TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021092/0210100.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 17KB | 328 lines

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COVER STORIES

1. Japan in the Mind of America


Friction between the U.S.and Japan masks a deeper truth: the
two nations need each other. They admire one another much more
than either realizes, and in some ways their ties are stronger
than ever. Following are two stories that explore how Americans
and Japanese look in one another's eyes.

By LANCE MORROW -- Reported by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles, Tom
Curry/New York and William McWhirter/Detroit


    A schoolchild looking at the outlines of South America
and Africa on the world map may intuitively fit the puzzle
together, and behold -- the principle of continental drift.

    No one studying a cultural map of the world would make the
mistake of thinking Japan and the U.S. once came from the same
place. The two belong almost to different universes. Each is the
other's antiworld: Japan an exclusive, homogeneous Asian
ocean-and-island realm, tribal, intricately compact,
suppressive, fiercely focused; and the U.S. a giant of huge
distances, expansive, messy, inclusive, wasteful, rich,
individualist, multicultural, chaotically diverse.

    Yet in the years after 1945, Japan and the U.S. became the
odd couple of the free world, the brilliant parvenus. They
collaborated -- victor and vanquished, senior genius of industry
and eager, hardworking apprentice. America sponsored Japan
almost ex nihilo, out of the ashes, became its protector and
ultimately its best, most lucrative customer. The Japanese stood
in grateful awe of all things American and overlaid their
ancient culture with a new layer mockingly like that of their
sponsors. The Japanese sent back to their benefactors a steady
stream of goods, tinny toys in the early years, then better
stuff. Much better stuff.

    Over the years the two peoples accomplished a cultural
convergence after all: they met on the hard, bright surfaces of
consumerism. But in each other's minds they remained mutually
uncomprehending presences, like mythic cartoons, action figures:
G.I. Joes, Mutant Ninja cultures. They tended to caricature each
other, always getting things just a little off. That was all
right as long as admiration and deference remained the
organizing principles, as long as nervous laughter and bowing
smoothed the way.

    Now the harmony of deference and dependence is gone. For
years after the war, the Japanese suffered from an inferiority
complex. Now it is the Americans who have begun suffering from
an inferiority complex, a disorienting, unfamiliar sense of
being economically vulnerable and not entirely in control of
their destinies.

    The Japanese, commanding a powerful, dynamic economy, the
second largest in the world, may overtake the U.S. by the year
2000. The American economy is stalled after 18 months of
recession. The presidential election is focusing the nation's
attention and rhetoric, and possibly the appetite for
scapegoats.

    This is becoming a familiar line: "The cold war is over,
and Japan won." Much of the rationale for America's global
military role is gone, and the U.S. must now find a new place
in a complex world economy. Robert Frost once wrote a poem
called The Oven Bird: "The question that he frames in all but
words/ Is what to make of a diminished thing." America, still
the most powerful economy, nonetheless feels itself to be
somehow the diminished thing.

    The old enemy, the Soviet Union, has vanished. With the
U.S. running a $41 billion trade deficit with Japan, the once
deferential partner begins to look to some Americans like the
new enemy. Pollster William Watts found that Americans rank the
Japanese economic threat higher than the Russian military
threat. Says Watts: "People answer that personally: Do I have
a greater chance of being nuked by the Russians or of losing my
job? On that basis, I'd rank Japan higher too."

    Some Japanese politicians and newspapers have become more
open in their contempt for America -- or what they consider
American self-indulgence, moral squalor and indiscipline. Yoshio
Sakurauchi, the Speaker of the Lower House of the Diet, called
American workers lazy and illiterate; the U.S., he said, was
becoming Japan's subcontractor. The remarks came just after
George Bush's trip to Tokyo with the heads of the American car
manufacturers, an excursion that left an impression of weakness
and whining.

    A group of investors led by Minoru Arakawa, president of
Nintendo of America, made an offer last week to buy the Seattle
Mariners baseball team. Cars and baseball are items located near
the center of the American psyche and folklore. To see them
symbolically under threat from the Japanese caused unusual
resentment and distress to some Americans, especially after they
have watched the Japanese buy heavily into Hollywood and
Rockefeller Center. The distress was illogical sometimes:
Arakawa has lived in the Seattle area for 15 years and has
promised to keep the team there, while the competing bidder, a
group of Americans, plans to move it to Florida.

    Americans used to feel almost proprietary about the
Japanese. As Columbia University historian Carol Gluck says,
"The Japanese depended on depending on the Americans, and the
Americans depended on being depended upon." Today the Americans
have a disconcerted sense that their relationship with the
Japanese has been turned upside down. History has performed
jujitsu on the American idea of itself as hero and overlord.

