The Missionary and the Libertine

by Ian Buruma

  This is also evident from the more sophisticated anthropological works on Japan. The search for purity appears to be on the wane—except in Japan itself. The contributors to Re-Made in Japan, a collection of essays edited by Joseph J. Tobin, have their hearts in the right place, but, alas, in many cases the blight of Baudrillard has wrecked their prose, even if the authors do not always agree with his ideas. Oddly enough, the dated Parisian jargon of deconstruction has had a more devastating effect in America and Japan than anywhere else. It is distressing to open a promising Japanese journal of criticism, only to find every sentence messed up with ekurituru (écriture) and disukuru (discours).

  Re-Made in Japan has its fair share of this jargon. Here is Dorinne Kondo on Japanese fashion designers working with the Western styles: “As these questions construct a transnational space, essentializing gestures and geopolitical relations simultaneously refabricate national boundaries.” But, once one disentangles the language, there is much of interest in the book, particularly on the artificial separation of East and West. The key term running through most of the essays is “domestication.” The Japanese are not passive receptacles of Western influence, but active shoppers in a global bazaar, picking and choosing what they want, before turning it into something of their own. The Japanese version of the English language, for instance, sometimes known as “Japlish,” is hardly intelligible to the English speaker. Who in London would know that sebiro means men’s suit, and was derived from Savile Row? But, as James Stanlaw points out quite rightly, “Japanese-English is used in Japan for Japanese purposes.” Maybe the same is true of ekurituru, but I doubt it.

  To balance the domestication of cultural imports, the Japanese have always been active inventors of native “traditions.” They did this when China was the main source of imports, and they do it today—in their lavish department stores, for example. A walk through the food halls of Mitsukoshi or Takashimaya reveals two distinct worlds, or perhaps even three: a Western one, offering Japanized versions of Italian or French delicacies, sometimes accompanied by piped European music; a Chinese one, displaying stacks of bamboo baskets filled with steamed dumplings and other delights; and a Japanese one, where, in Millie R. Creighton’s words, “employees dressed in hanten (happy coats) and hachimaki (headbands) clap and chant the virtues of their noodles, pickles, and bean cakes using the same boisterous sales techniques favored by street vendors of three or four centuries ago.” The point of these culinary theme parks is to establish clear cultural boundary lines, however invented they might be. As Creighton says: “Through this dialectic of ‘us’ and ‘other’ depāto [department stores] help their modern clientele affirm Japaneseness in a culturally eclectic age.”

  This is clearly true. Where I think I differ from some of the contributors to Re-Made in Japan is in their emphasis on modernity, as though cultural eclecticism were a specific product of the modern age (whenever that may have started). Culture never was pure; traditions always were invented, or parodied. Nancy Rosenberger quotes Baudrillard and Bourdieu to observe that Japanese consumers advertise the status they desire by the products they buy, by simulating “the tastes … of the higher classes they aspire to.” First, one does not need Bourdieu to tell us this. Second, the phenomenon is not new, or, if one prefers, “modern.” Edo-period merchants paid good money to acquire samurai culture. They even paid good money for prostitutes to act as noble beauties of the Heian period.

  What has changed—perhaps the real point of this book—is Japan’s relative wealth vis-à-vis the rest of the world, particularly the West. In a very interesting essay on Tokyo Disneyland (bigger than the lands of Anaheim and Orlando), Mary Yoko Brannen challenges the Baudrillardian assumption that Disneyland means American cultural imperialism. As she describes the place, it is rather the other way around. The Japanese have turned Disney into a modern Japanese equivalent of nineteenth-century European japonaiserie. One might call it américainerie. The Western craftsmen and guides, who are not allowed to speak Japanese and, unlike their Japanese colleagues, do not wear name tags, are put on display like exhibits in a Victorian ethnological fair. The theme parks, such as “Meet the World,” have been carefully redone to make the Japanese look both normal (to the Japanese) and unique (to everybody else), and the foreigners exotic (in the case of Westerners) and disreputable (in the case of Chinese). She concludes that “the selective importation of Disney cultural artifacts works in the service of an ongoing Japanese process of cultural imperialism.”

