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Other peoples tend to be even more critical. If the protectionist noises in America amount to a sort of restive snarling here and there across the countryside, such sounds abroad are full screams that sometimes translate into government policy. The French last October began funneling Japanese videotaperecorder imports through a tiny customs station at Poitiers. Some 200,000 items were blocked by delays for inspection and other red tape until the ban was lifted in April this year. As other economies around the world feel increasingly threatened, their fears could set off waves of protectionism that might cripple the world economy.
The world looks at Japan through one lens, the Japanese see themselves through another. Japan is a global force with an insular mentality, a superior organism that still harbors the soul of a small, isolated land. Living on their archipelago in the "Pacific Ring of Fire," vulnerable as always to earthquakes and typhoons, virtually unarmed, without any significant natural resources, dependent on the outside world for oil and food, the Japanese have a hard time seeing themselves as any kind of threat. "In our history of 2,000 years," says Taro Aso, a member of the Japanese parliament, "this is the first time that the Japanese have not had to worry about poverty. We are nouveau riche, a nation of farmers a short tune ago. It is difficult to accept international responsibilities when you have an inferiority complex."
The Japanese also argue, correctly in part, that the Americans use them as scapegoats, blaming them for the failures—managerial, cultural—of American business and labor. Says Brookings Institution Economist Lawrence Krause: "The damage that the Japanese do to the U.S. is trivial compared to what we do to ourselves—through bad management and bad planning."
The Japanese approach to other nations has grown far more sophisticated recently. Japanese businessmen have led the way. They have traveled the world and studied its languages. They have worked its trade routes with single-minded energy and curiosity, selling their wares, studying everything, plundering the remotest cultures and factories for information. They are Oriental Vikings armed with cameras and a samurai's resistance to jet lag. Prime Minister Nakasone has displayed a newly extraverted international style for a Japanese leader. He has, among other things, awakened what is for the Japanese the painful subject of their rearming, or at any rate contributing a greater share to the defense of the non-Communist world.
Japanese problems at home are also the complicating side effects of success. Many Japanese fear that they are beginning to suffer from what they call "advanced nations' disease," though the attack is not yet acute. In a recent poll, 89% of Japanese described themselves as happy with their lives. The present undoubtedly looks handsome compared with the bleak aftermath of the war. Many of the men who are now in the middle management of Mitsui and Mitsubishi were babies being fed a grain of rice at a time in 1946. Morita and Masaru Ibuka founded Sony that year by scrounging around the fire-bombed ruins of Tokyo for parts with which to build broadcasting equipment.