    Americans tend to react to the Japanese inroads with a
surly, complex resentment, or with chauvinism, anger, chagrin,
even backhanded admiration. The Los Angeles County
transportation commission canceled the contracts it had granted
to Sumitomo for a light-rail transit system and decided to try
to get into the business of manufacturing railcars itself. Cars
became the center of "Buy America" campaigns. In Warren, Ohio,
an ear surgeon, Dr. William Lippy, offered the 75 employees of
his clinic $400 cash if they bought a new American car. Lippy
became a favorite of morning television talk shows when he
invited other businesses to join his "Jump-Start America"
campaign. He claims to have enlisted a total of 175 firms with
60,000 workers to offer similar incentives.

    Jim Reynolds, president of the Detroit-based Reynolds
Water Conditioning Co., drives an expensive, Japanese-made
Infiniti Q45. "About three weeks ago," Reynolds reports, "a
customer said, `Next time I see you, don't call on me in a
Japanese car.' It was kind of a laugher. But at the same time,
I got the message. He happens to be a Ford Motor Co. engineer."
Reynolds says when he heard Sakurauchi insult American workers,
"I decided to do something." Reynolds canceled an order for a
Nissan company car. He ordered a Ford Escort instead. His next
step will be to sell the Infiniti and buy a Lincoln Mark VII.

    For all the public American anger at Japan, official
relations between the two countries are good and in many ways
getting better. Americans have made progress in reducing their
trade deficit with Japan in the past three years. Since 1985,
U.S. exports to Japan have more than doubled, to about $50
billion. The U.S. exports more to Japan than it does to Germany,
France and Italy combined. Japan imports $394 per capita from
the U.S., and the U.S. imports $360 per capita from Japan.

    In a diplomatic sense, the U.S.-Japanese relationship is
one of the great successes of postwar American history. An
enemy has become a close and prosperous ally, intimately tied
to America's own diplomacy, economy and -- especially for the
younger generation -- culture. Says Hiroshi Hirabayashi, the
deputy chief of mission in the Japanese embassy in Washington:
"The substance, the facts, are positive in our bilateral
relations. But the perception is more or less negative."

    Why? Writers such as James Fallows (More Like Us), Clyde
Prestowitz (Trading Places) and Karel van Wolferen (The Enigma
of Japanese Power) argue that it is because Japan remains
fundamentally different from the U.S. in economy and culture and
is committed to playing by unfair rules that discriminate
against imports. There is truth in that: Japan is a profoundly
communal society organized on almost every level to protect the
interests of the Japanese -- the welfare of the nation, its
business community and its people are one and the same.

    Ira Phillips, president of Quoizel Inc., a family-owned
lighting-fixtures manufacturer in Hauppauge, N.Y., with $30
million in sales, tells a story repeated by many American
business people: "I went to Japan, I worked with some lighting
people there, they liked my product and placed orders for it.
It took me nine months after I shipped it to get the merchandise
into the customer's store. The Japanese found problems at the
pier, they couldn't find the merchandise -- whatever they could
do to keep us from getting our product into the store, they did.
They had all kinds of inspections that we did conform to, but
then they make you wait a month before they inspect the
product." Says Clyde Prestowitz: "Not every Japanese economic
success is due to its business virtuosity. There is also
collusion, dumping and predatory pricing."

    Last spring a book called The Coming War with Japan became
a best seller in Japan and has sold 40,000 copies in the U.S.
The authors, Meredith LeBard and Dickinson College political
scientist George Friedman, predicted a shooting war within 20
years between the U.S. and Japan. The authors wrote, "The
issues are the same as they were in 1941. Japan needs to control
access to its mineral supplies in Southeast Asia and the Indian
Ocean Basin and to have an export market it can dominate
politically. In order to do this, it must force the United
States out of the western Pacific." As in the '30s, by this
scenario, the tensions eventually lead to a hot war. "The first
assumption when the book came out," says Friedman, "was that we
were psychotic Japan bashers. But there's been a sea change. No
one is debating anymore the question of whether we will see a
massive deterioration of the relationship. What was
`preposterous' in May becomes only `difficult to believe' in
January." The book implausibly assumes that the U.S. could be
"forced out" of markets and that the Japanese people would
support a rebirth of militarism. But its hyperbole is a
perfectly consistent American version of the sort of unpleasant,
vaguely paranoid fantasies that a number of Japanese writers
have been retailing for some time.

