Any day now, it seems, we might hear political candidates take daring stands against sushi, sumo wrestling and singing at karaoke bars.
The latest and most pointed anti-Japan sentiment to be expressed on the Illinois campaign trail came Friday, when U.S. Rep. William Lipinski called for an immediate five-year ban on imports of Japanese automobiles.
”We have been talking to the Japanese for years and years,” said Lipinski, who faces a bitter Democratic primary contest against fellow Rep. Martin Russo. ”They have played us for suckers and saps. . . . It`s simply time for us to say, `We are no longer going to be your patsies.` ”
Lipinski acknowledged that his proposal was severe, but added that years of talking tough on trade had accomplished nothing. He said Japanese cars made in America could continue to be sold here, but the profits should be prohibited from leaving the United States.
”We are in an economic war with Japan and Europe,” he said. ”We have to be for America first.”
His sentiments differentiated him more in degree than in content from Russo.
”We ought to talk tougher to the Japanese,” said Russo, who, like Lipinski, made his comments during and after a taping of the WBBM-TV program
”Newsmakers,” to be broadcast at 10 a.m. Sunday. ”They don`t understand rhetoric. They understand getting tough with them.”
The Japanese have a $42 billion trade surplus with the United States.
Even as Lipinski and Russo spoke Friday, big-league baseball was in a tizzy over a Japanese proposal to buy the Seattle Mariners franchise, adding to fears among Japanese-Americans that xenophobia is on the rise.
”I tell you, it really is kind of a nightmare to us when people start talking like that,” said Chiye Tomihiro, a member of the Chicago Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League.
”At the start of World War II this is just the way people talked, and it led to our evacuation. But you know, boy, once people start getting on that bandwagon they all join in the chorus.
”I think the Democrats need an issue and Japan is a very easy victim. I think there`s a little bit of racism involved as well. You don`t see that same kind of reaction to other countries” that buy American properties or have a trade surplus with the United States, Tomihiro said.
Lipinski and Russo, who are battling in the redrawn 3rd Congressional District for the hearts and minds of a conservative, working-class group of Southwest Side and southwest suburban voters, weren`t the only politicians to take after Japan on Friday.
U.S. Sen. Alan Dixon (D-Ill.), who also faces a tough primary, charged that President Bush had failed in his recent trade mission to Japan.
”The president has not brought back what he promised us, and we need to do what is necessary in the Congress to get this job done,” said Dixon, who said he had sponsored a bill that would require Japan to reduce its trade surplus with the United States by 20 percent a year over the next five years. Dixon spoke at a South Side heater factory that he said had closed after a Japanese firm bought it and moved its production facilities to Mexico, where he said that workers were now making the same heaters for $1 an hour.
But rather than identify by name Paloma Inc., the Japanese company that bought Rheem/Rudd and allegedly cost the Southwest Side 1,300 jobs, Dixon simply blamed ”the Japanese.”
Dixon has tried in campaign ads and elsewhere to portray himself as being tough on unfair trade practices, but he has taken heat from one of his challengers, Chicago lawyer Al Hofeld, for his acquiescence in the pending sale of a 40 percent interest in McDonnell Douglas Corp. to a Taiwanese aerospace company.
Lipinski`s proposal would require American carmakers to put any additional profits earned during the five-year moratorium on Japanese imports into wages and benefits, dividends and, mostly, research and development.
After five years, he said, the U.S. firms would be on equal footing with their Japanese competition.
Russo, who said automobiles represent 75 percent of the Japanese trade surplus, questioned whether such a tactic wouldn`t spark a dangerous trade war, especially because the American economy is heavily reliant on Japanese investors buying U.S. Treasury bonds.
He called Lipinski`s plan interesting, but said ”you can find out from somebody else whether Bill`s radical or reckless.”
Russo said he favors a five-year deficit-reduction proposal similar to the one outlined by Dixon. ”We have to send a very, very serious message,”
he said.
But it is the method of delivery of such messages-and their possible misinterpretation-that worries people such as Tomihiro.
”It makes me uncomfortable because there are an awful lot of people out there who will use any excuse for violence,” she said.
”I hate to see this inflammatory language because some of these people may take it out on Asians-not only Japanese, but Asians, because they can`t tell us apart, you know.”
