Japan, the fragile superpower

442 Pages·1987·13.893 MB·English

by  Frank Gibney

DS 821 .G513 1987
Gibney, Frank,
Japan, the fragile
superpower
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OKANAGAN COLLEGE
LEARNING RESOURCE CENTRE
BRITISH COLUMBIA
V1Y 4X8
THE FRAGILE
SUPERPOWER
SECOND REVISED EDITION
8 9 2 4 8
FRANK GIBNEY
CHARLES E. TUTTLE COMPANY
TOKYO • JAPAN
mm t
-
Published by the Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc.
of Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, Japan
with editorial offices at
Suido 1-chome, 2-6, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan
by special arrangement with Frank Gibney
Copyright © 1979, 1975, 1985 by Frank Gibney
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher,
except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review
to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.
A portion of The High Cost of Kick-backs appeared
in different form in the Atlantic Monthly.
First Tuttle edition, 1987
Second printing, 1988
ISBN 0-8048-1515-1
Printed in Japan

Contents
foreword to the Second Revised Edition ix
foreword xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xvii
chapter i The View from There i
A Foreigner in Toyko 27
chapter n The Tangled History of Japan and the
United States 32
Old Occupations Don’t Just Fade
Away 52
chapter hi The Unlonely Crowd 57
chapter iv Sacraments in Banks and
Department Stores 71
chapter v The Religion of Giri-Ninjo 84
The Emperor’s Old Clothes 99
chapter vi Dependence Begins at Home 107
The Hidden Matriarchy 123
Viii CONTENTS
chapter vii A Matter of Language 134
The Men with the Flags:
Few Leaders for Good Followers 154
chapter viii How to Succeed in Business by Trying:
The Truth about Japan, Inc. 161
The Fine Art of Committeemanship 187
chapter ix Japanese and American Businessmen:
Or How They Got Ahead 193
Company Presidents—Here and
There 209
chapter x The Mandarins: Japan’s Singular
Intelligentsia 216
chapter xi Mandarins Continued: The Press 241
chapter xii Passive Politics at Work 264
The Big Land Grab 287
chapter xiii Paying the Piper: Resources Missing,
Environment Poor 296
The High Cost of Kickbacks 315
chapter xiv Slow Growth and Fast Exports 324
“The Odd Threesome’’: Toyota, GM,
and the UAW 344
chapter xv Japanese and Americans:
Business “Plus Alpha” 356
chapter xvi The Outlook 376
INDEX 413
Foreword to the Second
Revised Edition
Just ten years after the first edition of this book was published, the
editors of New American Library have given me the chance for a
third revision. It is welcome. Although my family and I returned
to the United States early in 1976 after ten years of residence in
Tokyo, I have had the good fortune to continue a program of
almost constant visits to Japan since then, supplementing my
study here. During this time the interaction between Japan and the
United States, which was the sub-theme of my book, has intensi­
fied. At the basic level of human relationships, Japanese and
Americans have come to know one another better than before.
This deeper acquaintance has inevitably come from the size and
intensity of the economic connection between the two countries,
which has fostered a great deal of cooperative as well as competi­
tive business activity. The closeness of the ties between us is
reflected on the official level as well. Both governments have lately
come to operate with a keener sense of the relationship’s value.
The misconceptions and confusions in the relationship about
which I have written, however, persist. On both sides of the Pa­
cific the heat of controversy generated by trade issues in 1984 and
1985 continue to show much of the myopia and self-centeredness
of a decade before. I have seen no reason to retract or seriously
modify any of the central theses expounded in this book. Changes
since the first writing have been those of degree, not of substance.
X FOREWORD TO THE SECOND REVISED EDITION
I still believe that Japan is making its way toward some sort of
international citizenship; but the progress is slower than many of
us had thought. The success and affluence of Japan, achieved with­
out thus far having to sacrifice the country’s tight sense of national
society, has continued to keep the Japanese in a kind of incubator
atmosphere. There is a feeling all too prevalent, conspicuously
among many of that nation’s business leaders, that crises will sim­
ply blow over, if they are ignored, and that domestic concerns are
what count. Some feeling of this sort is of course true of all coun­
tries, but in a nation that must live by international concourse it
does not sit well.
At the same time there remains among Americans more than a
bit of xenophobic selfishness—partly racist in origin—which
mocks the genuine feeling of Pacific partnership that has emerged
in the United States over the past decade. Both in Japan and the
United States, however, we have a strong undercurrent of coop­
eration and at least the beginning of a mutual responsibility which
could not have been imagined some years back. On the growth of
such feelings—and the development of a real Pacific conscious­
ness— hang our hopes for the future.
Going through the previous edition, I have attempted to revise
statistics wherever useful, and of necessity to bring the chronology
of the book up to date. I have done this by adding and occasionally
abridging the chapters in their original context. With this I feel
confident that the book can be of as much use to the student of
Japan in the mid and late 1980s as it may have been a decade
before. A substantial postscript has been added to Chapter 14
(“Slow Growth and Fast Exports”). The original Chapter 15 has
been completely rewritten. In its place we have now two new
chapters, supplemented by a newly written essay. In these I have
further developed my earlier assessments and opinions about the
future of the Japanese, and in particular of their relationship with
Americans, in the light of present realities.
Foreword
The first Japanese I ever talked to, in his own language, was a
Superior Private who had survived the virtual annihilation of the
Japanese Army unit defending one of the Marshall Islands in 1944.
We sat in a thin wooden interrogation shack inside the remote
reservation near Pearl Harbor that housed a prisoner-of-war facil­
ity, facing each other across a table with one well-used map on it.
He was very frightened at the encounter and so was I. If I learned
little about what military secrets he possessed, it was still no trick
to realize that he was an average citizen like myself, who had gone
to school, looked forward to vacation times, fallen in love with a
girl, and not liked it much when he was drafted—one man among
a nation of individuals, who were variously bad, good, indifferent,
truthful, lying, cowardly, brave, bright, dumb.
Through the war years and immediately after, I met hundreds of
others like him. It was an odd introduction to a country and its
people, but it led to much. My unexpected wartime career as a
navy intelligence officer not only changed my own occupational
existence, from a Greek major at Yale College with ambitions to
study law, to a journalist who has lately been editing a Japanese-
language encyclopaedia. It also rescued me, without realizing it at
the time, from the tendency of most of my fellow countrymen to
see the Japanese either in terms of heedless human waves, or
cloyingly friendly reception committees, alternately part of an “in­