What is the meaning for us of the “Pacific Century” and the “Asian Resurgence”? It may be that we are on the verge of a mutually reinforcing golden age of economic prosperity and intercultural efflorescence. But it is also conceivable that there will be persistent conflict and perhaps even a violent breakdown. We have had, after all, three wars in the last half-century involving, in one way or another, both China and Japan, and even in periods of comparative calm we have felt—in the best Asian fashion—inchoate anxiety and unsettling disquiet.

We have also had to develop the ability to evaluate predictions about future threats from Asia. Some have been vague, like the “yellow peril”; others more precise, like forecasts as far back as the 1920’s and 1930’s about a coming Japanese-American showdown. We later conducted extensive public debate about the danger of a Communist regime in China, about China’s possession of nuclear weapons, about the backing it gave to anti-American “wars of national liberation,” about its relationship to the Soviet Union and to Soviet imperial ambitions in Asia. We were concerned also with the lesser states, as we still are with North Korea and its putative nuclear arsenal. It is as if new emanations appear even as the older ones are retreating into the shadows.

Thus, it cannot be altogether surprising that Japan has again taken on something of the sinister aspect it had a half-century ago. Throughout the 1980’s, for example, we learned about the emerging Japanese superstate, about Japan, Incorporated, about Japan as Number One, about our need to resign ourselves to a Japanese boss sometime in our future. And then, quite abruptly, we learned in the early 1990’s of spectacular “corrections” in the Japanese real-estate and stock markets, and next of a prolonged recession. Karen Elliott House of the Wall Street Journal reported this past February that after “stock-market collapse, export contraction, credit crunch, and plummeting profits, worse is yet to come.”

At the same time, however, we were also being advised not to become overly complacent. “The idea that the Japanese economy is in deep trouble—that the U.S. has turned the tables on a struggling Japan—is simply a myth,” wrote one observer. In other words, even if we have survived one Japanese onslaught, we may have a second in store.

We now know that the evaluation of any threat from Asia can reflect a deeper political argument. Some people who were once not very much concerned about China’s export of revolution are now very worried about Japan’s export of computer chips; the same people who once trusted a benign Uncle Ho now have large suspicions about the ruthless men from MITI.

Still, there has to be more to it than the ease with which politicians of different stripes can manipulate the varying images of Asia and Asians. One hopes that there is something really to be known, especially about a consequential people like the Japanese. But even if it is daunting to try to get at the true nature of these faraway people of whom we know little, it is useful to arrange the questions. In so doing, we will discover that now, as always, there is something new under the rising sun.

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The Japanese were a formidable and accomplished people long before they met up with us back in 1853. That, as most schoolchildren used to know, was the year Commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet opened Japan to the world. Alarmed by the spread of Western influence into Asia, and alerted (particularly by the West’s rough handling of the Chinese) to what might be in store for them, the Japanese began the revamping of their country in 1868—the famous Meiji Restoration.

Soon thereafter, they turned outward. In 1895, they defeated China in war and annexed the island of Taiwan. In 1905, they destroyed imperial Russia’s power in the northern Pacific and then annexed Korea in 1910. Exploiting the West’s preoccupation with Europe in World War I, they built up their position in China. They also took over the once German-owned Marshall and Caroline Islands in the central Pacific. They sent troops into Siberia in support of the “whites” in the Russian civil war, and did not evacuate Vladivostok until 1923. In 1931, they detached Manchuria from the rest of China and set up a puppet regime under the last of China’s Manchu emperors who, as a child, had been deposed in 1912. In 1937, they invaded China proper and gained control of the coastal regions and chunks of the interior. In December 1941, they attacked Pearl Harbor, while simultaneously launching invasions of the Philippines, Malaya, and Indonesia, all of which fell in short order.

So, in the space of 75 years, Japan went from an exotic and little-known Asian country of uncertain prospects to the owner of an enormous empire. It reached from the Western Aleutians at the edge of North America to the Amur in northeast Asia, from the heart of China deep into the central Pacific, from mainland Indochina and throughout the adjacent archipelagos all the way to the edge of Australia.

