Japanophobia: The Myth of the Invincible Japanese.

• Author: Grad, Oren

EVER SINCE MATTHEW PERRY'S first contact with Japan almost 150 years ago, the United States has been remarkably ambivalent toward the Land of the Rising Sun. As Japan has adapted and mastered elements of Western civilization ranging from wearing tuxedos to manufacturing high-tech consumer goods, we have been at turns flattered and fearful.

Over the past 25 years or so, as Japan emerged as the most ferocious--and ostensibly unstoppable--Asian economic tiger, Americans have been particularly edgy on commercial grounds, worded that the Japanese shred U.S. businesses like so much raw meat. James Fallows's Looking at the Sun and Bill Emmott's Japanophobia represent the latest additions to the long-running debate about Japan and American economic policy. Although neither book is exhaustive, each takes a provocative position on the Japanese experience and its relevance for other countries.

Fallows, the Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly, is a prominent member of what's known as the "revisionist" school of thought on Japan. Although their views differ in significant ways, all of the revisionists agree on a fundamental premise: Japan is radically different from Western nations. Hence, they argue, it is a serious mistake to try to understand Japan in terms of American social, economic, and political history.

In part, the revisionist movement was a legitimate reaction to the naive and condescending postwar American perceptions of the Japanese as simply junior Americans who were gratefully and diligently absorbing the gift of our tutelage in democracy. Revisionist writers have focused on the ways in which the underlying reality of Japanese life differs from both surface appearances and American expectations.

Scholar Chalmers Johnson, for example, in his MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982), traced the continuities between pre- and postwar Japan, not only in specific government policies but in organizational functions and even in the actual individuals who held positions of power. Dutch journalist Karel van Wolferen's The Enigma of Japanese Power (1989) explored in detail the web of corruption underlying Japanese party politics; the nearly autonomous, self-perpetuating bureaucracy that lies behind the facade of parliamentary democracy; and the complex of beliefs and attitudes among the Japanese people that makes the whole mess so resistant to reform.

For all of its insights, the revisionist movement would have been of purely academic interest were it not for the coincidence of two developments: the meteoric rise of Japan's economy in the years since the war and the apparent stagnation of the American economy in the post-Vietnam era. Revisionists have responded with both a diagnosis and a prescription for our own economic malaise. Japan, they argue, is guided by a world view that sees economics as merely a tool of national strength, while America clings to a false religion of neoclassical economic theory. Japan's system works stunningly well, while ours falters. Indeed, Japan literally feeds off of our blind adherence to such outdated concepts as "consumer welfare," "free trade," and "global allocative efficiency." If America is to have any hope of thwarting Japan's rise to global politico-economic leadership, proclaim the revisionists, it too must adopt a protectionist trade policy and an interventionist domestic industrial policy.

Looking at the Sun stands on these familiar revisionist foundations but, in its hemispheric reach and conceptual pretensions, is an altogether more ambitious effort than even van Wolferen's quasi-encyclopedic Enigma. Fallows argues that East Asia, with Japan at the lead, has...