by Ian Buruma
Sex and violence aside, the story has two leitmotifs that are bound to appeal: the decline of America, our way of life, etc., and a clearly identifiable enemy. The first is constantly alluded to by characters in the story, as well as by the author himself. “Shit: we’re giving this country away,” says a crude cop. “They already own Los Angeles,” says a woman at a party (“laughing”). “Our country’s going to hell,” says a television journalist. “They own the government,” says the crude cop. “The end of America, buddy …”
“They” is, of course, the enemy: Japan. There is a great deal of talk about “they” in the book. The enemy is identified but it has no face. It is present everywhere, manipulating us, corrupting us, in our offices, our newspapers, our government, our universities and, who knows, perhaps soon on our beaches and our landing grounds. “They” have a mind, a mentality, but no characters, no ideas. The pervasive, manipulative, inscrutable, mysterious mind is never expressed openly or directly. It is masked by subterfuge. Nakamoto Corporation, we are told, “presents an impenetrable mask to the rest of the world.” One of the few Japanese with a name, though without much in the way of human personality, Mr. Ishigura, has a face, but “His face was a mask.”
Masked minds and inscrutable cultures need to be decoded, hence the stock character in many colonial and tropical fantasies: the expert, the man who has the lingo and knows the native mind, the white hero dancing dangerously on the edge of going native himself. This role is performed by Connor, who knows his way around sushi bars and knows when to be polite and when to be firm. Firmness, in his case, means breaking into the rough language of Japanese gangster movies. But in a good mood he will hold forth on the finer points of Japanese manners, why “they” behave as they do and so on. Connor likes Japan, but never forgets that we are at war.
The other stock figure in war propaganda is the good enemy, who has crossed over to the side of the angels. In Japanese wartime movies this role was often played by the Japanese actress Li Ko Ran, later known, during her brief Hollywood career, as Shirley Yamaguchi. She was the Chinese beauty who invariably fell in love with the dashing and sincere Japanese soldier—a love that symbolized the glorious future in Asia under Japanese tutelage. In nineteenth-century anti-Semitic fiction it is the “good Jew,” such as the beautiful Miriam in Felix Dahn’s Fight for Rome (1876), who identifies wholly with the German tribe and hates the rootless and treacherous Jews.
In Rising Sun we have the beautiful Theresa Asakuma. Theresa works in a high-tech research lab, one of the last not to fall into Japanese hands; hence, I suppose, its dilapidated state. Theresa is happy to help Connor and his wholesome American sidekick Lieutenant Pete Smith, the narrator, who plays Doctor Watson to Connor’s Holmes. She is happy to help, because she hates the Japanese.
The beautiful Theresa is a useful character, because she represents the perfect target for Japanese bigotry. Her father was a black GI, and she has a crippled arm. She grew up in a small Japanese town, where the tolerance for blacks and cripples was low. Her story offers an opportunity to expound a little on Japanese racism—even the notorious treatment of polluted outcasts, the burakumin, many of whom work in the leather trade, gets an airing. Not that any of this is implausible or wrong—outsiders do have a hard time in Japan—but it functions as yet another stake driven through the heart of “they.” It is a bit like European or Japanese descriptions of America, in which every American is either a gangster, a redneck or a poor black.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is actually the last book I would have thought of comparing to Rising Sun. I can think of two anti-Semitic works that are much closer in tone and imagery. One is Jew Süss, the German film, directed by Veit Harlan in 1940. The other is a Japanese pop best-seller by Uno Masami about the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. It is entitled The Day the Dollar Becomes Paper: Why We Must Learn From Jewish Knowledge Now.
