What was going on when I was born?

The Japanese Government, yielding to years of pressure from the United States, agreed formally today to end all commercial whaling by March 1988. The Government decision came in a letter to the United States Commerce Secretary, Malcolm Baldrige, telling him that Japan would withdraw its objection to an international agreement to ban whaling operations. In the letter, Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe told Mr. Baldrige that the action today would become effective only if a United States appeals court rules to overturn a recent decision by a Federal judge that damaged Japan's hopes to continue whaling for a few more years. Japan wanted first to see that the appellate ruling would be in its favor, Mr. Abe said. But no matter what the outcome in the courts, the practical effect of today's announcement was that Japan's long tradition of commercial whaling would come to an end no later than March 1988.

Until the last few days, Japan apparently thought that as a veteran of the world trade wars it had seen all the hardships that combative negotiations could bring. This may explain why many Japanese officials were not prepared for the virtually unanimous warnings from Congress of reprisals against Japanese products unless Tokyo started immediately chipping away at its ever-expanding trade surplus with the United States. Not everyone was caught off guard. Saburo Okita, a Government trade adviser, was quoted last month as saying after a trip to Washington that ''the sentiment in the United States is like that before the outbreak of a war.''

Two key state prosecutors have accused Attorney General Robert Abrams of threatening the independence of their offices by seizing a greater role in an effort to expand his own reputation. The two - the head of the State Organized Crime Task Force and the special prosecutor for Medicaid fraud - have appealed to Governor Cuomo for help. ''The special prosecutors have come to us and have complained of interference by the Attorney General,'' said Lawrence T. Kurlander, the Governor's criminal-justice coordinator. Ronald Goldstock, the head of the task force, charged that the Attorney General had tried to use his control of wiretap authorizations to get the force to include him in news conferences and other opportunities for publicity. And Edward Kuriansky, the Medicaid special prosecutor, accused the Attorney General of ''trying to take over'' his 340-member office, leaving it ''disrupted in terms of morale and operations.''

Like Birmingham and Montgomery and Selma, those other shrines of the civil rights movement, Greensboro marked an important turning point for blacks in the South. Here, 25 years ago, four young black men sat down at a white-only lunch counter and refused to leave. The sit-in was the first in the South, and it inspired similar challenges across the region, actions that, over time, helped break the back of the Jim Crow segregation laws that were then the first line of white resistance to progress by blacks in the South. Gone with those laws is most overt discrimination. Today, blacks cannot legally be denied a drink at a water fountain, a table in a restaurant or a room at a hotel. But civil rights leaders in this graceful city in the rolling Piedmont of North Carolina, like other places throughout the South, say that resistance among whites, while no longer having the force of law, is being expressed in other, mostly more subtle ways.

The President of the Sudan cut short his overseas tour today and headed home from the United States to deal with the growing challenge to his one-party rule. The President, Gaafar al-Nimeiry, had been in the United States for talks since last week. He had planned to go to Egypt and Pakistan before returning to the Sudan in mid-April. But today, after conferring with Secretary of State George P. Shultz, he decided to return home this weekend ''to take hold of the situation,'' a Reagan Administration official said. He said he would make a brief stop in Cairo to consult with Egyptian officials about the situation in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.

Nicaragua today officially rejected a proposal by President Reagan for talks on the guerrilla war there. Mr. Reagan called Thursday for negotiations coupled with Congressional approval of his request for $14 million in aid for rebels seeking the overthrow of the Sandinista Government Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto Brockman of Nicaragua said in Managua, ''What President Reagan has said is: 'You drop dead, or I will kill you.' '' Formal Rejection Sent to U.S. An official in the Nicaraguan Embassy here said the Government had sent a message saying the President's call for a cease-fire and peace talks, offered Thursday, was formally rejected. The message has not been delivered to the State Department. Secretary of State George P. Shultz said today: ''We will keep the offer on the table. We will hope that the Nicaraguan Government will think it over a little more carefully.''

A week ago, a British professor decided to rush his blond daughter, a student, out of West Beirut after a secretary at the French Embassy was kidnapped. The secretary's abduction, three days before, deepened the apprehension among Westerners still in Beirut because it showed that foreign women were no longer immune from kidnapping. The apprehension did not ease after the French secretary, Danielle Perez, was freed. The wife of a French businessman, for instance, dyed her hair jet black so she would not look quite as foreign. 'Scouts' Survey Streets For many months, Westerners, Eastern bloc nationals and even Arabs, Lebanese and non-Lebanese alike, have lived in constant fear of being kidnapped or killed. Now, after a new wave of abductions of foreigners in the last month, an even more oppressive atmosphere has settled on Beirut.

Federal aid for many college students would be reduced under the budget package endorsed by President Reagan and Senate Republicans, but the cut would be less than the Administration originally proposed. The biggest change is a proposal to limit the amount of costs that the Federal Government would recognize for the purpose of calculating aid for undergraduate and graduate students. The limit would be $8,000 a year, more than the average cost of attending a public institution but less than the cost at many private institutions. In more general terms, Mr. Reagan said today that the Republican negotiators had worked out ''a very good plan'' for reducing the deficit, but the plan for a three-year limit on the cost-of-living increase for Social Security drew criticism. (Page 6.)

Erich Honecker, the East German leader, will make an official visit to Italy later this month, his first ever to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization capital, the East German press agency reported today. Diplomats suggested that the trip would be the clearest indication since the change in Soviet leadership last month that East Germany has received approval from Moscow to revive its efforts toward stepped-up ties with NATO governments. The East German leader, 72 years old, will be returning a visit by Italy's Prime Minister, Bettino Craxi, who went to East Berlin last summer amid a flurry of contacts between Mr. Honecker and Western European leaders.

Helmut Schmidt, the former West German Chancellor, who fell from power in the autumn of 1982, is now 66 years old. He has a pacemaker and is hard of hearing. He climbs steps with studious deliberation. A heavy smoker once, he now confines himself to snuff. He speaks softly enough that his listeners must sometimes strain to hear him. He was never famous for his passions. What stood out was his elegant, even icy, manner, his high intelligence and attention to the affairs of Europe and the West - especially the West's economic health and its strategy toward the Soviet Union.

The Government issued an unusual order today requiring all foreigners in New Delhi to carry their passports or residential permits at all times for two weeks beginning Monday. The Government statement announcing the order did not offer any explanation.

A black man was shot to death by the police in a small black township near the southeast coast after a group of blacks began stoning police officers and firefighters who were responding to an incident of arson, a police spokesman said today. The incident late Thursday night followed by a few hours a Government announcement of tougher measures to deal with what it called the ''situation of unrest in black areas.'' The incident in the township, the police spokesman said, was one of several disturbances to take place in the last 24 hours, most of them in the southern townships near Uitenhage, where 19 people were killed three weeks ago after the police fired on a black demonstration.