America in the Mind of Japan
By BARRY HILLENBRAND 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.
CHART: NOT AVAILABLE
CREDIT: TIME/CNN POLL
From telephone polls of 500 Japanese adults, taken on Jan 28-29 by Infoplan/ Yankelovich International, and of 1,000 American adults, taken on Jan. 30 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling errors are plus or minus 4.5% and 3% respectively. "Not sures" omitted.
CAPTION: THE AMERICAN VIEW
Which words describe what people in Japan are like?
THE JAPANESE VIEW
Which words describe what people in America are like?
CHART: NOT AVAILABLE
CREDIT: TIME Graphics by Nigel Holmes
TIME/CNN POLL
From telephone polls of 500 Japanese adults, taken on Jan 28-29 by Infoplan/ Yankelovich International, and of 1,000 American adults, taken on Jan. 30 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling errors are plus or minus 4.5% and 3% respectively. "Not sures" omitted.
CAPTION: THE AMERICAN VIEW
THE JAPANESE VIEW
Which is the main reason for the large trade imbalance between the U.S. and Japan?
With reporting by Kumiko Makihara/Tokyo