The key to improving relations between the United States and Japan begins with understanding an incident that took place in this country in 1968.
That`s when the former Joan Stern, a 20-year-old newlywed, yelled at her 26-year-old husband, Hiroki Kato (KAH-tow), for the first time in their marriage.
She can`t remember today what Hiroki did to provoke her ire, but she`s sure it wasn`t anything major, like engaging in unfair trade practices.
”It was probably along the lines of not putting away his clean socks,”
she said during a recent interview with the Katos in their Evanston home, a two-story, red-brick house near the Northwestern University campus.
For Joan, the important part of the story was Hiroki`s reaction.
Here was an opportunity for a marvelous marital spat, and he blew it. He didn`t raise his voice to defend himself or counterattack by accusing her of an equally irritating transgression or stomp out of the room in anger.
He just stood there, looking hurt.
”Hiroki was wounded to the core,” Joan said. ”He was also puzzled. In fact, he was almost in a panic, trying to figure out what he had done that was so terrible to cause me to yell at him.”
Is this not a heartbreaking moment? The marriage had hardly begun and already it was in trouble.
Poor Joan. ”It was no fun to fight with Hiroki,” she said. ” `Fight`
was not part of his vocabulary.”
Poor Hiroki. He didn`t have a clue about one of this society`s most hallowed matrimonial traditions.
Such problems arise when cultures collide.
Especially Joan`s and Hiroki`s. Joan was from a suburb of Chicago. Hiroki grew up near Hiroshima.
Marriage is tough enough when you tie the knot with the gal or guy next door. For the Katos, being hitched was considerably more complicated. Because of their vastly dissimilar backgrounds, it was as if they were playing the same game with different rule books.
To form a more perfect union-or one that had any chance at all of surviving-both were forced to look at things they once took for granted in a totally new way, often embracing unfamiliar customs and concepts more daunting even than spousal debates.
That time, by the way, it was Hiroki who blinked.
”It`s true that fighting was not fun for me,” he said. ”But now I`m able to put up a good fight, and I kind of enjoy it, even if I lose. It sort of cleanses the mind.”
With other matters, it was Joan who often made the cultural U-turns.
The happy result is that last month the Katos celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary, which raises an intriguing thought: If Joan and Hiroki can learn to live together in respect and harmony, why can`t the U.S. and Japan do the same?
You say the analogy is simplistic?
Earlier this month on a television documentary, an American pundit described the two countries as a couple who had ”rushed into a marriage, an economic marriage,” and ”are beginning to wake up and say, `Who are you?` ” And, of course, in situations where they do things differently, the pundit continued, each country expects the other to be the one to change. That sounds a lot like marriage all right.
Hiroki and Joan Kato also find wedlock a fitting metaphor for the relationship between the two nations.
”There will always be a tension between the egalitarian culture of the U.S. and the hierarchical culture of Japan,” Hiroki said. ”Joan and I had to learn to deal with these tensions in our marriage. That`s where mutual accommodation and understanding come in, which is exactly what Japan and the U.S. must learn.”
The Katos are co-authors of ”Understanding and Working with the Japanese Business World,” published this year by Prentice Hall.
Joan, 44, an attorney, has represented Japanese and American companies in resolving disputes and will soon open a northern California office for Anderson Kill Olick & Oshinsky, a New York City law firm.
Hiroki, 50, is vice president for Asian development at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
The book, they write, ”grew out of the mutual affirmation of many years of trying to understand each other. . . . Our home life has been sort of a cross-cultural lab.”
Even their temperaments reflect culture contrasts.
There is a bit of Bette Midler in Joan, who is wry, outspoken, bold, assured. Asked how she handles anger, she replied: ”I don`t. I express it.” Hiroki, who displays the qualities of a diplomat, is congenial, reserved, unflappable, circumspect. ”He`s very sweet, the easiest person in the world to live with,” Joan said.
But skin-deep differences tend to count for less than what the Katos have in common, a truism for any marriage. And in addition to whatever symbolism their marriage may have as a model for East-West cooperation, their origins are fascinating.
”We are children of trauma,” Joan said, referring to World War II, which, directly and indirectly, was a central, defining event in their lives. She is the daughter of Russian Jews who lived in Warsaw, fleeing to the Soviet Union when the Germans invaded in 1939, and returning in 1945.
