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Reporting on Japanese investment has been peculiar for several reasons. One is that Japanese corporations are less open to American governance than American companies are to Japanese control. Also, Japan has been less than effusive in welcoming U.S. goods. Then too, no U.S. bureaucracy compares with Japan's Ministry for International Trade and Industry, an entity whose principal mission, some commentators believe, is to plot Japan's economic domination of the world.
Perhaps most troubling is that Japanese direct investment in the U.S. is not only three times America's investment in Japan but is also growing at a remarkable pace. According to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis, Japan's direct investment (ownership of at least 10% of any one firm) in the U.S. stood at $53 billion in 1988, a 52% increase since 1987. Even so, Japanese direct investment was only one- fourth that of all Europe, about half that of Great Britain and roughly equal to that of the Netherlands. Nor was it any more one-sided than that of the Dutch. Neither Japan nor any other country imminently threatens to gain economic control over the U.S., whose nonbank multinational corporations have assets totaling well over $5 trillion.
Dismaying though the financial trends concerning Japan may be, economics alone cannot explain the current media attitude any more than the immigration levels of the early 1900s could explain the Nippon hysteria of those years. But modern-day Japan is hardly a suitable candidate for press pity. American reporters have a duty to be tough minded in their exploration of Japanese business practices. Yet publications have all too frequently reached for easy headlines and analyses that evoke some of the worse aspects of the yellow- peril era. That is unfortunate. For, to the extent that coverage of Japanese business is reduced to the 1989 equivalent of "Japanese plan invasion of industrial fields," journalism will be that much more diminished and readers that much less informed.