Yet fewer than four years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, all this—the work of two generations—was gone. The imperial system in whose name these efforts had been undertaken barely survived even symbolically, and the physical ruin of the country was nearly total. Two of its cities were destroyed by atomic bombs, and the international war-crimes tribunal which sat in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948 laid out a record of extraordinary brutality.

We in the West would call this a cautionary tale, though its moral and practical implications are seldom if ever discussed in Japan itself. There is the occasional embarrassment, as when Japan’s Minister of Justice was forced to resign last May because he had publicly asserted that the notorious Rape of Nanking in 1937 had been a “fabrication.” Minister Nagano was dismissed mostly because his remarks had caused protests in neighboring countries; but lost in the furor was his underlying premise, namely, that Japan was not an aggressor in those years, but an underminer of Western imperialism.

As for the larger meaning of Japan’s rise and fall, an ethicist might see in it the inevitable retribution for arrogance—hubris and nemesis. A strategist might make the more mundane point that a nation of limited resources should not have taken on the United States, Britain, China, and the Soviet Union at the same time. But all should wonder how this story informs Japan’s present ambitions, how it directs the great bursts of energy of which the country is obviously quite capable.

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By the 1960’s, the Japanese of Pearl Harbor and Bataan were forgotten in America and the orthodox view of Japan was now dominated by our political approval of its transition from crazed garrison state to peace-loving society and our aesthetic appreciation of its cultural refinements.

The political standing of postwar Japan owed much to Edwin Reischauer (1906-90), the most distinguished of America’s authorities on Japan, a pioneer in the field of Japan studies, a longtime professor at Harvard, and ambassador to Tokyo for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He came to represent the high view of what happened in Japan between 1930 and 1945.

In its simplest form, this interpretation saw the period as an aberration. Japan in the 1920’s was well set on a democratic course. In this, it was part of an era, resembling our own time, in which democratic ways made seemingly enormous progress in Europe and Asia as old empires collapsed. The ascendancy of the militarists and expansionists was only a detour, and one with a predictable dead end.

In this view, then, the reforms brought to Japan by the post-World War II American occupation were seeds sown in ground better prepared than we realized, seeds which would, over time, produce a firmly rooted plant.

This transformation of Japan’s image was reinforced by its unique experience of nuclear war. Over time, the fact that atomic weapons had been used against Japan came to overshadow and then to displace altogether the appalling crimes Japan itself had committed during its hegemony in Asia. Indeed, the manipulation of the Hiroshima event by international “peace forces” and by the Japanese themselves allowed Japan to undergo a metamorphosis from evil perpetrator to innocent victim and somehow even made it seem that Japan had been a nation of pacifists all along.

Meanwhile, something else was also contributing to the image of a kinder and gentler Japan, and that was a new interpretation of Japanese culture, traditional and modern. What Reischauer did in the political realm, Donald Keene, now professor emeritus at Columbia, did in the cultural.1 Keene, as translator and historian, played an essential role in introducing Japanese literature to our country in the years following World War II, and in interpreting it as delicate, ethereal, precious, subtle, evanescent, and reticent. In so doing, it was necessary to pass over some problematic elements in Japan’s literary culture, especially the pronounced presence in modern Japanese literature of what we would regard as the twisted, deviant, and perverted, and its loving and exquisite portrayals of the sensual, the sadistic, and the suicidal. It may be that, just as Reischauer interpreted Japan’s bad political behavior as the exception and not the rule, a literary historian like Keene might have wanted to do something comparable in the cultural realm.

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These men and others did indeed produce an era of good feeling, a golden age of Japanophilia, if you will. But it has now given way to a much tougher analysis of the relation between our two peoples. Public discourse about Japan is no longer dominated by scholars but by advocates of one kind or another, wholly preoccupied with the commercial competition.

