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                ┌*< à                                                        ╚NATION, Page 20

COVER STORIES

2. America in the Mind of Japan


By BARRY HILLENBRAND/TOKYO -- With reporting by Kumiko Makihara/
Tokyo


    Sony. Toyota. Honda. Mitsubishi. Nikon. Ricoh. Toshiba.
There seems no escaping Japan in the U.S. these days. But just
try to escape America in Japan, especially if you are young and
yearn to be hip in Tokyo. America is an essential element of
growing up urban in Japan.

    It starts with the clothes: a pair of Bass Weejuns, baggy
chinos, a Stanford sweatshirt, a Washington Redskins hat. And
it's also the food: the Cool Ranch-flavored Doritos tortilla
chips bought from 7-Eleven; real American all-beef frankfurters
eaten under a Wrigley Field mural in the Chicago Dog restaurant;
or ersatz American pizza ordered from Chicago Pizza, which
promises home delivery as speedy as archrival Domino's.

    America does not stop at food and clothing: it's
entertainment too. The blockbuster movies are all American --
Terminator 2, Home Alone, Pretty Woman -- and require buying
tickets days in advance. Hours after the box offices opened, all
56,000 seats for M.C. Hammer's concert at the Tokyo Dome were
spoken for. Millions of dollars' worth of CDs -- from New Age
to rap to jazz to blues -- are bought at stores like Tower
Records. Don't want to buy? Listen to American music on J-Wave
(81.3 FM), presented by English-speaking deejays with names like
Jon and Carole.

    And what about sports? The national pastime is baseball,
which became popular at the turn of the century, but among
college students, the latest craze is American football
(setdown, ready, ichi, ni, san). The Super Bowl, as well as the
World Series, is broadcast live in Japan.

    America is also on Japan's mind and stays there even after
a Japanese outgrows blue jeans. American books, both pop and
profound, can at times sell more in Japanese translation than
back home in English. News is often seen through an American
prism. Trends and movements sweep across the Pacific from
America and take root. In Japan these days many people prefer
whale watching to whale eating: environmentalism has arrived.

    The puzzle is how two countries so intertwined can be so
frequently at odds. Ever since President George Bush showed up
in Tokyo last month with a group of vituperative business
leaders in tow, the U.S. and Japan have once again been sniping
at each other. And once again the ambiguous mix of Japanese
attitudes toward the U.S. has been brought to the surface. In
the mind of Japan, the superpower on the other side of the
Pacific is both an object of respect and envy, of emulation and
repulsion, of gratitude and contempt. Despite the years of
wrangling between the two nations, Japan retains a large
reservoir of good feeling toward the U.S. For the Japanese,
America is the foreign country, the one that is admired and
imitated, the standard for measuring national success.

    What has changed is Japan's growing desire for respect.
The unquestioning adulation of the U.S. that once prevailed has
been replaced by increasing self-confidence. The Japanese
believe that social and economic problems have eroded America's
strength at just the moment when their own hard work has brought
their country wealth and prosperity. While few officials hope
or expect that Japan will eclipse America as a great power, they
firmly believe it is time for Washington to treat Tokyo as its
most important ally, and not like a junior partner.

    In Japan, debts are neither readily forgotten nor easily
repaid. The Japanese acknowledge the enormous debt they owe
America for the benevolence of the post-World War II occupation
and for the nurturing and protection the U.S. has provided
Japan ever since. As Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa put it in
a speech two weeks ago, "It is no exaggeration to say that Japan
could not have achieved its postwar prosperity had it not been
for the good-hearted support of the U.S." Older Japanese in
particular feel the need to repay that debt, especially now that
the U.S. is in the midst of its longest recession since the
1930s. "We are sorry to see America in this trouble," says
Tatsuro Toyoda, 63, executive vice president of Toyota Motor
Corp. "We must help America because we really would like to see
America strong once again."

    But there are limits to how far the Japanese will go to
help America. Opinion surveys show that the majority of
Japanese fear that a significant drop in the nation's trade
surplus would be bad for their domestic economy. This concern
gives some bureaucrats reason to delay reforms that would
further open markets to American imports. During Bush's visit,
Japanese auto companies promised to double their purchase of
American auto parts to $19 billion by 1994. But they are
reluctant to extend assistance to U.S. makers trying to sell
American cars. "The Americans themselves have done little to
penetrate our market," says Nissan president Yutaka Kume. "They
must try harder." Beyond that, Kume would not mind if Americans
like Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, whose comments about
Japanese honesty and fairness Kume calls "outrageous and
insulting," would cease their verbal assaults and get on with
selling cars.

    Lately some Japanese executives have begun to acknowledge
that their country is partly to blame for America's economic
problems. A commentary in a recent issue of the respected
business weekly Toyo Keizai could have been written by Pat
Buchanan: "Japan can't merely criticize the decline of the U.S.
economy by saying, `It serves you right.' If one takes into
consideration the abnormal situation where Japan's excessive
competition, low profit margins and long work hours served as
a background to our earning a $40 billion trade surplus with the
U.S. . . . we can say that Japan has a share in the
responsibility for U.S. industrial decline."

    But most Japanese -- like most Americans -- place the
responsibility for U.S. economic troubles largely on Americans
themselves. "Whatever happened to the good old Emersonian credo
that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path
to your door?" asks Masao Kunihiro, an anthropologist who is
also a member of the Diet's Upper House. "That is what made
America what it is today, economically and industrially
powerful. But many of us, rightly or wrongly, now feel that the
U.S. is no longer turning out mousetraps which are better than
ours. Sadly, there's been an erosion of the Puritan work ethic
in America, a country which taught us so much."

    Unfortunately, not all analyses of America's problems are
as sophisticated as Kunihiro's. When Yoshio Sakurauchi, the
Speaker of the Lower House of the Diet, caused a furor in the
U.S. two weeks ago by saying that the "root of America's
[trade] problem lies in the inferior quality of American
labor," he was reflecting a condescension toward Americans that
many Japanese share.

    At times, criticism of America borders on racism. Young
people who have grown up enjoying a succession of ingenious
Japanese-made consumer products have developed a contempt for
anything made by lesser mortals. In addition, many Japanese
contend that America is handicapped because it does not mirror
Japan's cultural and racial homogeneity, which they believe is
largely responsible for the country's high degree of national
harmony. The virtues of this harmony are probably overrated, and
the disadvantages -- repression, numbing conformity -- are
widely ignored. But the myth that racial homogeneity engenders
unity is the root of discrimination against anyone who is not
Japanese. Accustomed to the efficiency and uniformity of their
own country, the Japanese are frightened and shocked by the
seemingly chaotic nature of American society. They tend to
believe that America's racial and cultural diversity are
weaknesses, not strengths.

    Since the end of World War II, Japanese racism has had no
formal guiding ideology. Books with bigoted themes appear
occasionally and sell well to a curious public. The books are
often the source of ignorant racist remarks by Japanese
politicians. But with one or two minor exceptions, no notable
Japanese has taken up racism as a political or social platform.

    The same is true of anti-Americanism. Shintaro Ishihara,
a Diet member and author of The Japan That Can Say No, struck
a resonant cord with some when he argued that the country should
become more assertive on the world stage because it now holds
technological supremacy over the U.S. But Ishihara, a persuasive
man with wide personal popularity, has little political clout
and no role in setting Japan's political agenda.

    Last fall some Tokyo-based foreign journalists discovered
and wrote about kembei, which means "resentment of America."
Their stories unleashed fears that a new strain of
anti-Americanism was emerging. But the word was never in
widespread use and has since virtually disappeared. Writer
Yoshimi Ishikawa, who claims credit for coining the word,
asserts that it was misunderstood from the beginning. Kembei,
says Ishikawa, was meant to describe Japan's sense of impotence
when faced with America's demands for assistance during the gulf
war. Ishikawa points out that U.S.-bashing demonstrations, a
regular and often violent feature of student life in Tokyo
during the 1960s, are practically unknown these days. And while
marginal politicians, assorted TV-news anchors and intellectuals
are taking noisy potshots at the U.S., no important cultural
figures in Japan -- such as, say, sumo superstar Takahanada or
baseball's Hiromitsu Ochiai -- have been heard uttering such
sentiments. Asks Ishikawa: "Everyone is saying, `Apparently,
there is a growing dislike of America,' but where is it? Who's
doing the disliking?"

    Certainly there is no indication that Japanese are
shunning the icons of popular American culture or of America
itself. While it is true that the Japanese -- like many
Americans -- think twice about buying an American car, they
consume more than a billion dollars' worth of McDonald's fast
food each year and another billion in soft drinks from
Coca-Cola.

    Not content with merely experiencing a bit of America at
home, more than 3 million Japanese visited the U.S. last year
and spent $10 billion. Nearly 1.5 million of them (including
20% of all Japanese honeymooners) journeyed to Hawaii, while
the other half traveled on the mainland. And it's not just
Disneyland that draws them. Some Japanese tourists are paying
$1,600 for a five-day trip to Snoqualmie, Wash., where the TV
series Twin Peaks (a big hit in Japan) was shot.

    On the other hand, the Japanese are bombarded with the
same negative images of the U.S. that have deepened America's
mood of depression and self-doubt. People watch CNN reporting
on the American homeless. They flock to see the gratuitous
violence of Die Hard 2. Japanese Playboy, which for years
projected an image of the U.S. as a carefree sexual playground,
now runs stories about the AIDS epidemic. Japanese newspapers,
cribbing from the U.S. press, detail the decline in American
educational standards and the growth in the murder rate.

    These images contribute to a vision of America as a
country spinning out of control. In Japanese eyes, the picture
of the U.S. as a faltering giant has weakened America's
authority to lead the free world, a leadership that Tokyo used
to accept without question. These days, says a Foreign Ministry
official, Japan is weary of being treated like a mindless "cash
register" to be rung up when problems arise but not consulted
or taken seriously by Washington. Miyazawa wanted to make that
the focus of his talks with Bush during his recent visit, but
the subject was mostly drowned out by the flap over trade.

    Of all Japanese, young people are the most ambivalent
about America. Unlike their older countrymen, they are not
burdened by the debt of gratitude from the postwar occupation,
and they do not remember much from the days when the U.S. was
viewed with undiluted reverence. Because they have traveled more
widely, young Japanese understand America, warts and all, better
than their parents did. They are both fascinated and repelled
by what they see. Says Donald Richie, an American critic who
writes on contemporary Japanese culture: "Young people view
America as a dangerous wilderness filled with freedom and
adventure. Embracing America is a way of rebelling against the
strict paternalistic society at home."

    In the process, young Japanese are dabbling in American
culture and life-styles in ways that baffle their elders. Like
the thousands of American students residing in Japan, the 30,000
young Japanese living and studying in the U.S. are beginning to
build bridges between the two countries. Some Americans persist
in their hope that Japan will become more like the U.S. when
these young people come to power, but that is unlikely. The more
realistic prospect is that over time, through increased
understanding, the Japanese will develop more tolerance for
societies different from their own. What they will never abandon
is the qualities that make them uniquely Japanese.