The Chrysanthemum and the Eagle. Ryuzo Sato

      ONE

      THE RISE OF REVISIONISM

       The “Hawks” and the “Chrysanthemum Club”

      A New Containment Policy? Early in 1991, I had a discussion with James Fallows, the Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who is calling for drastic changes in U.S. policy toward Japan. During the course of our conversation he made a remark that helps explain the mixed feelings Americans have toward Japan. When General Douglas MacArthur returned to the United States after heading the Allied occupation of Japan, Fallows said, the general was certain he had made Japan into an American clone, a notion that was apparently shared by most Americans in those days. In the course of subsequent Japan-U.S. negotiations, however, it soon became clear that, far from having been re-created in America’s image, Japan had emerged as a country poles apart from the United States. The illusion and its betrayal, Fallows pointed out, underlie the frustrations of the American people in their dealings with Japan.

      Still, just as no two people look exactly alike, no two countries are the same. Each country has its own culture and traditions. Even the occupation authorities knew that; all they hoped to redesign in the American image were Japan’s political institutions and economic systems. The drastic reforms they launched—land reform, dissolution of the zaibatsu (big financial and industrial combines) and the old class system, women’s suffrage, equal opportunity in education, and freedom to unionize—did indeed make Japan totally different from what it had been before the war. Today, a half century after Pearl Harbor, the democratic political system and the capitalist economic system the United States implanted on Japanese soil have been thoroughly acculturated and indigenized, rendering them completely different from their parent models. It is easy to understand why some Americans stress the need to drastically revise a Japan policy that was adopted by the United States at a time when it thought it was dealing with a country which had the same systems as its own.

      I first came to the United States in the late 1950s as a Fulbright exchange student, and for more than thirty years I have spent part of each year in the United States and part in Japan. During that time I have watched American attitudes toward Japan and Japanese products undergo a profound change. When I was a student in Baltimore I remember going to look for a secondhand car. “What about that Japanese car over there?” I asked. The salesman, a big man about six foot three or four, put his foot on the bumper and shook the car back and forth. “You don’t want to buy this,” he said. “This isn’t a car; it’s a Japanese toy.”

      No one talks about Japanese toys today. Although the atmosphere of fear and hostility has eased somewhat as the United States and Japan have both turned inward to deal with their respective domestic economic problems, many Americans have come to regard Japan’s economic success as a threat to their own way of life. Sensationalist accounts that imply Japan is out to dominate the world economically—although it has no such intention—merely increase Americans’ unease during a period in which the U.S. economy is being radically restructured.

      Since World War II, the enemy, both militarily and ideologically, has been the Soviet Union. But the 1980s saw an extraordinary reversal in American feelings toward what President Ronald Reagan at the beginning of his term of office had called “the evil empire.” By the end of the decade Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika policy had led to a new detente, brought an end to the cold war, and ushered in a new era of East-West cooperation. Since then, the Communist party has been ousted from power in all the countries of the former Soviet bloc, including the Soviet Union itself. By the end of 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had ceased to exist, and Russia and its former allies have begun experimenting with a free-market economy. Capitalism has triumphed over communism, and the policy of Soviet containment first articulated by George Kennan has been an overwhelming success.

      In 1947 an article entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” by Mr. X (later identified as George Kennan) appeared in the U.S. journal Foreign Affairs. The United States, Kennan wrote:

      must continue to regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner, in the political arena. . . . Russia, as opposed to the western world in general, is still by far the weaker party. . . . Soviet power . . . bears within it the seeds of its own decay. . . . Soviet society may well contain deficiencies which will eventually weaken its own total potential. This would of itself warrant the United States entering with reasonable confidence upon a policy of firm containment.

      History has corroborated the truth of these views, written more than forty-five years ago. America’s “Russian containment policy” has proven to be a successful strategy against the Soviet Union.

      What if, in the above quote, “Japan” were substituted for the “Soviet Union,” and “in the economic arena” for “in the political arena”? This may not have been what James Fallows had in mind when he wrote his article “Containing Japan” for the Atlantic Monthly in 1989, but such a statement would perfectly encapsulate a Japanese containment policy. If America regards Japan as an economic adversary, and if, as some maintain, concepts of democracy, capitalism, and a free economy and society are different in Japan from what they are in the Western world, then “containing Japan” would be strongly persuasive as an effective policy measure.

      Implicit in America’s view of itself is the belief that the United States has the strongest military power, the richest economy, and the most desirable ideological system in the world. The collapse of communism has provided stunning corroboration for the first and third of these premises. But is America in fact the world’s richest country? How can one account for the fact that at the same time communism was in retreat in Eastern Europe, vast sums of “Japan money” were buying up America and that one U.S. institution after another passed into Japanese hands, including—to the great indignation of the American people—such American icons as Rockefeller Center and Columbia Pictures, which the October 9, 1989, issue of Newsweek called “a piece of America’s soul”? Or to put the question another way, why does America, the most powerful country in the world, with the most abundant resources and the most stable and desirable political system, suffer from twin budget and current account deficits, and why has it become the world’s largest debtor nation?

      Clearly, Japan must be “unfair.” That is the easiest line of reasoning for the American public to understand. And, in fact, when one starts to reexamine Japan from this premise, a number of illogical or unfair practices begin to emerge—protection, controls, bid rigging, corporate groupings, winning bids of a single yen, insider trading, and disregard for the consumer. Such practices fueled the criticisms of a new school of thinking about Japan—revisionism—which began to make its presence felt in the United States at the end of the 1980s.

      The views of the revisionists can be summed up as follows: For a long time America has believed that Japan is a country which has the same values as itself. That, however, is only an illusion. As the Japanese themselves assert, Japan really is unique. The American concept of free trade does not hold true for the Japanese, and the various attempts to get Japan to change have been fundamentally mistaken. From now on America should shift policies and adopt radically different measures to deal with this very different country. The effect