Interestingly, the older generation of Japanophiles, who had had direct experience of real war with the Japanese, were not thereby turned into Japan-haters. The less deadly economic combat of today, however, has produced stronger feelings and greater determination to get at the sources of Japanese aggressiveness with a new set of questions. Is the Japanese expansionist impulse still manifested in an internally well-coordinated commercial imperialism? Is it a carefully constructed strategy or an atavistic compulsion? Or is it just another day at the office?

Bill Emmott, now editor of the Economist, once served as that magazine’s correspondent in Tokyo. His recent book, Japanophobia,2 expands on the theme of his earlier volume, The Sun Also Sets. The titles say it all, for Emmott is one who believes that, at the end of the day, the laws of economics will out.

From Japanophobia, readers learn that the Japanese, including especially their vaunted industrial-policy bureaucrats, make their share of mistakes; that Japan’s influence over the American economy is woefully exaggerated; that the Japanese economy’s seeming ability to levitate is but an optical illusion. Indeed, according to a recent comprehensive report in Emmott’s magazine, in the past 40 years the Japanese government has ended up backing slow-growth industries; the “clever technocrats [have] picked and supported losers”; and “though Japan’s economic success is obvious, industrial policy may well have hindered rather than advanced the cause.”

For Emmott, not only are the laws of economics the same for all, but the Japanese are also like everyone else in their foreign-investment behavior. It is therefore wrong for Americans to be fearful of Japanese investment in our country, and would be a mistake for the American government to act against it.

For a seasoned Japan-watcher like Emmott, Japanophobia seems, in the end, to be the result of misinformation or disinformation, both of which are correctable by accurate data. Still, Emmott’s faith notwithstanding, the “facts” are not always relevant. When the rise of Japan is seen not just as an economic but as a political phenomenon, with philosophical, ethical, and intellectual meanings, invocations of tried-and-true Anglo-American laissez-faire economics will fall on deaf ears. And when the new and astonishing pace of Asian economic development can somehow be fitted into a perennial critique of American capitalism as something forever in dire need of government direction and renovation, those facts will have an even harder time.

There is ample reason to think that recent economic and political successes in Asia validate Anglo-American tradition, that the Asians have attained their new prosperity by emulating us, and that the American “strategic umbrella” provided the requisite security to make this possible, even at the cost of war in Korea and Indochina. If true, these successes should boost our self-esteem (to borrow a term of current lingo). But now a contrary notion is being argued, and it is most comprehensively presented in James Fallows’s recent book, Looking at the Sun.3 Fallows, Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly, has assembled his lengthy writings previously published in that magazine—writings based on an extended stay in Asia and a study of history and economics—in order to argue that the Japanese know what they are doing, but that we do not know what we are doing. Even less do we know what they are doing.

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Fallows’s book reprises the now-familiar theme in which the Japanese fuse state power, corporate ambition, and private greed to achieve awe-inspiring results. This achievement, he urges us to conclude, vindicates a way of thinking which Westerners in their naive approach to business and economics do not understand or tend to ignore, but which they would do well to try to emulate:

When Westerners talk about business and economics, they usually just talk about business and economics—that is, they view the rise and fall of certain industries as if this were a matter of purely commercial interest. But as seen from Asia, the economic expansion of Japan is not primarily an economic phenomenon at all. It is better understood as a political achievement.

It is, upon reflection, remarkable that Fallows would accuse the contemporary United States of naiveté on such matters, and would advocate a fusion of commerce and politics to replace our too laid-back notions. For when he was working in the Carter White House in the late 1970’s, it was the allegedly nefarious practices of American multinational corporations and their government collaborators that were widely thought by American liberals (among whom we should include Fallows) to be the problem.