Harlan’s version of Jew Süss (there were many versions) shows how peaceful, prosperous eighteenth-century Württemberg is almost destroyed by letting in the Jews. The vain and gullible duke of Württemberg has virtually exhausted the state budget by indulging his taste for pomp and dancing girls. The Jew Süss Oppenheimer contrives, by oily flattery and promises of bottomless riches, to persuade the duke to let him take care of his finances. He also presses the duke to allow the Jews to settle in his city. Soon they control everything through their evil manipulation. As a symbol of German humiliation, the Jew has his wicked way with the county sheriff’s daughter. She commits suicide, the good people of Württemberg at last rise up against the duke and his Jews. Oppenheimer is hanged, and the Jews are driven out of town. The message at the end of the film is that the burghers of Württemberg woke up to the danger in their midst and banished the Jews by law. This law should be upheld not only for the sake of our generation, but for our children, our grandchildren, and so on forever and ever.
Uno Masami’s book is a collection of more or less mad conspiracy theories. Among the more outré ones is the notion that Roosevelt, scion of a well-known Jewish family, tricked Japan into going to war, so that the U.S., as a front for world Jewish interests, could save the Jews from Hitler. The basic premise of the book is a simple one: Jews control world public opinion by controlling the media. Jews have convinced the decent and gullible Japanese that Japan should be internationalist instead of looking after its national interests. Thus American Jews wrote the postwar Japanese constitution to make Japan impotent. Thus the Jewish-controlled press made the Japanese feel guilty about the war. Thus decent Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi or Fujitsu cannot compete with IBM, because IBM is controlled by Jewish interests which are out to dominate the world. One salient point about this lunacy is that, to the likes of Uno, Jewish and American interests are more or less interchangeable.
Michael Crichton’s thriller is not quite as zany as Uno’s tract, or quite as odious as Harlan’s Jew Süss. And to call his book racist is perhaps to miss the point. After all, as he told The New York Times, he likes Japan very much. He may have painted a picture of the Japanese as liars and cheats, but as Connor, the expert on the native mind, points out, that is only from our point of view, not theirs. No, the problem with Crichton is that, like Uno and the makers of Jew Süss, he has conceived a paranoid world, in which sincere, decent folk are being manipulated by sinister forces. These forces need not be from a different race: in a different era, they might have been communist.
Paranoia can be based on half-truths. To say that the craziest red-baiters were paranoid is not to say that communism bore no threat. Just so, undeniable problems with Japan do not alter the fact that some of the wildest alarmists are a trifle unhinged. Crichton describes, again in Connor’s words, how the Japanese in America are part of a “shadow world.… Most of the time you’re never aware of it. We live in our regular American world, walking on our American streets, and we never notice that right alongside our world is a second world.” Couple this to the refrain that “they own” our city, our government, our country, and one is not so very far removed from Veit Harlan’s Württemberg.
The metaphors are remarkably similar. Masks are a key image both in Rising Sun and in Jew Süss. The idea in Jew Süss is to contrast an organic, decent, even somewhat slow-witted German community, rooted in its native clay, and the artificial, devious, clever floating world of the rootless Jews. The duke of Württemberg is warned by one of his courtiers that the Jew is always masked. In both Crichton and Harlan, the enemy is pictured as omnipresent, omnipotent and certainly more sophisticated. “The Jews are always so intelligent,” says an exasperated Württemberger. “Not intelligent, just shrewd,” answers another. As Richard Wagner liked to say, the Jew can only imitate, not create.
Connor, only a little ironically, calls America “an underdeveloped peasant country.” Compared to the Japanese, he says, we are incompetent. But on the other hand, of course, “they” have bought our universities, because as an American scientist tells Connor, “they know—after all t
he bullshit stops—that they can’t innovate as well as we can.” Not intelligent, just shrewd.
In Jew Süss and in Rising Sun, we are shown how native institutions are slowly taken over by alien forces. Veit Harlan suggests this by using dissolves and music: the German motto on the Württemberg shield of arms dissolves into Hebrew; a Bach chorale gradually melts into the song of a cantor. In Rising Sun, as in Uno’s book, “our” press is infiltrated; one of “their” people is “planted” at the Los Angeles Times, no less. Another Los Angeles Times reporter, one of “ours,” explains the situation: “The American press reports the prevailing opinion. The prevailing opinion is the opinion of the group in power. The Japanese are now in power.”
