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The Japanese have been known in the past for being able to turn their civilization on a dime. After 215 years of deliberate feudal isolation during the Tokugawa period, Japan threw itself open in 1854. It was, wrote Arthur Koestler, like breaking the window of a pressurized cabin: the Japanese crashed out into the world devouring everything that had been done or thought in the rest of the planet during their long encapsulation (the late Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution). Rarely has there been an ingestion of foreign influence so smoothly accomplished. The Japanese did something of the same thing after World War II. Military fascism did not work. The entire people switched over with amazing cultural equilibrium to democracy under a constitution partly devised by a group of young lawyers on Douglas MacArthur's staff.
According to the stereotype, the Japanese are merely clever copiers of other people's inventions. Now the Japanese find that they are on the verge of joining the leaders of the world. They do so almost reluctantly; the role makes them uncomfortable. Now they must do the inventing. Says Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone: "We must formulate a society for which there is no precedent in any other country."
The new international troubles of the Japanese arise from their doing almost too well at their economic ventures. After 1945, Japan's industrial plant was in ashes. MacArthur said that he hoped eventually to rebuild the country to the point where it would become "the Switzerland of Asia." Today, Japan is the second most powerful economy in the free world. Its trillion-dollar-a-year industrial machine accounts for 10% of the world's output. By 1990, the Japanese may achieve a per capita gross national product that surpasses that of the U.S. As a 19th century French tourist said of another island people, the English: "Mon Dieu, comme ils travaillent!"
Japan's best friends in the world are still the Americans, a fact that should give the Japanese pause. For even Americans view the Japanese with suspicion and ambivalence, with fascination and admiration and resentment intermingled. A poll by the Los Angeles Times last spring found that 68% of Americans favor trade restrictions to protect American industries and jobs. The American trade deficit with Japan could well reach a menacing $21 billion this year. It results partly from superior Japanese competitiveness and products, partly from unfair Japanese barriers to trade, and partly from an overvalued dollar and undervalued yen. Most Democratic presidential candidates, including Walter Mondale, have courted the labor vote by urging new kinds of protectionism. A former Japanese ambassador to the U.S., Nobuhiko Ushiba, said in April that he had "never seen the mood on Capitol Hill as ugly as it is now toward the Japanese." Unemployed Americans focus their anger upon the Japanese, at least when they are not blaming Ronald Reagan. In West Virginia, a charity raised money by selling sledgehammer hits on a Toyota. A recession bumper sticker read: WHEN YOU BOUGHT YOUR JAPANESE CAR, 10
AMERICANS LOST THEIR JOBS.