  What would SCAP make of it all? Now Japanese executives land in L.A., New York and Honolulu and buy the flashiest buildings, the finest companies and the biggest studios in Hollywood. GI Joe is still in Japan, to be sure, but he can hardly afford to leave his base. Indeed, the more salacious Japanese weeklies love to recount that his own wife is sometimes constrained to meet Japanese patrons to exchange her favors for yen. Meanwhile, Japanese politicians and popular authors write best-sellers about the Japanese ruling the world. One of the latest, by Watanabe Shoichi, is entitled This Is How History Begins. The jacket announces that “Japanese civilization has begun to take over from the white man’s civilization,” and that “for the next 250 years, Japan will move the world.” No wonder people in the West are beginning to feel anxious.

  The new fashion for Yellow Peril fiction is one anxiety symptom. There is the pulp end of it, with titles like The Tojo Virus, by John D. Randall, about a dastardly Japanese plot to cripple the military, scientific and business computers in America by infecting them with a virus. Or there is Blood Heat, about Japanese biological warfare against American civilians. Or Dragon, about Japanese nuclear blackmail. Then there is the sophisticated end of the market, with Michael Crichton’s best-seller Rising Sun (see “Wake Up, America,” page 270).

  What most of these books have in common is an image of the Japanese that makes them seem omnipotent, sinister, fanatical and sexually threatening. The cover of Steven Schlosstein’s Kensei reads, “Circulation. Determination. Elimination. The samurai code for total victory in the war on America.” Those tired old samurai again. Since these books also play up the idea of American doom, Americans are often depicted as venal, decadent or simple suckers. As a Japanese character in Dragon observes to an American opponent, “You’ve become a cesspool of deterioration, and the process is unstoppable.”

  More rational, or at least more sympathetic, are the books on how to learn the secret of Japanese power. Miyamoto Musashi’s eighteenth-century tract on samurai tactics, entitled The Book of Five Rings, has proven a popular book among the businessmen seeking insights into Japanese business strategy. More up-to-date accounts have such titles as Yen! or Why Has Japan “Succeeded”? or Japanese Power Game. The most detailed and by far the best informed of the crop is Karel van Wolferen’s The Enigma of Japanese Power.

  Now there appears to be a third genre: how to cash in on Japanese economic power by joining it. Some, like Yankee Samurai, by Dennis Laurie, or Funny Business: An Outsider’s Year in Japan, by Gary J. Katzenstein, are accounts of what it is like to be employed by Japanese companies. One of the odder specimens of this ilk is by Jina Bacarr, a longtime student of Japanese culture and a spokesperson for the Japan Mutual Food Company. It bears the straightforward title How to Work for a Japanese Boss. The book is an amalgam of advice, potted history (from 660 B.C. to 1992 in four pages) and cultural analysis.

  But culture is just one aspect of Bacarr’s objective, which is “to teach you how to think Japanese.” She tries to achieve this by combining the down-to-earth and the airy-fairy in a disconcerting way. Her advice on how to do business with Japanese is practical, even though presented in the kind of baby talk to which readers of American business magazines have become accustomed. Chapters open with haikulike personality sketches that read like captions to Glen Baxter cartoons: “As Kurt followed the kimono-clad waitress to his table in the Japanese restaurant, he paid little attention to the beautiful decor and the sound of the small brook running through the re
staurant.” If much of her advice to aspiring American “salarymen” seems more appropriate to aspiring courtiers, that is because the unfortunate salaryman’s chances of success do indeed depend to a large extent on his or her capacity for fawning, dissembling and attending to the boss’s whims.

  What is distressing about this book is how little we seem to have progressed from the cultural clichés of the Occupation. Bacarr, like so many others before her, has this to say about “the Japanese character”: 1. the Japanese are good at copying; 2. Zen, or “the contemplation of the void” is “the root of much of their success”; 3. the Japanese are masters of “group thinking.” The Americans, she concludes, “tend to use logic,” whereas “the Japanese use a system based on emotions and spiritual values that goes back to feudal times when they were ruled by a class of samurai who …” etc., etc.

