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

                L)ä                            E=                            ╚NATION, Page 16

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 th