    Despite the American alarm and anti-Japanese sentiment, a
strain of ambivalence and self-criticism runs through American
opinion. For one thing, anti-Japanese gestures can be very
complicated in the new world. In Valley Stream, N.Y., Steve
Verga sells Hondas, about 450,000 of which are now made in the
U.S. annually. "When customers ask us, `Where was this car
made?' " says Verga, "we say, `In Ohio, by American workers.'
"

    The Buy America campaign may be simple. The larger context
is not. During the week that anti-Japanese protests took place
in Louisville, Toyota announced yet another $90 million plant
expansion there, which would add 200 more jobs to the local
economy. Total Japanese employment in the U.S. has risen to
600,000, nearly 400,000 in the manufacturing sector, while
Japanese investors continue to hold $180 billion of the nation's
mountain of debt paper, 30 times as much as the Germans.

    Sadahei Kusomoto, the chairman and chief executive of
Minolta's U.S. operations for 22 years, argues with some
plausibility, "It's hard to blame Japan for the recession in the
U.S. Ford, GM and Zenith are moving their plants to Mexico.
American companies are giving up manufacturing in this country,
while Sony, Toshiba and Mitsubishi are coming here and opening
up major plants. When things go wrong, we have to find some
excuse, and the Japanese are becoming some sort of scapegoat."

    A corollary to nationalistic America First sentiment
disturbs many Americans. The other day Kansas City lawyer Ilus
W. Davis, a civic leader and former mayor, had lunch with two
fellow Kansas City businessmen. One of them had won a contract
to install a new sewer system in Cairo, and the other was
offering fireproof grease to the Hungarian market. Says Davis:
"If we took foreign trade out of Kansas City, we'd be in total
depression in 48 hours. It has come over a long period of time,
piece by piece, but we sure like it."

    Some Japanese believe the anti-Japanese sentiment in
America is essentially racist. Kusomoto raises the question:
"Most American people don't like to admit it, but racial issues
have some very deep roots," he says. "Americans are seeing our
successes here as Pearl Harbor II. Only this time, we win."

    Are Americans racially prejudiced against the Japanese?
Occasionally the accusation rings true. Would Americans be upset
if, say, Canadian investors offered to buy the Seattle Mariners?
Probably no more than they are that Canadians already own the
Montreal Expos and the Toronto Blue Jays. Says Linda Cunningham,
editor of the Rockford, Ill., Register-Star: "There is an
increasing willingness to refer to the `Japs,' and to talk
openly about things that might have been said only privately in
their own living rooms. There now seems to be a respectability
attached to a subtle return of racism."

    In 1946, just after World War II, the historian Allan
Nevins observed, "Probably in all our history, no foe has been
so detested as were the Japanese." The real astonishment is the
extent to which a hatred of the Japanese vanished in America.
Curiously, Americans are now in many ways more anti-American
than anti-Japanese. There is even a danger that Americans in a
self-flagellating mood have become prejudiced against
themselves.

    The central concern in American objections to Japan is
that of fairness. Americans entertain a profound respect for
the talents of the Japanese, for their hard work, their
intelligence, their high standards of quality. James Kielt is
a retired envelope and paper salesman in Freeport, N.Y., who
served in the Navy during World War II. Says he, remembering the
Mitsubishi fighters and bombers of the Pacific war: "I probably
would have trouble buying a Mitsubishi." He drives a Toyota
Tercel. Says his friend John Wood, a retired retail chain
executive: "The Japanese are probably more industrious than we.
And I think we are getting lazy in this country."

    Just as Sakurauchi said. The rueful self-accusation is
repeated across the U.S. Being a debtor nation, mortgaging their
real estate to the Japanese, the mighty Americans, the victors
of World War II, the dollar people, have lost a certain amount
of face in their own estimation. They have been outdone, they
sense, in a way they would not have thought possible -- outdone
not only by the Japanese but also by their own appetite for the
things their competitors sell. Most Americans probably agree
with Texas investor Richard Fisher, who took his family on a
four-month sabbatical to Japan last year. Says Fisher: "When I
grew up, we were the sole proprietors of the world's economic
system. Now we're being asked to be one of the partners. But we
still don't have any collective knowledge of Japan; none of our
political leaders speak Japanese. We are dealing from a vantage
point of weakness. We need to clean up our own act first, and
then deal with them on a basis of mutual respect."

    The U.S. and Japan have a long, fractious history of
disputes over immigration, investment and trade. President
Theodore Roosevelt had a few brushes with the Japanese at the
beginning of the century. He struck an intelligent note: "I am
exceedingly anxious to impress upon the Japanese that I have
nothing but the friendliest possible intentions toward them, but
I am nonetheless anxious that they should realize that I am not
afraid of them and that the U.S. will no more submit to bullying
than it will bully." Japanese-American dealings are often
distorted by cultural misperceptions -- and the Japanese know
how to maneuver artfully within the cloud of their own mystique.
Both sides will profit if the air is cleared now by some painful
truths.