Japan could do its economy much good and no harm if, instead of trying to sell $645 billion of new bonds, it would experiment with printing new, noninterest-bearing legal tender notes--a Japanese version of our Civil War ''greenbacks'' (''A year of fresh disasters?'' Asian Business, Jan. 18).

The only precaution would be to provide that its issuance stop automatically if price stability appeared to be giving way. Additional reassurance that inflationary forces would not be set loose would come from the fact that the Bank of Japan's powers to check inflation, by selling from its bond holdings or by raising commercial-bank reserve requirements, would remain in place.

''Printing press money'' achieved its awful reputation among economists by fueling inflations that were started by supply shortages or intense struggles between labor and management over the distribution of their joint product or a combination of the two, triggered by shortages. The logic of blaming the inflation on the printing of money to accommodate it is no better than blaming the wood for the fire, instead of blaming the match that started it. Even the conservative Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has observed that he is not concerned about inflation in the U.S. in the absence of shortages.

This printing of new money is far from being as radical as it may sound. It merely provides an alternate mechanism that does not require an undesirable enlargement of the public debt and the interest burden thereon. It can reasonably be described as a modern version of government's long-recognized right ''to coin money.'' Interestingly, that power is granted to Congress in our Constitution several paragraphs away from the granting of its power ''to borrow money.'' It is limited only by the accompanying power ''to regulate the value thereof,'' a phrase that can reasonably be interpreted as an injunction to prevent inflation.

Jetson E. Lincoln
Montclair, N.J.


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