by Ian Buruma
Was he the right man for the job? The Japanese, as Reischauer himself points out over and over again, certainly thought so. And many Americans thought so too. In a typical passage, Reischauer quotes “a certain Ambassador Flake, who … told us upon leaving that never in his thirty-five years in the Foreign Service had he seen the morale and spirit of an Embassy rise so sharply as ours did after we came.” Even the Japanese emperor was pleased to see the great conciliator:
At court functions, the Emperor could not conceal his boredom as he gravely murmured to each person in turn, “Yo koso (You are welcome).” However, on more than one occasion early in our stay, he suddenly broke his usual solemn round when he looked up and saw that he was shaking my hand and, bursting into a broad smile, would say with enthusiasm, “Honto ni yo koso (You really are very welcome).”
Ambassador Reischauer, it is clear, came, saw and conquered. Ironically, the only ones who never much took to him were the Japanese leftists, who rightly saw the so-called Reischauer line (basically the strengthening of Japan as the main capitalist Asian ally against Chinese and Soviet communism) as inimical to their pan-Asian socialist aspirations. These aspirations petered out in time. Today the voice of the left is hardly audible. Many reasons have been given for this. Few have much to do with Reischauer’s ambassadorial dialogues. U.S. and, subsequently, Japanese recognition of China took much of the wind out of the pan-Asian cause. And the sharp rise in living standards that began with the economic boom of the 1960s was part of a deliberate political strategy to undermine political activism. The so-called income-doubling plan was hatched when Kishi was still prime minister, but was carried out under his successor, Ikeda Hayato. The South Korean leader Park Chung Hee, though a far more authoritarian figure than Ikeda, did the same thing for similar reasons. Oddly, Reischauer only refers to Park in the most scathing terms.
So the basis for the Japanese Economic Miracle was laid during Reischauer’s tenure, which ended in 1966. The miracle seemed to suit the political goal of making Japan a strong, dependable (and, indeed, highly dependent) U.S. ally. Which is why Japan was treated as a special case, like a gifted child who needs to be carefully nurtured. It was part of the comfortable arrangement whereby Washington more or less took care of Japanese defense and foreign policy, while the Japanese got on with getting rich. In effect, Japan could build a partly state-subsidized and state-managed export economy, retaining domestic tariff barriers to an extent unthinkable in Western Europe or the U.S., and still be treated as if it were a free-trading nation. Of course, once a subsidized industry had cornered the Japanese market, the tariffs could gradually come down. One must give the Japanese credit for using the circumstances to their best advantage.
It was during that golden age of the transistor salesman that Morita built his empire. He describes in his book how he appeared in 1969 before a Joint Congressional Economic Committee in Washington. He was asked by a congressman “whether it was possible for us Americans to start a firm in Japan when you started Sony in Japan.” “No,” said Morita, “it was not possible.” Whereupon the congressman said, “But Sony has now established a firm in America. Why is it that America is not allowed to enter Japan?” And Morita said, “The Japanese had a fear complex that giant America’s free inroads into Japan would immediately outmarket them. Whatever the reason, as long as they have this fear complex, they will feel resistant toward liberalization.” Quite how this fits in with Morita’s admonishments that if only American businessmen would learn Japanese and work harder, the Japanese market would be theirs, is never explained.
Naturally, Japan’s rather cushy economic deal and its lack of a foreign policy beyond wishing, like any good merchant, to remain friends with everybody, irritated Americans and Europeans at times, but this is where Reischauer could be counted upon to explain Japanese cultural sensitivities to the unthinking and unfeeling barbarians.
Besides speaking Japanese, Reischauer was a youthful representative of Kennedy’s Camelot, and was married to a Japanese. Almost as soon as they arrived in Tokyo, Reischauer and his wife, Haru, became superstars for the Japanese press. He saw his job “as being essentially educational, as it had been at Harvard.” This meant explaining America to the Japanese, but, more importantly for a Japanese scholar, it meant explaining Japan to Americans. Reischauer often showed impatience with American newsmen who did not show an adequate understanding of things Japanese. The great Japanese public, which adores benign pedagogues, especially when the subject concerns the great Japanese public itself, loved Reischauer. And Japanese officials, who know a soft foreign touch when they see one, loved him too.
