"Go, man, go!" exclaims George Young. "That's how I feel about the Reagan Administration's trade sanctions on the Japanese." Young, 34, the co-owner of Village Records & Tapes in Grosse Pointe, Mich., is speaking against his self- interest. He readily admits that higher tariffs on the many Japanese products his store sells could force prices up enough to hurt his business. More than half of his compact discs, for example, are pressed in Japan. But sanctions are necessary, says Young, because the "U.S. needs to be more self- sufficient. I'm a real nationalist when it comes to trade."
That line, however, gets an immediate and sharp rebuttal inside his own shop. "If we have a trade war with Japan, we're in bad shape," says Young's partner, John Denomme, 35. "We almost totally rely on Japanese hardware to play our software. Nearly every component in home audio and video systems is manufactured in Japan. If the Japanese decided they were going to make it difficult for everybody else, they could." Denomme is far from comfortable with that situation. In fact he finds Japanese economic power "frightening." Nonetheless, he is dead set against protectionism: "What good is it going to do? The Japanese have it all over us in terms of goods. U.S. protectionism is like a spoiled child having an angry fit."
This exchange is not exactly typical. Young and Denomme are much better informed, and far more concerned, than the great majority of their fellow citizens about the threat of economic warfare between the U.S. and Japan. But their argument does point to some of the bewildering crosscurrents in American attitudes toward Japan, its products and trade policies. As reflected in polls and interviews by TIME correspondents across the country, those attitudes are a strange mixture of admiration, envy, resentment touched now and then by fear, and no little confusion. Protectionist sentiment does exist, but it is rarely voiced with much passion. And the sharpest criticisms of Tokyo's "unfair" trade policies are likely to be mixed with equally unsparing criticism -- sometimes from the same person -- of Americans for being less energetic and skillful than the ubiquitous Japanese.
That, to be sure, is not the impression anyone would get from listening to politicians in Washington. Among them the dominant mood is unalloyed anger. Speech after speech in Congress accuses Tokyo of wiping out American jobs with floods of imports while keeping the Japanese market closed to U.S. and other foreign goods and services. That resentment does not just ring through debates on trade policy; it also creeps into remarks that are supposed to be focused on banking, mergers, education, defense, science -- almost anything a legislator feels moved to orate about.