of a building, they are not of much use by themselves.
In America today the quarrel between the hawks and the Chrysanthemum Club has evolved into a head-on collision between two groups in the political mainstream responsible for formulating U.S. policy. U.S.–Japan relations have gone far beyond the stage when those who knew something about Japan clashed with those who did not. This fact has extremely serious implications for understanding the true nature of Japan-U.S. frictions. As Japan has emerged as a major world economic power, Japan-U.S. relations have come to be included among America’s main policy concerns. For that very reason, a single misstep in policy on the part of either Japan or the United States could have dire consequences.
From a different perspective, the quarrel between the hawks and the Chrysanthemum Club might be regarded as a conflict between emotional and logical arguments. Against the more emotional hawks, the Chrysanthemum Club resorts to logic to make its point. Which, then, will prevail—feelings or logic? Reason teaches that logic should win, but emotional arguments have often carried the day, and sometimes in the long run the choices based on them have worked out for the best. What, for example, was the rationale behind the Japanese automobile industry thirty or forty years ago when it was still in its infancy? For a small country, with roads little better than farm tracks, an attempt to promote an auto industry flew in the face of reason. That was the logic of the economists of the time, not to mention the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). But the people making cars felt differently. No matter how farfetched their plans seemed to others, they had faith that they could make the Japanese automotive industry the best in the world. Today, it is clear their faith was justified.
Economic logic, in other words, does not always produce the right results. In relations between countries, especially, emotional arguments often get the better of reason. In the conflict between the hawks and the Chrysanthemum Club, it cannot be assumed that rational arguments will win. Ninety-nine percent of the American people have never been to Japan and know nothing about the realities of life there. Logic is based upon knowledge, and emotional arguments thrive on ignorance. As the hawks’ propaganda penetrates grassroots America and emotional arguments dictate public opinion, the logic of a free-market economy is being overwhelmed by the Japan-is-different argument.
Is Japan Really Different?
Containing Japan. Just as many Americans overreacted to what they perceived as America-bashing in the pirated English version of The Japan That Can Say “No” by Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara (see chapter 2), many Japanese have overreacted to James Fallows’s article “Containing Japan,” which they regard as Japan-bashing. This trans-Pacific exchange of bad feelings seems to have been provoked by the titles of these two works rather than by their actual contents.
In English the nuances of the word contain are not nearly as strong as they are for the Japanese word fūjikome, which was used in the translation of Fallows’s article. Fūjikome has strong overtones—it would be used, for example, in describing the sealing off of a nuclear reactor where an accident has occurred. As a translation for the English word contain, it is a bit too strong. The meaning of contain is essentially defensive; the overtones of the word fūjikome are a hundred-percent offensive and imply a preemptive strike.
In one sense, America has already tried “containing Japan.” To counter the flood of Japanese imports in areas like textiles, steel, consumer electronics, and automobiles, it launched a containment policy that forced Japan to accept export controls and voluntary restraints. To counter a soaring trade deficit, it embarked on a containment policy that put pressure on Japan to open its markets and increase domestic demand. The 1985 Plaza Accord was yet another attempt at a containment policy. To redress the trade imbalance, the finance ministers of the five major industrialized countries (the United States, Japan, West Germany, Great Britain, and France) agreed to a currency realignment at a meeting held in September 1985 at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Despite a drastic downward revaluation, from 240 yen to 120 yen to the dollar between 1985 and 1988, the U.S. balance of trade with Japan improved a mere 15 percent, and Japan continues to maintain a healthy surplus.
Theoretically, if the value of the dollar decreases by half, prices of American goods destined for Japanese markets should also be halved, generating brisk sales that should lead to an increase in U.S. exports and a reduction in the trade deficit. Prices for Japanese goods, on the other hand, should double, causing a slowdown in sales. The resulting decline in Japanese exports should bring about a decline in Japan’s trade surplus. That, at least, is what the laws of economics dictate. And, in fact, this occurred in Europe, where a lower dollar led to an American-European trade balance. It did not happen in Japan, however. Foreign goods in Japan remained as expensive as ever, and Japanese goods sold abroad did not double in price. The annual trade deficit with Japan remained—and still remains—around $50 billion. Why? The answer must be that Japan is “different,” that structural differences are at work there that do not respond to economic laws.
This is the background against which the revisionists emerged with their call for a reexamination of U.S. premises about Japan. This is what set the stage in 1989 for the most recent round of U.S.–Japan trade negotiations, the Structural Impediments Initiative talks, which were haunted by the threat that Congress would invoke the Super 301 provision of the 1988 Trade Act and impose economic sanctions on Japan and other countries that engage in “unfair” trading practices. In this dangerous atmosphere the use of the word fūjikome in the title of the translation of “Containing Japan” was irresponsible. It evoked associations with the ABCD encirclement and the international isolation of Japan on the eve of World War II; it also angered and alarmed the Japanese people and stirred up nationalistic sentiments. No one could have been more surprised by this reaction than the article’s author, James Fallows himself.
The Mass Media in the United States and Japan. In November 1989 I had a discussion with James Fallows at the request of a Japanese magazine and television station. Before our talk began, he was very wary of me. His extreme mistrust of the Japanese media seemed quite understandable. The Japanese translation of his article had caused a furor far beyond his wildest expectations, and the Japanese media en masse had made him out to be an enemy of Japan. As he put it, somehow or other, he had become public enemy number one. As an example of the misrepresentations the media had indulged in, Fallows told me the following story.
Fallows had been asked by a television station to discuss his views on the Yellow Peril theory. In the course of that interview, he made the statement that he did not endorse the view that racial prejudice lay at the heart of current American criticisms of Japan. Regrettably, racism did exist in America, but he personally was firmly opposed to those who resorted to this sort of argument, as were America’s leading policymakers. He had accepted the television station’s invitation, he told me, because he thought it provided a good opportunity to convey the convictions of Americans like himself who regard racial prejudice as something to be ashamed of, and he talked animatedly for several minutes on the subject. Sometime later he heard from the television station that his comments had been cut because they did not fit in with its plans. To learn what these plans had been, he later watched the program with considerable interest. To Fallows’s dismay, he discovered the program was not about whether the Yellow Peril theory was valid. It took American racism for granted, and so quite naturally his comments did not fit in.
The program dramatically traced historical events such as the extermination of the aboriginal peoples of Central and South America by the Spanish and the mass slaughter of Native Americans in North America by later white settlers. Stressing the whites’ oppression of nonwhites, and relying on the tricks and special effects of television, it conveyed the message that recent American criticisms of Japan are an extension of white America’s historical racial prejudices. Where was the conscience of the Japanese mass media, Fallows asked. This program was inflammatory, an abuse of the power