There is obviously nothing wrong with promoting mutual understanding. Indeed, it is desirable. But understanding Japanese feelings is held to be synonymous in Japan with seeing things from Tokyo’s point of view. Understanding, in other words, implies agreement. Mixing politics and culture, therefore, almost always works toward Japan’s advantage. In the 1960s Japan’s advantage was held to be America’s advantage too—few people had woken up yet to the potential might of the Japanese industrial machine. So, in the mood of his time, Reischauer did a good job. In the 1980s things became a little different, however. And it would have been fascinating to know what the old conciliator thinks now of the trade imbalance between the U.S. and Japan, and to what extent it can be traced to policies laid down in the days of his own Tokyo Camelot.
Alas, not a word. Instead, endless space is devoted to more prestigious (a favorite Reischauer word) matters: awards, distinguished guests, speeches received rapturously, prestigious positions on prestigious panels of prestigious organizations, and so on. When Reischauer vents his spleen about not receiving a Purple Heart—“which I felt I deserved for my close brush with death in the service of my country”—after being stabbed in the thigh by a Japanese lunatic, one is not sure whether he is being facetious. One rather thinks not.
Morita, as a true insider, could have given us an important account of how the Japanese economic system was set up, how the Ministry of International Trade and Industry decided upon policies, how they benefited Japanese companies, and how Sony, as a postwar parvenu, fitted in with more established corporations with closer links to the bureaucracy. But Morita is so busy promoting himself—so much for the stereotypical self-effacing Japanese—and the virtues of Japanese culture that he explains absolutely nothing, except, well, himself. “As I said to Henry Kissinger …”; “I was frank with Deng …”; “I told President Reagan …”; “I pointed out to my friend George Shultz …”; “Herbert von Karajan …”; “Cyrus Vance …” And there usually follows a self-serving platitude about the feelings of We Japanese. Although Morita likes to think of Sony as an exceptional company in Japan—perhaps rightly—it is not always clear which hat he is wearing: that of Morita the man, Morita the chairman of Sony, or Morita the spokesman of We Japanese. As far as the man’s exceptional talents are concerned, we are told that these were “handed down to me through the family genes.” But he also believes that as a manager he is blessed with “a kind of Oriental sixth sense.” This piece of wisdom was actually suggested by William Bernbach, the New York advertising man, and Morita took to it instantly.
Reischauer, too, appears to have imbibed Oriental wisdom in his baby cot. The first sentence of Chapter 1 reveals a great deal about the ambassador’s character:
In my youth, American children born in Japan, especially those of missionary parentage, were called BIJs. We were very proud of the distinction and felt superior to our less fortunate comrades. We tended to know a great deal more about living in Japan than they did and to speak better Japanese.
The BIJ mentality seems to have stuck for life. As has the missionary zeal to teach mankind the morally correct position, as it were. Reischauer takes trouble to inform his readers that, unlike in other foreigners’ households, “the fundamental attitude … in my own home … was one of deep respect for the Japanese.” Four paragraphs later he repeats that “I was free from racial p
rejudice,” and that this meant that “I was a generation or two ahead of my time.” It is splendid and reassuring to know that the ambassador was not a racist, but there is something annoying about the way he has to ram the point home. It also betrays the peculiar defensiveness of a man who is emotionally committed to two countries which do not always get along well. Reischauer is constantly ready to defend Japan against would-be attackers. This may not have been quite the right frame of mind for a man with the brief to defend American interests in a competitive world.