At the beginning of Rising Sun, Connor rides an elevator in the Nakamoto Tower with some American cops. An electronic voice announces the floors in Japanese. “Fuck,” says the cop, “if an elevator is going to talk, it should be English. This is still America.” “Just barely,” says Connor.
This kind of paranoia is more complex than mere xenophobia. It suggests a deep frustration. Again, Harlan’s film is instructive: the fiancé of the girl who falls prey to the wicked Jew’s designs is shown as an impotent man—handsome in a blond, romantic, German sort of way, but incapable. In the beginning of the film, the girl makes advances to him, but he fails to respond. The Jew succeeds, albeit violently, where the decent German fails. The enemy as a potent stud: this is how an American floozy in Crichton’s book describes her Japanese patrons: “ ‘A lot of them, they are so polite, so correct, but then they get turned on, they have this … this way … She broke off, shaking her head. ‘They are a strange people.’ ”
There runs a streak of masochism through all this. And, to be sure, it wouldn’t be the first time that American self-flagellation has sold many books. But there is also a hint of awe for the enemy, as though we would like to be more like “them.” In 1942, Hitler quoted “the British Jew Lord Disraeli” as the source of the idea that the racial problem was the key to world history. The anti-Semitic jurist Carl Schmitt hung a picture of Disraeli above his desk. Uno Masami wants the Japanese to learn from the Jews, to learn how they maintained the purity, the virility and the independence of their race.
It is striking how often the fiercest Western critics of Japan are the ones who most want to emulate Japanese ways: protectionism, industrial policies, order, discipline. Crichton, or rather Connor, speaks about being at war with Japan, and at the same time repeats with admiration all the clichés of Japanese cultural chauvinists: how the Japanese people are “members of the same family, and they can communicate without words,” or how good the Japanese police are, because “for major crimes, convictions run ninety-nine per cent.” Connor forgets, perhaps, that confessions are enough to convict in Japan, and that the Japanese police are rather good at getting confessions.
Could it be, then, that some Americans are feeling frustrated with the messiness of American democracy, with its many competing interests and its lack of strong central power; that people are getting tired of freewheeling individualism and the hurly-burly marketplace; that they despair of all the immigrants, who barely speak English yet occupy American cities in their expanding shadow worlds: that, in other words, many Americans would secretly like to feel part of one family, with order imposed from above? If so, it would be a sad thing. For America, thus awakened, would stop being the country to which millions came to escape from just such tribal orders. And those millions included quite a few Japanese.
1993
LOOKING EAST
A new phrase has recently come buzzing in: the Asianization of Asia. As in all such phrases, the concept is vague. Was Asia once less Asian? If Asia wasn’t really Asian, what was it? How Asian does Asia have to be before it can be called truly Asian? And so on.
But a closer look at the kind of people who have taken up the slogan offers some clues to its meaning. At the 1993 Bangkok Declaration on human rights, politicians from various more or less repressive regimes in the region trumpeted what they called “the Asian Way.” They meant a Way that stresses harmony, order and the collective good, as opposed to individualism and “human rights.” (The frequent use of quotation marks around “human rights” by proponents of the Asian Way is meant to show that the idea is supposed to be not just alien to the Way, but rather distasteful too.) The Asian Way rests on the assumption that the government is benevolent and knows best what is good for the common weal. Those who beg to differ threaten that common good, and should be dealt with harshly. Human rights and democracy are dismissed as “Western values,” the advocacy of which is a form of imperialist arrogance. And so, after decades of colonialism, neocolonalism and “Westernization,” it is time for Asia to assert its own values. It is time to Asianize Asia.
That the Singaporean or Indonesian or Chinese government should take this line is understandable. Each profits from the Asian Way. It justifies their grip on power. If individual rights, the rule of law, and popular sovereignty are indeed no more than “Western values,” why then should Asians not rule according to “Eastern values”? Who is to say which is better? If politics is a natural (or, if you prefer, organic) reflection of culture, then there can be no argument: the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 were deluded by foreign values, and the Chinese government was upholding the Asian Way.