For example, American oil companies, acting in accordance with a grand strategic design, were presumed to have brought an enormous share of the world’s petroleum resources under the sway of the United States. Even more sinisterly, bankers, industrialists, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency were all said to have worked together to eliminate potential commercial rivals in various countries, not shrinking from bribery and intimidation, or even from instigating coups d’état. Our ability to do this was further reinforced by our worldwide military establishment. As for the strength of some of our industrial enterprises, their “competitiveness”—as we would now say—benefited from enormous subsidies provided through large Department of Defense and NASA budgets. For want of a better term, let us call these arrangements America, Inc.

Generally speaking, American liberals thought this situation was very bad, and required correction in all its aspects. In fact, nothing less than an entirely New International Economic Order (NIEO) was considered capable of coping with it. Overseas, such an order would have to be administered through unprecedented international cooperation, especially within the instrumentalities of the United Nations, but also through the creation of various political and economic blocs modeled on the OPEC cartel. Here at home, legislative, fiscal, and regulatory remedies were to be applied.

As it turned out, the NIEO did not amount to much. But the domestic effort to constrain America, Inc. made definite headway, not least in entrenching the idea that American business success is evidence of American moral failure. Now, in the 1990’s, here are people like Fallows saying they are disquieted by the change in our relative economic position and implying that it is the ordinary American’s naivete, rather than the progress of their own political agenda, which may have brought this situation about. And they hope to play upon widespread anxiety about the economic consequences of their agenda to reconstitute a new kind of America, Inc., under a new aegis.

The 1990’s version of America, Inc.—of business-government cooperation to restore our competitiveness—seems to be little more than an array of domestic social projects, but the “theoretical” underpinnings of the effort form the most interesting and novel part of Fallows’s book. Here, instead of relying on a peculiarly “Asian” outlook, he finds a useful text in the thinking of the German economist Friedrich List (1789-1846).

Fallows notes that the current American world view derives from three Englishmen—Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Adam Smith. But it is German thought, represented by Hegel and List, that was “carefully studied, adapted, and applied in parts of continental Europe and in Asia, notably in Japan.” In this German view, economic growth is not so automatic and self-regulating as Adam Smith posits; rather, development is a deliberate process. What ends up doing the society as a whole the most good is not the sum total of individual decisions; nor is the ultimate good of a society measured by its level of consumption. Rather, the best measure is what a society does for producers. As Fallows summarizes the point:

A society was worth as much as it could make, not as much as it could buy. . . . The German view was more concerned with the welfare—indeed, sovereignty—of people in groups—in communities, in nations. This is its most obvious link with the Asian economic strategy of today.

To bring his case home, Fallows goes on to claim that none other than one of our own Founders, Alexander Hamilton, may have shared List’s opinions. Fallows even suggests that something like List’s outlook informed the first century-and-a-half of American economic history: “Consumer welfare took second place. . . . The United States, trying to catch up with Britain, behaved more or less like the leaders of Meiji and postwar Japan trying to catch up with the United States.” Hence it becomes possible to find some philosophical common ground between ourselves and our Asian competitors.

Yet as Fallows himself concedes, the specific content of the doctrines involved seems to rule out any prospect of long-term harmony. “In the German view,” he writes, “economics is not a matter of ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ . . . it is merely a matter of strong or weak . . . If a nation decides to help itself—by protecting its own industries, by discriminating against foreign products—then that is a decision not a sin.”

It is hard to believe, however, that Fallows genuinely imagines a powerful United States on the move in the world, but without that patina of sin so necessary to liberal thinking about American power and American foreign policy. He certainly is of no disposition to revive the muscular America, Inc. of earlier days. The Great Power attributes of a great power seem to interest him not at all; for him, evidently, our revival can be had solely through soft social programs at home and tough talk about trade abroad.

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People who pay attention to Japan often remark on the seeming contradiction between its sustained economic success, supposedly well-orchestrated by its permanent government, and the apparent chaos of its parliamentary political system. With the resignation of Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro this past April, Japan will have had six governments in the past five years (including the current one of Prime Minister Hata), four of which fell because of allegations of corruption. It is as if parliamentary government were an irrelevant gloss on whatever else happens in the country—or that the part of Japan most Western in appearance may be least consequential in substance.