Joan was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1947. ”We lived in a one-room apartment with 17 other people. Because she was very ill, my mother had the only bed.”
Two years later, her parents brought her and her older brother to Minnesota; her mother died when Joan was 4.
When Joan was 12, her father, an accountant who is now 85 and retired, moved to Skokie and later to Highland Park, where she attended high school.
Born in 1942, Hiroki lived in a village of 2,000 people that was 20 miles from Ground Zero in Hiroshima, where the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945. His earliest memory is viewing the devastated city with his father, a school principal.
”I also remember watching trucks bringing the wounded and dead day and night to our village school, which became a makeshift hospital and morgue,”
he said.
In high school and at International Christian University in Tokyo, Hiroki became active in the peace movement, visiting the U.S. and Europe at 21 with survivors of the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, serving as a translator because of a fluency in English he honed as a ham radio operator.
He and Joan met in 1967 at a draft resistance conference while both were students at Washington University in St. Louis.
Their politics were compatible; each supported civil rights and opposed the Vietnam War. ”You were either involved in those days or you were a nerd,” Joan said.
The hormones also kicked in. ”But it wasn`t love at first sight,” Joan said. ”It took me five minutes.”
Ten months later, they were married. ”It`s an old story,” Hiroki said.
”We were young and stupid.”
”The atmosphere was right for an unlikely marriage,” Joan said.
”Everybody was hyper-idealistic and enthusiastic about changing the world. It was a time when anything seemed possible.”
Still, sushi restaurants had not appeared in the Midwest, and the Katos were married in Illinois because a miscegenation law was still on the books in Missouri.
”Yet it never crossed my mind that there could be any obstacles to an interracial, intercultural marriage,” Joan said. ”I thought we were terrific looking together, and when our kids came along, I thought they were unbelievably beautiful.” (Their two sons, Isaac, 21, and Saul, 17, are students at Stanford University.)
Indeed, the Katos encountered only a few minor instances of racism. The chief pressures were inside the marriage.
”The adjustments were enormous,” Joan said. ”Six months after we were married, we went to Japan so I could meet his family. Not only did I have no idea of what to expect, I wasn`t too clear on where Japan was exactly.
”He hadn`t been home for three years. We got off at the train station in this little village and walked up this little path, and his mother came out to greet us and she and Hiroki just bowed deeply. I thought: `Where`s the emotion? Where`s the excitement here?”`
”My parents and I are very close, but emotion is not displayed,” Hiroki said.
”I was amazed I wasn`t the center of my husband`s attention,” Joan continued. ”His mother was. His principal obligations were toward his parents, particularly his mother. I was second fiddle. I thought, `What is this!”`
Joan assumed they would settle in Japan someday. ”After I saw my husband there, torn between being a Western husband and following his social duties, I didn`t want to go.”
Not moving to Japan doesn`t translate to staying put. ”We`ve had more than 20 homes in 24 years of marriage,” Joan said. ”I say I don`t like to clean closets so we just move, but I think maybe it`s a control issue that`s connected to our childhoods. Moving every few years could be a way of somehow trying to forestall the terrible things that happened to our families during the war.”
”The paradox is that the farther I live from my family, the more effort I make to spend time with them,” Hiroki said. ”Family is everything for Joan and for me.”
”Probably the reason the marriage has persisted in spite of itself was that we feared the humiliation of having to tell our families we`d failed,”
Joan said.
Whatever the secret, the payoffs have been substantial.
Hiroki: ”Joan is irreverent and fearless, and her assertiveness has opened up a different world for me. If she`s convinced she`s right about something, she does it. She is extemporaneous. She wings it. I don`t wing it. I overplan.”
Joan: ”Hiroki opened up a world to me that I would never have known. Every bit of growth in my adult life has been promoted and supported by him.” Both believe the Kato marriage would be doomed in Japan because of the emphasis there on one`s place in the social hierarchy and the demands of the workplace on one`s time.
They also believe the U.S. and Japan need to stay together through thick and thin. ”America can`t survive without the Japanese market any more than the Japanese can survive without the U.S. market,” Hiroki said.
This calls for serious geopolitical marriage counseling.
So the next time the politicians and business leaders and columnists and ordinary folks in these two goofball countries start yelling at each other, will everybody please cool it a minute and call Joan and Hiroki.