Spokesmen for the Asian Way are not lacking in allies in the West. Funnily enough, the people who come closest to their line of thinking are not authoritarian right-wingers, but often nice, liberal, anti-imperialists, who equate politics with cultures. These are the neo-Orientalists, who believe that Eastern people are fundamentally different from us. Their patron saint, in a way, is Johann Gottfried Herder, the eighteenth-century German philosopher of history, who believed that it was natural for Orientals to worship their kings. Herder deployed this argument against the universalism of Voltaire and other thinkers of the French Enlightenment, whom he regarded as arrogant imperialists.
Samuel P. Huntington, professor of the science of government at Harvard, though not a liberal, is a good example of a neo-Orientalist. The conflicts of the future, he wrote in Foreign Affairs in summer 1993, will happen along the “cultural fault lines” separating civilizations. This, he says, is because “differences between civilizations are not only real; they are basic.” Following Huntington’s somewhat arbitrary categories, differences between Arab, Confucian, Latin American, Japanese and Western civilizations are basic. Quite what is so basic about the differences between Latin American and Western, or Japanese and Confucian, civilization is unclear. But one thing is certain in the neo-Orientalist universe: East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.
James Fallows, the author of Looking at the Sun, is not a cultural expert. His main interest is in economics. But, like Huntington, he believes in basic differences. The subject of his book is the “Asian System.” He means an economic system, based on the Japanese model, that fits the autocrats’ description of the Asian Way. “The Chinese leadership,” he writes, “is trying to demonstrate, that a country can have a powerful modern economy without allowing its people the individual freedoms that the Western world calls ‘human rights.’ [The quotation marks again.] The entire Asian model is based on a variant of this proposition: that it is possible to become as strong as the Western world without embracing its permissive ways.”
That is indeed the proposition put forward by the autocrats and their allies, but does it fit the facts? Is the model specifically Asian? Is it culturally determined? Was it historically inevitable? And if it is true that the Asian System exists, what should we do about it? Should we admire and emulate it? Or must we fight it? Fallows does not seem entirely sure. There are strong hints in his book that he would like us to do both at the same time: fight it by learning from it. But the safest thing he can say with real conviction is “There is nothing inherently dangerous in the new social and economic models being developed in Asia. There is great danger in failing to
see them for what they are.”
Well, to be sure. But what exactly are they? Fallows approaches his Asian System in various ways, which don’t always accord. He has assembled a ragbag of history, culture, mentalités, economics and travelers’ tales, as experienced out East by the author and his family. And, since the model of the Asian System is Japan, most of the book is about Japan.
Fallows’s description of postwar Japan rings true in some ways, but not in others. His analysis of the skewed relationship between Japan and the U.S. is reasonable enough. General MacArthur decided after the war that the Japanese Emperor should stay on his throne and be shielded from blame for the war. At the same time he had a new constitution drafted that made it illegal for Japan to maintain its own armed forces. The U.S. would take care of Japanese security, while Japan got on with building up its industrial power. Thus, as Fallows points out, “Japan’s economic institutions grew stronger and stronger. Its political system atrophied. It was left with the ability to promote its industrial interests but to do very little else. This legacy of the Occupation is the fundamental source of the endless ‘trade frictions’ between Japan and the rest of the world.”
Indeed. And Fallows’s descriptions of bureaucratic battles, in Tokyo and Washington, between “pol-mil” types who did everything to keep Japan happy during the Cold War, and the commercial types who wanted more breaks for American businessmen, are interesting and to the point. But this perfectly rational explanation for Japan’s present state is clearly not enough to sustain the idea of a peculiarly Japanese, let alone Asian, System. So Fallows looks back further, to the sixteenth century, when, in his opinion, many Japanese attitudes were shaped. In 1587 the strongman Toyotomi Hideyoshi expelled the Jesuits. Five years later he invaded Korea, where his bloody campaigns are still officially remembered with great bitterness. “In so doing,” writes Fallows, “he underscored another of the constants in Japan’s relations with outsiders: its own acute sense of vulnerability, which has affected its policies in profound ways.”