  Of course it would be foolish to ignore culture altogether. Cultural differences exist, and they affect the way we do things. But, if crude cultural distinctions are to be the main explanation for economic and political arrangements, there are only three options when conflicts arise with countries whose cultures are different from our own: they become like us, we become like them, or we go to war by boycotting their trade or, in extreme cases, by taking up arms.

  To judge from the latest books, good and bad, there are few takers any longer for the idea that Japan will be just like us. In this respect, the Chrysanthemum Club has lost, and the so-called revisionists who maintain that the Japanese (or East-Asian) version of capitalism is fundamentally different from the Anglo-American system, have won. Quite how Japan differs is a matter of contention, even among the revisionists.

  Whatever their differences, however, many revisionists share a portentous tone of gloom. They are the professional Cassandras, as opposed to the Chrysanthemum Pollyannas. Their very language invites visions of catastrophe. On the subject of American decline, they tend to sound like French nationalists after losing the war with Prussia in 1871. It is as though the virility of the nation were at stake. When Michael Crichton began to research Rising Sun, he said in his contribution to a June 1992 symposium on political correctness and Japan-bashing, he “was stunned to discover how desperate our situation really is.” America, I was told by a revisionist in Tokyo, was now going through its “darkest hour.” Karel van Wolferen, not himself an American, warns that American inaction on Japanese trade will invite “calamity.” His 1989 op-ed piece for The Washington Post bears the headline “Japan: Different, Unprecedented and Dangerous.” These are not his own words, but they do reflect the tone of the revisionist debate.

  The least one can say about America’s relative economic decline is that opinions differ. According to a 1992 C. V. Starr Newsletter issued by the Center for Applied Economics at New York University, “Japan’s higher growth rate has been slowing down and is now hardly ahead of ours anymore, while the level of Japan’s manufacturing productivity certainly remains well below ours.”

  Views are equally divided on just what, if anything, should be done about Japan’s brand of capitalism, whose differences the revisionists have uncovered. Is it a threat? Is the American economy really being ruined by Japanese trade practices? So far, the biggest losers as a result of Japanese mercantilism have been the Japanese consumers, who pay too much. In the U.S. and Britain many people have benefited from Japanese trade, as consumers, as employees and as recipients of investment. Are these benefits outweighed by other, darker factors, such as a dangerous dependency on Japanese capital or technology? Perhaps, perhaps not. What is certainly true is that the present relationship between the U.S. and Japan is that of a resentful and mercantilist power locked into a state of infantile dependence on U.S. security.

  Two articles that appeared around the same time, one by Chalmers Johnson in the autumn 1992 Daedalus and the other by Joseph Nye in the winter 1992 Foreign Policy, offered two different solutions to the problem. Johnson, professor of Pacific international relations at the University of California at San Diego, is often called the doyen of the revisionists. Nye, a Harvard professor of government, is a traditional American liberal. Of the two, Nye favors the more conservative solution. Basically, in his view, GI Joe should stay in Japan. For if Japan were to become a military power, all kinds of unpredictable things might happen, including an East Asian arms race. The best thing, Nye believes, would be for Japan to become a “global civilian power.” This would mean a bigger role in UN agencies, including a seat on the Security Council, even though Japan would be unable to implement the military policies it would have to help to decide.

  Johnson thinks a greater change is in order. Unlike Nye, Johnson wants to end the Occupation, not just in form, but in fact. The U.S., in his opinion, can no longer afford to be the policeman of East Asia, and the Japanese will resent it more and more. The Cold War, after all, is over, and it is time the Japanese took care of their own affairs. The continued presence of American troops stops them from doing so. Ergo, if the U.S. pulls out, Japan will be weaned from its narrow mercantilism and will become a more responsible, more “normal” regional superpower. Or so we can only hope.

