April 6, 1985

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.