In the current environment of Japan bashing, American assessments of Japan have to be taken with a stiff dose of reality. Americans are fed up with hearing about excellent Japanese education, manufacturing, and quality control. What they welcome is any news about the downside of Tokyo's miracle. There is a big market in the U.S. media for stories about Japan's sexist society, its poor “rabbit hutch” housing, its stinginess with foreign assistance, and its wimpiness when it comes to standing up to a bully like Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The reason the Japanese buy up so much of Hawaii and Los Angeles, the pessimist scenario goes, is because they want someplace decent to live, Or, to push the logic, the Japanese supposedly can thank the United States for everything. If it weren't for our protection, they would be dead in a minute. And worst of all, if they couldn't steal their ideas from our universities and didn't cheat on trade, we could beat them in a minute in any arena.
Most Japanese would agree with the facts, if not the tenor, of this assessment. They would add that it was the United States that wrote Japan's postwar constitution and initiated the reforms that gave Japan a single national mission - peaceful economic recovery and growth. The Japanese are great students. They accept new ideas readily, give them their own twist, and then, unfortunately for their mentors, often improve on the imported idea with a vengeance. Like overzealous students, they just don't know when to cool it. So now we have what Peter Drucker calls “adversarial trade.”
The Japanese readily accept ideas, but they do not like having many foreigners around to mess up their tidy little all-Japanese world. They find it convenient and easy to control a nation where everyone is the same race, goes to the same schools, and tends to think the same things about politics, religion, sex, and the outer world. Uniformity is great for doing business and makes all kinds of coordination and consensus-building easy. The Japanese are also happy with their “no surprises” politics: The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been in power since 1955. The opposition communist, socialist, and numerous religious parties can bark and scream, but they are not taken seriously in conservative, high-growth Japan.
If that weren't bad enough, the Japanese are the Calvinists of Asia, working like little beavers to prove themselves to each other and the world. I remember vividly the petite Japanese lady - nearly 90 years old - telling me atop Mount Fuji to hang tough and not give up because the top of the mountain was only another hour away. If nothing else, the Japanese are resilient.
All of this would be fine if we could take exception to their rudeness or ingratitude. Then we could dislike them. Unfortunately, they are not very helpful on this score. We are all familiar with the sight of nicely dressed Japanese visitors bringing some small, homemade Japanese souvenir and bowing deeply for no reason. They are orderly, polite, and unfailingly considerate.
Still, it would be great it they would be more like us, if they become mass consumers and got sloppy and weak. After all, good cars and smart people are not all that important to having the good life - or so the American scenario goes. But no one ever accused the Japanese of being stupid. They watch every move Americans make the way a scientist studies a specimen with a
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