  I believe he is right. But it will take some doing, and the process will not be helped at all by the Amerika Erwache rhetoric that is currently so popular. For the image of Japan as a fundamentally dangerous nation will impede any moves toward an end to the informal Occupation. Herein lies one of the paradoxes of revisionism. All the revisionists, including Chalmers Johnson, are agreed that if something is not done to stop Japanese mercantilism in its tracks there will be a dangerous, emotional backlash in the U.S. So Americans have to be woken up to a danger, posited by the revisionists, in order for those same Americans not to get emotional when they finally realize that the revisionists were right. If the shrill tone of fictional propaganda helps to wake them up, so be it. As James Fallows, a notable member of the revisionists, observed to the Los Angeles Times: “We [America and Japan] have serious conflicts and we need to resolve them. To the extent that fiction reveals them, it’s having a useful effect.”

  This is how SCAP’s censors argued too, except it was their business to avoid further conflict, and their fictions were more benign.

  1993

  WAKE UP, AMERICA

  Once in a while—in America, perhaps more than once in a while—a book comes along whose interest is chiefly in the hype attending it. Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun is such a book. The text of the publicity handout announced that this “explosive new thriller [was] rushed to publication one month earlier than previously announced because of its extraordinary timeliness with regard to U.S.–Japan relations”—at the height of the Japan-is-buying-up-the-U.S. hysteria in spring 1992.

  This is unusual: thrillers are not generally rushed out to match political events. Odder still was the sheaf of newspaper clippings about the decline of American industries and the predatory methods of Japanese corporations stapled onto the advance reader’s edition. Singular, too, is the bibliography at the end of the book, listing mostly academic works on Japan, but also, for example, Donald Richie’s study of Kurosawa’s movies. Strangest of all, however, is Crichton’s afterword, which ends with a homily: “The Japanese are not our saviors. They are our competitors. We should not forget it.”

  With such a buildup, the literary press could not be left behind. On the front page of The New York Times Book Review, the thriller was compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin for stirring up “the volcanic subtexts of our daily life.” Kirkus Reviews promised the return of the “Yellow Menace,” only now “he wears a three-piece suit and aims to dominate America through force of finance, not arms.”

  Volcanic subtexts, Yellow Menace, Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month club, first printing 225,000 copies, top of the best-seller lists, a Hollywood picture in the works—what exactly was going on here?

  Michael Crichton clearly wanted to do more than entertain with a murder mystery. He wrote his book, so he told The New York Times, “to make America wake up.
” Now, on the whole, people who go around trying to wake us up, as though we were all asleep, oblivious of some apocalyptic Truth, tend to be boring, or mad—like those melancholy figures who wander about with signs announcing the end of the world.

  Crichton’s book isn’t boring. He is good at snappy dialogue—though his copious use of Japanese is often incongruous and sometimes wrong—and he is a deft manipulator of suspense. He takes great pains to avoid giving the impression that he is mad. Indeed, the whole idea of the newspaper clippings, the bibliography, the afterword and so on, is to make sure we get the serious message buried in the “explosive new thriller.” He dislikes the term “Japan-bashing,” he says, because it threatens to move the U.S.–Japan debate into “an area of unreasonableness.” The thriller, by implication, is reasonable.

  Well, I wonder. But, before going on, perhaps I should mention the story, the vessel, at it were, for Crichton’s awakening message to the American nation. In brief, it is this: a large Japanese corporation called Nakamoto is celebrating the opening of its new U.S. headquarters, the Nakamoto Tower in downtown L.A. A beautiful young American woman—Caucasian, naturally—is murdered during the party. Investigations follow. The Japanese obstruct, the American police bumble, the Japanese corrupt, the Americans are corrupted, and only through the brilliance of a semiretired detective called Connor, who speaks Japanese and knows the Japanese mind—who can see “behind the mask,” so to speak—is the case more or less solved. Along the way, we have some kinky sex—the Japanese, unlike us, have no guilt, you see—and a couple of spectacular suicides: a U.S. senator, framed for the murder of the girl, shoots himself through the mouth, and a Japanese gets himself a concrete suit by jumping into wet cement from a considerable height.