Reischauer is a little too proud of his own righteousness. Like a considerable number of liberal-minded people at the time, he thought in the late 1930s that Western colonial empires had had their day. In 1939 he wrote a proposal to the State Department that argued that “all the peoples and nations of the Pacific Area are by nature equal as nations, peoples and individuals” and that “all discrimination based upon differences of race” should be ended. These were noble sentiments, with which one can have no quarrel. But to say that “I was light-years ahead of most other people” is an overstatement. “Who could envisage the disappearance of the British, French, and the Dutch empires?” Well, quite a few people, actually. Why does he think Gandhi had so much support in Britain?
The point, however, is not so much that Reischauer is a boaster: modesty may be a virtue, but it is a virtue lacking in many great men. There is a more important flaw in the BIJ’s character—a flaw shared by many liberals, especially liberals born to missionary parents. Reischauer is so intent on proving his moral righteousness that he risks losing touch with reality. Or, to put it in another way, reality is rejected when it does not fit into his moral vision. How else can one explain Reischauer’s insistence that the U.S. and Japan shared an “equal partnership,” when this was—and is—so patently beside the truth? An equal partnership, when the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo “ranked somewhere between the imperial family and the cabinet”? The equal partnership is, of course, a fine ideal based upon another ideal, presented by Reischauer as if it were reality. This is that “the two nations shared common basic ideals of democracy, human rights, and egalitarianism, and yearned alike for a peaceful world order made up of truly independent nations, bound together by as free and open trade as possible.” We all want peace. And Japan certainly benefits from free and open trade in other countries. But the same common ideals of democracy and human rights? This is an act of faith, by no means always justified by facts.
Not that allies necessarily need to share the same ideals, as long as they share the same interests. It is certainly in the interests of both Tokyo and Washington that conflict between the countries is avoided. But one wonders whether that cause is served in the long run by painting a rosier picture than one ought, and by tolerating political gambits in the guise of cultural proclivities.
Morita’s book is political. It is a huge red herring to distract American businessmen wringing their hands at so many Japanese miracles. His cultural explanations for Japanese business success are not only self-serving and disingenuous, but false. It is not true that Japanese companies never fire workers, because “we are part of the same family.” Only the largest corporations offer the so-called lifetime employment system, which covers about one third of the Japanese workforce. The rest are employed as seasonal contract workers or work for small subcontracting firms, which have a vital part in Japanese industry. While it is true that large corporations can ride economic crises without letting many workers go, this is at the expense of smaller firms, who no longer enjoy the trickle-down benefits of the big companies. It is they who suffer from the high yen rate, while the large corporations export as many cars and video sets as before. And plenty of workers get fired in the process.
It is not true that “the competition on our domestic markets makes the consumer king.” Japanese consumers sometimes pay as much as 50 percent more than people overseas for manufactured goods, and about five times as much for beef or rice (rice farmers are protected from outside competition because they are part of the “Japanese cultural heritage,” as well as voters for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party).
It is not true that “today’s Japanese do not think in terms of privilege” or that “we have a kind of equality that does not exist elsewhere.” Japanese society is very hierarchical indeed, especially when compared to the U.S. And the historical example of eighteenth-century actors who broke into the upper classes by dint of their success is absurd: actors, like black slaves, were sought after as illicit sex partners, but they were still beyond the pale in class terms—an attitude that persists even today. When Morita’s own son wanted to marry a popular singer, he was almost disowned by his father. As an instance of his own egalitarianism—as opposed to American elitism—Morita tells us that he was prepared to pose for pictures with the staff of a Sony lab near Palo Alto. And as for the idea that “money is not the most effective tool” to motivate Japanese workers, but that “family loyalty” is, well, I would like to hear that from a factory worker, not from his very rich boss. (One wonders, incidentally, what could have stimulated a respected journalist like Edwin Reingold to help write this shoddy book, if it was not money—but then, of course, he is a materialistic American.)
But even if all these things were true, they still do not explain why so many foreign products cannot be sold in Japan at competitive prices. Forget about American cars, what about products from South Korea or other Asian countries?
