Lance Morrow

By LANCE MORROW

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.

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 that it is because Japan remains fundamentally different from the U.S. in economy and culture and is committed to playing by unfair rules that discriminate against imports. There is truth in that: Japan is a profoundly communal society organized on almost every level to protect the interests of the Japanese -- the welfare of the nation, its business community and its people are one and the same.

Ira Phillips, president of Quoizel Inc., a family-owned lighting-fixtures manufacturer in Hauppauge, N.Y., with $30 million in sales, tells a story repeated by many American business people: "I went to Japan, I worked with some lighting people there, they liked my product and placed orders for it. It & took me nine months after I shipped it to get the merchandise into the customer's store. The Japanese found problems at the pier, they couldn't find the merchandise -- whatever they could do to keep us from getting our product into the store, they did. They had all kinds of inspections that we did conform to, but then they make you wait a month before they inspect the product." Says Clyde Prestowitz: "Not every Japanese economic success is due to its business virtuosity. There is also collusion, dumping and predatory pricing."

Last spring a book called The Coming War with Japan became a best seller in Japan and has sold 40,000 copies in the U.S. The authors, Meredith LeBard and Dickinson College political scientist George Friedman, predicted a shooting war within 20 years between the U.S. and Japan. The authors wrote, "The issues are the same as they were in 1941. Japan needs to control access to its mineral supplies in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean Basin and to have an export market it can dominate politically. In order to do this, it must force the United States out of the western Pacific." As in the '30s, by this scenario, the tensions eventually lead to a hot war. "The first assumption when the book came out," says Friedman, "was that we were psychotic Japan bashers. But there's been a sea change. No one is debating anymore the question of whether we will see a massive deterioration of the relationship. What was 'preposterous' in May becomes only 'difficult to believe' in January." The book implausibly assumes that the U.S. could be "forced out" of markets and that the Japanese people would support a rebirth of militarism. But its hyperbole is a perfectly consistent American version of the sort of unpleasant, vaguely paranoid fantasies that a number of Japanese writers have been retailing for some time.

Despite the American alarm and anti-Japanese sentiment, a strain of ambivalence and self-criticism runs through American opinion. For one thing, anti-Japanese gestures can be very complicated in the new world. In Valley Stream, N.Y., Steve Verga sells Hondas, about 450,000 of which are now made in the U.S. annually. "When customers ask us, 'Where was this car made?' " says Verga, "we say, 'In Ohio, by American workers.' "

The Buy America campaign may be simple. The larger context is not. During the week that anti-Japanese protests took place in Louisville, Toyota announced yet another $90 million plant expansion there, which would add 200 more jobs to the local economy. Total Japanese employment in the U.S. has risen to 600,000, nearly 400,000 in the manufacturing sector, while Japanese investors continue to hold $180 billion of the nation's mountain of debt paper, 30 times as much as the Germans.

Sadahei Kusomoto, the chairman and chief executive of Minolta's U.S. operations for 22 years, argues with some plausibility, "It's hard to blame Japan for the recession in the U.S. Ford, GM and Zenith are moving their plants to Mexico. American companies are giving up manufacturing in this country, while Sony, Toshiba and Mitsubishi are coming here and opening up major plants. When things go wrong, we have to find some excuse, and the Japanese are becoming some sort of scapegoat."

A corollary to nationalistic America First sentiment disturbs many Americans. The other day Kansas City lawyer Ilus W. Davis, a civic leader and former mayor, had lunch with two fellow Kansas City businessmen. One of them had won a contract to install a new sewer system in Cairo, and the other was offering fireproof grease to the Hungarian market. Says Davis: "If we took foreign trade out of Kansas City, we'd be in total depression in 48 hours. It has come over a long period of time, piece by piece, but we sure like it."

Some Japanese believe the anti-Japanese sentiment in America is essentially racist. Kusomoto raises the question: "Most American people don't like to admit it, but racial issues have some very deep roots," he says. "Americans are seeing our successes here as Pearl Harbor II. Only this time, we win."

Are Americans racially prejudiced against the Japanese? Occasionally the accusation rings true. Would Americans be upset if, say, Canadian investors offered to buy the Seattle Mariners? Probably no more than they are that Canadians already own the Montreal Expos and the Toronto Blue Jays. Says Linda Cunningham, editor of the Rockford, Ill., Register-Star: "There is an increasing willingness to refer to the 'Japs,' and to talk openly about things that might have been said only privately in their own living rooms. There now seems to be a respectability attached to a subtle return of racism."

In 1946, just after World War II, the historian Allan Nevins observed, "Probably in all our history, no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese." The real astonishment is the extent to which a hatred of the Japanese vanished in America. Curiously, Americans are now in many ways more anti-American than anti-Japanese. There is even a danger that Americans in a self-flagellating mood have become prejudiced against themselves.

The central concern in American objections to Japan is that of fairness. Americans entertain a profound respect for the talents of the Japanese, for their hard work, their intelligence, their high standards of quality. James Kielt is a retired envelope and paper salesman in Freeport, N.Y., who served in the Navy during World War II. Says he, remembering the Mitsubishi fighters and bombers of the Pacific war: "I probably would have trouble buying a Mitsubishi." He drives a Toyota Tercel. Says his friend John Wood, a retired retail chain executive: "The Japanese are probably more industrious than we. And I think we are getting lazy in this country."

Just as Sakurauchi said. The rueful self-accusation is repeated across the U.S. Being a debtor nation, mortgaging their real estate to the Japanese, the mighty Americans, the victors of World War II, the dollar people, have lost a certain amount of face in their own estimation. They have been outdone, they sense, in a way they would not have thought possible -- outdone not only by the Japanese but also by their own appetite for the things their competitors sell. Most Americans probably agree with Texas investor Richard Fisher, who took his family on a four-month sabbatical to Japan last year. Says Fisher: "When I grew up, we were the sole proprietors of the world's economic system. Now we're being asked to be one of the partners. But we still don't have any collective knowledge of Japan; none of our political leaders speak Japanese. We are dealing from a vantage point of weakness. We need to clean up our own act first, and then deal with them on a basis of mutual respect."

The U.S. and Japan have a long, fractious history of disputes over immigration, investment and trade. President Theodore Roosevelt had a few brushes with the Japanese at the beginning of the century. He struck an intelligent note: "I am exceedingly anxious to impress upon the Japanese that I have nothing but the friendliest possible intentions toward them, but I am nonetheless anxious that they should realize that I am not afraid of them and that the U.S. will no more submit to bullying than it will bully." Japanese- American dealings are often distorted by cultural misperceptions -- and the Japanese know how to maneuver artfully within the cloud of their own mystique. Both sides will profit if the air is cleared now by some painful truths.

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

How much do you know about Japan and its people?

THE JAPANESE VIEW

How much do you know about America and its people?

THE AMERICAN VIEW

Which of the following do you admire about Japan?

THE JAPANESE VIEW

Which of the following do you admire about America?

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles, Tom Curry/New York and William McWhirter/Detroit