There is another disappointment. One might think that Japan, as the oldest and the only completely functioning parliamentary democracy in East Asia, would somehow be involved in the great contemporary discussion of universal values vs. regional particularism. On the face of it, Japan demonstrates the relevance of Western-derived principles of representative government and human rights—indeed, Japan might well be cited as the great example of the possibility for profound transformation in a traditional political culture. But what if two generations of democratic practice in Japan have had no real transforming effect, as sometimes seems the case? Then our expectations for the rest of Asia must be drastically altered.

This past March, then-Prime Minister Hosokawa was in China only a week after the visit of Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Christopher’s mission had focused on the relationship between trade and human rights in Sino-American relations, and reportedly went badly. Hosokawa, on the other hand, was said to have agreed with Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng that the Western concept of human rights should not be applied to all nations. “I told him that it is not proper to force a Western or European-type democracy onto others. I made the same statement when I met President Clinton last November in Seattle,” Hosokawa reported after his visit.

Perhaps Hosokawa’s grandfather would have liked to say the same thing to President Harry Truman if he had had the chance; but of course he did not. The origin of Japanese democracy in the shame and powerlessness of total defeat is something all Japanese take into account, and something which a supremely self-confident yet subtle China knows how to play upon. At the same time, it is apparent that China, not Japan, is becoming the heart of the new East Asian system. Is it inevitable that Japan will be wholly absorbed into it? Or will the American model still be able to pose some counter-attraction to China’s powerful political and cultural gravity?

In this respect, the evolution of Sino-Japanese relations is apt to have an enormous influence on us. The two countries represent an awesome combination, and one would hope for an American diplomacy bent on recognizing this danger and doing what it can to prevent it. But at the moment, we have a Clinton-type diplomacy which has estranged both countries from us; it, in turn, appears to rest on a Fallows-type analysis which, if adopted by the Chinese and Japanese themselves, would serve only to push the two of them closer together.

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In the meantime, Japan is free to move a certain strategic distance from the United States now that the common Soviet enemy has disappeared. It is also predisposed to move a certain emotional and psychological distance from us, partially but not primarily because of congenital anti-Japanese sentiment in American political culture. Whatever the interest of Fallows’s complex tracing of East Asian practice to continental European precedent, his own analysis does not usefully distinguish between the economic damage the Japanese may have done to us and the damage we have done to ourselves. And the methods he appears to think we should employ against them—higher tariffs? import quotas? export targets?—would, if strongly applied, be counterproductive; weakly applied, as they are today, they work only to embarrass our country further.

Current policy toward China—to borrow a formulation from that country’s Foreign Minister—trapped the Clinton administration in a web of its own weaving; the President found himself unable to do anything but repair lamely to his predecessor’s standard, even though he had roundly denounced it. Current policy toward Japan has also become a self-made snare. In the latest go-round, it began with a demand for “numerical targets” to improve our trade balance. But Japan’s surplus grew. This led to an effort to lower the value of the dollar, so as to make Japanese goods more expensive. But our Treasury’s manipulations were too good by half, and the dollar then had to be propped up.

The result of all this, as the New York Times reported, was to discourage the Japanese from investing in American markets, thereby complicating the already complex task of balancing trade, investment, interest rates, and the rest of it. In sum, so the Times report goes, “the Clinton strategy toward Japan is moribund, unlikely to produce the expected results and probably going to have to be redesigned.”

Is there any hope that this twin fiasco will engender even a bit of humility among those who now conduct our foreign relations? After all, these affairs are being run by men whose claim to legitimacy is that they understood “Asian realities” twenty years ago, that they could see deeply beneath the surface of things as others could not. As they look toward the East again, we shall find out what they make of their opportunity to prove it.

1 Keene's autobiography, On Familiar Terms: A Journey Across Culture, has recently been published by Kodansha (292 pp., $23.00).

2 Times Books, 261 pp., $25.00.

3 Pantheon, 528 pp., $25.00.

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