Morita is quite right to say at the end of his book that the “future holds exciting technological advances that will enrich the lives of everybody on the planet.” Take telecommunications, for example, a field in which the U.S. is still superior. Professor Chalmers Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley has written a detailed study of how two Japanese ministries are gearing up to set the stage for another Japanese miracle: the future monopoly of the telecommunications market by Japanese corporations. What is to be done about this? Peter Drucker, among others, suggests bilateralism or “reciprocity”: tariffs and other penalties applicable only to goods from countries that refuse to import similar goods.
Morita’s answer? “Reciprocity would mean changing laws to accept foreign systems that may not suit our culture.” Indeed.
1987
SAMURAI OF SWAT
Few Japanese—if any—have forgotten that dark day in October 1964 when Anton Geesink beat the Japanese judo champion Kaminaga Akio to win the Olympic gold medal in Tokyo. The Dutch giant—6 foot 6 inches, 267 pounds—didn’t just beat Kaminaga, he flattened him. And the nation wept, quite literally. Grown men, pressed against shop windows to see the fight on television sets especially provided for this purpose all over Tokyo, collapsed in tears. Geesink told reporters that coping with the Japanese crowds after the fight had been tougher than the fight itself.
Judo was introduced that year for the first time in the history of the Olympic Games by special request of the Japanese hosts. Judo was not just a national sport: it symbolized the Japanese way—spiritual, disciplined, infinitely subtle; a way in which crude Western brawn would inevitably lose to superior Oriental spirit. And here, in Tokyo, a big, blond foreigner had humiliated Japan in front of the entire world. It was as though the ancestral Sun Goddess had been raped in public by a gang of alien demons. The disaster was blamed on Geesink’s bulk, of course, but that rather left one wondering about this business of spirit versus brawn.
Sport, like sex, cuts where it hurts most: that soft spot where national virility is at stake. Nowhere is it more sensitive than in Japan, the peripheral nation, always on the outside edge of greater powers, always panting to catch up with the foreign metropolis, Changan, Beijing, Paris, London, New York. And at no time was it more delicate than in the 1960s, when the nation was beginning to crawl out from the shadow of the greatest humiliation of all: defeat in war and subsequent occupation by a superior foreign power. The Tokyo Olympics were supposed to have put the seal on all that. The revival of national virility, already boosted by the
accelerating economic boom, was at hand; the Judo Open Weight gold medal was meant to have clinched it; the shame of defeat would be wiped out and Japanese face would finally be restored.
The writer Nosaka Akiyuki described exactly what it was all about in a wonderful novella, published in 1972, entitled Amerika Hijiki (“American Seaweed”). A Japanese man is visited in Tokyo by an American acquaintance who had served in Japan during the occupation. For his entertainment, the American guest is taken to a live sex show, where Japan’s “Number One Male” is to perform. On this occasion, however, Number One, possibly distracted by the American in the audience, fails. The Japanese host is as embarrassed as the star performer but understands his predicament:
As soon as those jeeps started racing through his mind, cries of “come on everybody” rang in his ears, and sad memories of brilliant skies over burnt-out bomb sites returned, he was rendered impotent …
Strong measures, in such humiliating circumstances, were called for. And in the late 1950s national virility was redeemed somewhat in the spectacular shape of Riki Dozan, a large and very virile wrestler who specialized in beating big, blond Americans—often wearing cowboy hats—to the mat. Riki Dozan was the perfect Japanese macho man: he had fighting spirit to burn. But he always spoke fondly, even tearfully, of his mother, was benevolent to his juniors, and fought fairly. The outsize Americans, on the other hand, fought dirty. But despite the hidden knuckledusters and other weaponry suddenly produced by these dastardly foreigners, Riki Dozan’s fighting spirit would invariably prevail. In comic-book versions of his career, this indomitable spirit was inspired by frequent visions of Mount Fuji. Few men in the history of modern Japan have been more popular. That he was actually born a Korean, like so many other Japanese sporting heroes, was something people preferred to ignore. Hence, when he was stabbed to death in a Tokyo nightclub a year before the Tokyo Olympics, only one national newspaper cared to mention this unfortunate blot on his otherwise exemplary biography.
