Sentiment against Japan is on the rise in the U.S.
In a Chrysler commercial, Lee Iaccoca whines about American preference for Japanese products. Pollsters report that most of us believe Japan to be our chief international nemesis and that we resent its visible success in our midst. Jean Kirkpatrick has written about Japanese ”threats against U.S. national security” and the latest issue of Foreign Policy includes an article about U.S. interests in the Far East that refers to ”Asian economic adversaries” and advocates strategies ”to withstand Japanese assaults.”
Criticisms of Japan frequently employ military imagery and cast the economic debate in the context of a deceitful stratagem producing Amerian economic ruin. A local New York ad for Pontiacs described a Christmas of the future when families would troop to Manhattan ”to see the big Christmas Tree at Hirohito Center.”
Alongside this trend, we continue to exercise our freedom as consumers to buy the best product at the best price and thereby patronize Japan`s manufacturers. These antithetical patterns are contributing to a distorted sense of the public interest at a time when clear-headed and fair-minded judgement is most needed.
Lacking our familiar mission as freedom`s guardian against communism, we now direct our focus toward economic rivals, principally those with whom we have had the least ancestral, cultural and political linkage. Unlike Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, Japan meets the need for an antagonist, not simply because it is by far the largest and most aggressive of our Asian competitors, but because it has been our chief foreign bogeyman before. It is also conveniently inept in handling the tools of public relations, even as the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor approaches. (While investing more here than has Japan, Great Britain somehow escapes our antipathy; but a recent Japanese purchase of a ranch in Nebraska has brought calls for enforcement of a 19th Century ban on the sale of farm land to ”aliens”).
In general, media coverage of Japanese acquisitions have reflected a more alarmist attitude when compared with similar or even larger purchases by British, Dutch, French, Swiss, German and Canadian investors.
Reducing Japan`s $49 billion annual trade surplus is the premise of American demands in bilateral negotiations between Tokyo and Washington that have culminated in the so-called final report of the Structural Impediments Initiative and a summary agreement. The U.S. has called for dramatic increases in Japanese spending on public works, the further opening of Japan`s markets to competition from foreign goods, the increased import of supercomputers and improved enforcement of regulations outlawing Japanese corporate collusion designed to exclude foreign competitors.
Ironically, Japan`s demands on the Americans in the negotiations were not designed to preserve and expand Japanese advantage in the U.S. marketplace but rather to improve the quality of American education, encourage long-term growth over short term profit-taking, increase U.S. personal savings so as to lower the cost (and increase the availability) of capital and (of course)
drastically reduce the federal deficit-proposals that would greatly strengthen America`s competitiveness. The U.S. has now agreed to these terms. And yet nobody stopped to observe how peculiar it is that our antagonist should put forward as its demand the requirement that we bcome a more effective competitor and commit to act in our own economic interest!
In fact, the circumstance is not as ironic as it may appear. The success of Japan`s products in the American marketplace derives from the Japanese manufacturers` long-standing habit of attention to the consumers` preference for reliable, serviceable, attractive and affordable commodities. Logically enough, Japan sees its future success as linked to long-term American prosperity and therefore seeks to assure the continued ability of Americans to thrive and consume.
Similarly, in the recent talks the Japanese government`s position predicates what is ultimately good for Americans, both as producers and consumers-namely, an open and diverse marketplace in which well-educated management and labor produce competitive products under the aegis of carefully planned industry fueled by low cost capital over the long term. Sounds like a good deal for us, right?
The American negotiators do not deny that Japan`s demands are in America`s own interest. Instead, political gamesmanship that panders to isolationist and protectionist tendencies embedded in our culture has required that the focus be kept primarily on Japanese compliance with industry-specific U.S. demands rather than on the utter implausibility of the federal government suddenly getting its economic act together.
If Japanese leaders seek an excuse not to achieve full compliance, they need only point to Washington`s compliance with its end of the bargain. There is no suggestion on Capitol Hill these days that major progress is about to be made in reducing the deficit.
Nor is there any consensus regarding a way to improve the quality of education. Nor any agreed plan for reinstituting incentives for personal savings. Thus, failure of the U.S.-Japan agreement has been predetermined by our lack of economic discipline. If Japan were to accomplish immediately everything demanded in the negotiations, would the trade deficit disappear-or even be cut in half? Not likely.
The fact is, no matter what our representatives committed to accomplish in the SII talks, we will not do for Japan what we can`t do for our own people. That nagging knowledge coupled with our Eurocentric preferences is one sure source of much anti-Japan sentiment in America today. We have seen the enemy and it is us. The dilemma is far less a challenge to Japan than to the government of the United States.
So before American business and political leaders join the Iaccoca chorus in deploring Japanese trade dominance or encourage latent bigotry, they should look in the mirror and ask whose responsibility it is ultimately to act in America`s best long-term interest.
