually represented at the APEC summit by Koo Chen-fu, a close friend of President Lee and a bigwig in the Taiwanese business community. Koo, chairman of Taiwan's semiofficial Straits Exchange Foundation, is also the island's top envoy in charge of relations with mainland China.

The choice of Koo as a Taiwan representative at the APEC summit in Osaka was widely seen as a compromise deal that saved the faces of both Beijing and Taipei.

Matsunaga, who has a widespread reputation for his diplomatic finesse and has cultivated close personal ties with many influential LPD lawmakers, played a significant role in reaching the compromise deal, the sources said.

Japan switched its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 1972. Beijing has regarded the island as a breakaway province since 1949, when the communists defeated the nationalists in a civil war. Beijing has not yet renounced the use of military force, if necessary, to reunite the island with the mainland.

Matsunaga is currently vice chairman of the Japan Institute of International Affairs, a Tokyo think tank with close ties to the government.

Hiromoto Seki, the Japanese ambassador to Italy, is the highest-level Japanese government official whose visit to Taipei has so far been confirmed. Seki also visited Taipei in 1995, not for talks on bilateral relations but as part of preparations for the Osaka summit of APEC. At the time, Seki was an ambassador in charge of APEC.

APEC currently has 21 member economies. When APEC was inaugurated in 1989, it had only 12 members. China, Taiwan and Hong Kong were admitted to the forum in 1991.

APEC has held a meeting of top leaders from its member economies annually since 1993. Taiwan has sent only Cabinet ministers in charge of economics to the annual APEC summits, except the 1995 Osaka summit.

Although relations between China and Taiwan began to thaw after the 1996 Taiwan presidential vote, cross-strait military tensions have been escalating again since early July, when President Lee defined Taiwan's relationship with mainland China as "special state-to-state" ties.

Beijing has threatened to cancel the planned first visit to Taiwan this fall by Koo's Chinese counterpart, Wang Daohan, chairman of China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits.