Japan: Adjusting to the Nixon Shokku

ELMENDORF Air Force Base, which stretches across 13,400 frosty acres of tundra on the outskirts of Anchorage, is a carryover from the days when Alaska had not yet become an American state and Japanese soldiers were swarming through the fog and cold of Attu and Kiska. Constructed 16 months before Pearl Harbor, Elmendorf was designed to blunt a Japanese thrust at the Aleutians. This week the base was to play a far different role in Japanese-American relations. According to the prepared script, a gleaming Japan Air Lines DC-8 jet swoops down at night for a refueling stop on its 7,700-mile flight from Tokyo to Copenhagen. Out steps no less a personage than Emperor Hirohito, 70, the first reigning member of his ancient dynasty to set foot outside the homeland, en route to Europe for an 18-day visit. Waiting to greet the Emperor during his 100-minute stopover is no less a figure than the President of the U.S.

The meeting between Emperor and President is an unprecedented incident for the slight, shy Hirohito, the 124th ruler in an unbroken line that stretches back 2,600 years. He was considered "sacred and inviolable" in prewar Japan; under the constitution imposed on Japan after the war, he became no more than a "symbol of the state and of the unity of the people." As a figure shorn of real power, the Emperor carefully avoids political discussions. The list of acceptable topics for discussion at Elmendorf, therefore, consists of little more than anecdotes about Nixon's six earlier visits to Japan and, of course, expressions of mutual regard.

Though basically ceremonial, the meeting in the shadow of the magnificent Chugach mountains is of enormous symbolic importance. Relations between the two countries are at their worst since World War II, when Hirohito was regularly caricatured in the U.S. as a bucktoothed, sword-carrying warrior and given prime responsibility for the assaults and atrocities of Japanese forces. With Richard Nixon's overtures toward Peking, Britain's probable entry into the Common Market, and West German negotiations with the Soviet Union, the world has assumed a new shape in which several power centers will replace the bipolar Washington-Moscow pattern that has defined the international scene since World War II. In that new world, the role of Japan is crucial.

The Japanese Century

Japan's presence overhangs the forthcoming Nixon visit to China; Peking is concerned about the U.S.'s future relations with "militaristic" Japan, while Tokyo is concerned that in its new fascination with China, the U.S. might downgrade Japan as its principal partner in Asia. Above all, at the IMF meeting in Washington this week, Japan is playing a key role in the showdown between the U.S. and its trade partners over trade and money policies.

The problem of trade between the world's No. 1 and No. 3 industrial powers is the most troubling of all. Forecasters like the Hudson Institute's Herman Kahn predict that before long Japan, whose gross national product now exceeds $200 billion, will overtake the Soviet Union, with its $600 billion G.N.P., for second place. Kahn envisions the 21st century as "the Japanese century," the time when the hardworking, disciplined people of Japan will even surpass the prolific but bedeviled U.S. Richard Nixon stated the challenge last week as he sent to the Senate the treaty draft that restores Japanese sovereignty over Okinawa. Said the President: "The potential for cooperation between our two economies, the world's most productive and the world's most dynamic, is clearly immense." But he warned: "The problems involved in strengthening the fabric of peace in Asia and the Pacific will undoubtedly be challenging. If Japan and the U.S. go separate ways, then this task would be incomparably more difficult."

Slap, Slap, Slap

Against this background of U.S.-Japanese conflict, Emperor Hirohito's trip assumes new significance. While in most respects it is simply high-level tourism, the journey symbolizes an attempt to reach out to the West and to find ties with nations other than the U.S.

The trip itself will be a rather engaging spectacle. Not long ago, Hirohito confessed that he still kept an old Paris Metro ticket as a memento of the freest, happiest days of his life. In 1921, when he was Crown Prince, Hirohito boarded the battleship Katori for a six-month tour of Europe. His jet flight this week will get him there in 15 hours, instead of the 65 days it took the lumbering Katori to reach England. Accompanied by the Empress Nagako, 68, who has never been abroad, Hirohito will visit seven European countries.

Except for such events as dinner with Queen Elizabeth and lunch with President Georges Pompidou, the imperial couple's routine is not markedly different from those that 1,300,000 other Japanese will have followed before the end of this year. The two travelers and their entourage of 34 will visit Notre Dame, see the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen Harbor and ride a steamer along the Rhine to gaze at the Lorelei rocks. At Buckingham Palace, Hirohito might show his Empress the bedroom where, 50 years ago, King George V padded in wearing carpet slippers and suspenders, and boomed: "Everything satisfactory, me boy?"

In Japan itself, the brief meeting between Hirohito and Nixon will overshadow the rest of the itinerary. Never have a U.S. President and a Japanese Emperor met in the 117 years since Commodore Matthew Perry's fleet of U.S. "black ships" opened feudal Japan to the West. Dwight Eisenhower nearly made it to Japan in 1960, but massive demonstrations by anti-American students in Tokyo forced Ike to turn back. Initially, the plans for the Emperor's tour called for no presidential appearance at Anchorage. Tentatively, Mrs. Nixon or Julie and David Eisenhower were being considered to meet the royal couple; even Vice President Agnew was a possibility, despite his famous "Fat Jap" remark made during the 1968 campaign about a newsman from the Baltimore Sun.

But that was before the President had convulsed Japan this summer with the "Nixon shokku"--his spectacular policy shifts on China and the economy. The fact that Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger had paid a secret visit to Peking was sprung on Japanese Premier Eisaku Sato only three minutes before it became public knowledge. Precisely a month later, when the President proposed tough monetary policies and import surcharge taxes that will seriously affect the Japanese economy, Sato was only given ten minutes' advance notice. Discussing the double-barreled blow recently at ceremonies opening the new Japan House in New York City, Professor Jun Eto of the Tokyo Institute of Technology said: "It was almost as if the black ships had reappeared off the coast of Japan." The Japanese described Nixon's twin action as an ofuku binta--the forehand-backhand slap in the face that imperial army officers administered to erring soldiers before 1945.*

To reduce the sting of those slaps, Nixon accordingly decided to turn Hirohito's routine refueling stop in Alaska into a chiefs-of-state ceremony complete with booming cannon, Marine Corps trumpeters and satellite coverage of the event for Japan's five TV networks. But even as the President prepared to reaffirm Japanese-American friendship, the U.S. administered yet another slap to Japan.

Since Nixon took office, Washington has striven for some sort of voluntary limit on textile imports, and Japanese textile firms after considerable bargaining have agreed to most of the U.S. demands. But the Japanese businessmen do not want the agreement to take the form of a constricting government-to-government arrangement; the U.S. textile industry, to which the Nixon Administration has granted virtual veto power on the terms, will settle for nothing less. Last week the White House, as a result, let it be known that it intends to take action. The U.S. set Oct. 1 as the deadline for agreement between the two governments. If it is not forthcoming by then, the President plans to impose unilateral quotas on Oct. 15, not only on Japan but also on Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. Ironically, the President plans to act under emergency powers granted him by the Trading with the Enemy Act, which normally applies to strategic materials and unfriendly nations.

Implacable Attitude

Nixon's move was decided upon after a broad review of the situation. In private talks with Sato the President had come away with the impression that he had worked out a solution. The U.S. for its own interest had agreed to return Okinawa to Japan for $320 million in indemnities, including $70 million to cover the cost of removing U.S. nuclear weapons. Nixon thought the Japanese, in exchange, ought to agree to the U.S. textile demands. He got the impression that Sato agreed. Too late, Nixon discovered what many a visitor to Japan eventually learns: the Japanese often seem to be saying yes because they find it discourteous to say no. The President was infuriated; when the Okinawa treaty was formally signed last June, he deliberately bypassed the Washington half of the ceremony.

When U.S. and Japanese businessmen met in Hawaii last month to discuss mutual problems, they attempted unsuccessfully to settle the impasse. The Japanese were surprised by the implacable U.S. attitude. They were also indignant when the Americans passed around the lyrics from a Southern ballad called The Import Blues, in which a laid-off mill hand laments: "Now the people of Jay-pan have it made./ They make cheap-john goods in a sleazy style./ And ship these goods the whole world wide." Even his wife, the mill hand complains, wears "Jap-made minis" produced by "slant-eyed people of the country of the Rising Sun flag."

Treasury Secretary John Connally, the Commerce Department and the Department of Agriculture argued for a hard line toward the Japanese textile men. The State and Defense Departments, Federal Reserve Board and Council of Economic Advisers all agreed that too much pressure was dangerous: it could force Sato and his successors to abandon Japan's pro-American stance. The tough protectionist approach prevailed, and the decision on imposed quotas came just in time to serve as a curtain raiser for Hirohito's trip. "At this point," says a Japanese trade official glumly, "relations could hardly get worse."

The triple U.S. shokku came at a time when things all around the world seem to be getting tougher for Tokyo after 15 years of uninterrupted gains. Other Asian nations resent the economic successes of the Japanese, resist their hard sell, and worry meanwhile about the return of well-remembered Japanese militarism. Japan's foreign aid policy is criticized as a form of economic imperialism since much of it is tied to the purchase of Japanese goods.

In Australia, the question that seems to be asked most frequently of travelers returning from Japan is, "Are they getting arrogant again?" Seven out of ten Australians, when polled, consider the Japanese a potential menace, even though Tokyo is an increasingly bigger buyer of their iron ore, coal and wool. In downtown Sydney last week stood a Toyota bearing a "For Sale" sign; across the sign someone had scrawled BUY BLITISH--a mocking reference to the stereotyped Japanese tendency to interchange the letters l and r in speech.

America the Underdeveloped

At home, meanwhile, the economic pace of "Japan, Inc." (so called because of the extent of government-industry cooperation) shows signs of slowing down. Even before Nixon's monetary moves, the Japanese islands were experiencing a mild recession. In the aftermath of the President's action, corporate budgets are being tightened; the owner of one operation in the Ginza, which has 1,200 bars, strip joints and restaurants, anticipates that at least 10% of the establishments will close down by year's end. The $20 billion a year export trade may decline by as much as $2 billion. The Tokyo stock exchange has tumbled 10% since mid-August. The giant electronics maker, Hitachi, plans to take on no high school graduates next spring because of the expected drop-off in export trade; last spring the firm hired 6,500. Despite this, however, no serious unemployment problem is foreseen; opportunities still outnumber applicants overall, and the current level of joblessness is 1.2% in a labor force of 51.5 million.

Nixon's doru shokku (dollar shock) is designed to force the Japanese to revalue the yen by as much as 15%--from 360 to the dollar to 300 or so. Japan is resisting that precipitous revaluation. Allowed to float, the yen so far has risen in value no more than 6.8%. Japan, meanwhile, is trying to reopen bilateral talks with the U.S. In Tokyo, Premier Sato told TIME Correspondent Edwin Reingold: "There must be another round of talks between Japan and the U.S. Through these talks I believe that the difficult questions of the dollar and the yen will be settled."

Neither side has been blameless for the deterioration of relations. Though Nixon last week justly described their huge two-way trade (1970 total: $11.6 billion) as "the greatest transoceanic commerce in the history of mankind," he has been flashing signals to Tokyo that trouble was looming ever since he became President. Japan's restrictive trade policies, coupled with an anticipated favorable balance this year of $2.8 billion in dealings with the U.S. alone, were major irritants. Some experts said that the situation had reached the point where Japan was treating the U.S. like an underdeveloped country, buying its raw materials and shipping back finished goods.

The Japanese, however, responded to the signals with excruciating slowness. They argued that among the world's 76 biggest exporting nations, Japan stood only 62nd in the ratio of its exports to its gross national product. Under Japan's paternalistic system of lifelong employment and infrequent firings, uninterrupted production is essential, even if a company is required to sell at no profit. As for Japan's favorable trade balance, American Businessman Howard Van Zandt, a vice president of ITT, reckons that U.S. salesmen could sell $500 million a year more if they were as hardworking.

Despite the blows dealt to his country and his career by the U.S., Premier Sato, 70, has not turned against Americans. Last week, in fact, he agreed to co-sponsor Washington's U.N. resolutions proposing membership for Peking while also preserving Taipei's seat.

The decision to support the U.S. was solely Sato's, and it could conceivably cost him his job. Most of Sato's advisers, including Foreign Minister Takeo Fukuda, opposed support. Sato's policy of complete agreement with the U.S. as Japan's best foreign policy course has kept him in office for six years and eleven months, a record for consecutive tenure by a Japanese Premier. But the Japanese, seeking a new style of independent political action, are angry at themselves for swaying for so long like willows in an American wind.

Thus Sato's position looks less and less attractive politically. Japan's largest newspaper, Asahi Shimbun (circ. 5,700,000), scorns him as a man who has "neither the vitality nor fresh and courageous ideas to tide us over this period of dramatic changes." Sato had anticipated that the reversion of Okinawa would be the ultimate crown to his career. He foresaw an orderly transfer of power to Fukuda--at 66 a somewhat aging protege--next summer, when the Okinawa treaty is scheduled to take effect. Now, considering the controversy around him, he will be lucky if he stays in office through the winter.

Sato's skid has launched a scramble for power within his Liberal Democratic party, which dominates Japanese politics. Fukuda is so closely identified with Sato that political oddsmakers give him only about a 50-50 chance to succeed him as premier. So far, he has three contenders to face: Minister of International Trade and Industry Kakuei Tanaka, 53, a tough, brilliant self-made man, and two former foreign ministers, Takeo Miki, 64, who favors closer relations with Peking, and Masayoshi Ohira, 61, who has solid business support. Whoever wins will have a rocky time of it.

Oceanic Changes

After Sato, Japan will have to cope with oceanic changes--political, economic and social. Under the impact not only of shifting U.S. attitudes but also of a realignment of the entire Pacific power structure, something very much like a total transformation appears to be under way even now. One thing that is certainly being mulled is new alliances. Says Sato, mixing his images: "If there is trouble inside the U.S., the waves caused by these troubles lap the Japanese shores. We must realize that we are in the same boat." Sato's successor is unlikely to abandon the boat, but he may look with new interest on Japan's biggest neighbors, the Soviet Union and China, as potential lifesavers. It is improbable, however, that in the end he will cling too closely to either.

Stripping Manchuria Bare

The Japanese have not forgotten that even though they signed a pact of neutrality with Moscow in 1941, Stalin abrogated it in the closing days of World War II by sending the Red Army into industrialized Manchuria to strip it bare. Nor have the Japanese forgotten that the Russians took advantage of them at war's end by seizing South Sakhalin, the Kurils, the Habomais and the islands of Shikotan off Japan's northern coast. Of course, with U.S.-Japanese relations deteriorating and with Chinese hostility directed against both Moscow and Tokyo, the Soviets may yet decide to play a trump card by returning at least the Habomais and Shikotan.

An alliance with China would also have serious drawbacks. The Chinese have never rid themselves of what Asian critics call their "Middle Kingdom" complex, an attitude that dates back 3,000 years to the days when China considered itself the ideal country, halfway between heaven and earth. Others were backward barbarians, especially the Japanese, whose culture is heavily indebted to China. This prejudice was certainly strengthened by the rape of Nanking and other Japanese wartime atrocities, which the Chinese still recall regularly in propaganda plays.

The two-China problem is a particularly delicate one for the Japanese. Though they recognize Chiang Kai-shek's government as the legitimate China, the Japanese trade with both Taipei and Peking. Premier Sato explains: "During this transitional period, it is possible to recognize the existence of two regimes under the principle of one China." At present, Japan's trade with the two is almost in balance: $822 million with Peking last year, $950 million with Taipei (whose population is only 14 million, or one-fiftieth that of the mainland).

Despite this burgeoning activity, however, relations between the Japanese government and Peking have never been cordial. The Chinese accuse Japan of renascent militarism. They widely publicized the spectacular death last November of Japanese Novelist Yukio Mishima, a latter-day samurai who organized a small private army, and who committed hara-kiri (TIME, Dec. 7) to protest the decline of the warrior ethic in Japan. China's attitude infuriates Sato: "They have nuclear weapons. They have the biggest army in the world. It is strange that such a country accuses Japan of a military revival."

While there appears to be little of the military resurgence that the Chinese fear, Japan is in fact strengthening its Self-Defense Forces. With the U.S. drastically trimming its military commitments in the Far East and urging other nations, under the Nixon Doctrine, to look to their own defenses, Japan intends to spend $16 billion over the next five years to refurbish and modernize the SDF, half of whose equipment dates from World War II. Even so, Japan will still be spending barely 1% of its G.N.P. on defense (v. 8% for the U.S.) when the current program is completed.

Will modernization ultimately bring nuclearization to the only nation ever to feel the terrible power of an atomic bomb? The Sato government has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but it has not yet been formally ratified. The Japanese are already constructing nuclear plants to generate electric power, and they undoubtedly have the expertise to develop nuclear weapons. Some U.S. military advisers have in the past attempted to persuade them to do it. As one Pentagon general explained during an inspection tour of Japan last year: "A nuclear weapon is just like a generator, only it runs a little faster."

Three things that hold back nuclear weaponry in Japan are "atomic allergy," the high cost of bomb building, and the realization that Japanese nuclear weapons would further complicate relations with China. The scheduled U.S. underground atomic test 750 miles off the Japanese coast at Amchitka in the Aleutians, for example, is generating strong protests. But Japanese politicians agree that ultimately the question is going to be settled by a generation that does not remember Hiroshima. Says Diet Member Kiichi Miyazawa: "The U.S. and China must be very careful that they don't push Japan around too much when this present generation is gone. If they do, the next generation may decide to go nuclear."

Some Asians believe that Japan's political as well as military strength ought to increase markedly simply as a corollary of its flourishing economic power. At present, Japan is an economic giant that casts no political shadow whatever. "They must sooner or later play a role commensurate with their industrial power, if only to keep their system going," says Singapore's articulate Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam.

Social Overhead

One reason the Japanese remain hesitant to undertake such a role is the growing realization that there is much unfinished business at home. Japan's per capita income of $1,560 is now the highest in Asia, but ranks only 14th in the free world. Japanese consumers can now afford what they call the three Cs--cooler (air conditioner), color television and car--that their U.S. and European counterparts also cherish. But Japan's economic miracle was financed by sacrificing needed social improvements in favor of industrial investment, which has been running at an annual rate of $28 billion. The average Japanese thus hears constantly about his country's affluence, but he wonders where it is as he glances around his tiny living quarters, as he sweats for hours in jampacked trains and buses or bounces over potholed roads, and as he peers with smarting eyes through the ubiquitous smog. The Japanese are somewhat shamefaced that while Paris has had a complete sewage system for 200 years, only 9.2% of Japanese homes boast flush toilets. That total includes even Tokyo, whose 11.4 million residents account for one-tenth of the country's population. "We have lacked investment in social-overhead capital," says Sato, "and this is a good moment to improve that."

Errant Current

The national alarm over inadequate living facilities, coupled with the uncertainty over the political future, has created an almost fatalistic despondency among many Japanese. Early in September the feeling was heightened by a curious natural phenomenon. Off the Philippines there originates an ocean current that the Japanese call Kuroshio (the black current). Carrying a water volume of 500 Amazon Rivers north and east along Japan's mountainous Pacific coast, Kuroshio has served for eons as the conveyor belt for a wealth of marine resources. But last month the black current brought mostly trouble. For reasons still not explained, Kuroshio began running three feet higher than usual, flooding settlements all along the coast.

The apprehension underscored by the errant current lingers. "Our tomorrow is like a large elephant," says Businessman Kazuo Matsuoka, "and we are like blind people trying to figure out its proportions by touch." Tokyo's foremost futurologist, Professor Shinkichi Eto of Tokyo University, believes that he has some idea of the dimensions. Eto's projection: "The most probable course for Japan to follow will be for her to drop the growth rate [from 11.1% in the 1960s] to 5% in the 1970s. That level will be maintained through the '80s and '90s. By the final decade of this century, Japan will have caught up with the U.S. in living standards--at least in things like sewage, roads and tapwater systems. For the last 30 years of the century, Japan will continue to suffer from youth riots, urban guerrillas, environmental disruptions, parliamentary crises and weak political leadership. Nevertheless, Japan's parliamentarianism is likely to survive."

But will Japan's threatened partnership with the U.S. also survive? There is a communications gap between the two nations that is wide and getting progressively wider. Americans are more to blame for this than Japanese, according to Frank Gibney, Tokyo-based executive vice president of Encyclopaedia Britannica. In the October issue of Foreign Affairs, Gibney regrets that "behind the textiles and transistors, the American, so relatively sophisticated about the changing situations of Britons, Italians or Russians, sees in the Japanese the same 25-year-old image which American soldiers originally brought back from the occupation days: smiling, polite little people (if on occasion deceitful) who are hardworking but inscrutable." Supporting Gibney's argument is the fact that the Administration has been nothing less than cavalier in its treatment of the Japanese on many vital issues. Japan will be a major subject when Nixon meets with Chou En-lai in Peking, for example, but Japanese diplomats have not yet been consulted. This can only aggravate Japanese fears that the U.S. and China will work out some arrangement harmful to Tokyo's interests.

The Japanese remain profoundly fearful of attitudes of white superiority, and such treatment is bound to reinforce their suspicions. Says Harvard's Edwin Reischauer, former U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo: "There are loads of people in this country--and even more in Western Europe--who are not ready to admit that a non-Western country can be one of the leading or perhaps most successful of the modern nations. If that kind of racist reaction does come from the West, then we will certainly stir up a nationalist response."

One of Japan's strengths, like Britain's, is its ethnic homogeneity. But this has bred an almost schizoid attitude--now arrogant, now absurdly humble--and it has led to a distorted, inward-looking perspective. "You have intermarried, you have had a mixing of population," says Diet Member Kiichi Miyazawa. "We have had none of that. We have so little in common with the West."

One difference, says a Japanese diplomat, is that "in Japan when you love a girl, there is an expression: 'Eyes talk.' But in your country when you love a girl, you must shout 'I love you, I love you, I love you!' " Up to now, the Japanese have learned neither how to shout nor how to react when others are doing the shouting. The result is a sense of gnawing unease for an emerging superpower that has yet to establish its identity.

*A joke making the rounds in Washington, alluding to a recent movie title, has the Emperor asking: "Who is Richard Nixon and why is he doing those terrible things to my country?"

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