Japan's Full Story: Inside and Outside of the Cabinet

Politicians and analysts in the 1980s recited the line, "The Cold War is over, and Japan won," but now that seems ridiculous. "The Cold War is over, and Japan vanished," seems more accurate today. Japanese companies are no longer feared, and Japanese management inspires not envy but ridicule. Books and movies like Rising Sun relied on an audience's perceptions of Japan as ominous and exotic. It is nice that the West no longer feels threatened, but unfortunate that an unthreatening Japan comes across as such a bore. America's future could be stamped, in large part, "Made in Asia." Most thoughtful people are aware of the huge stakes riding on China's evolution, but Japan's direction is also important for the future of the West.

Think of the uncertainties about Japan in the coming decades: Is Japan abandoning its postwar peacenik role and returning to a more muscular military policy? Will Japan deploy nuclear weapons? Is its economy, the world's second-largest, beginning a recovery that will pull the country out of its quagmire and again inspire awe around the world? My answers to those questions (yes, no, and yes) are just guesses. One can make a cogent argument for the opposite conclusion in each case, and America's own prospects will depend partly on the answers.

Publishing is one of the few sectors that is still devoting attention to Japan, and the result has been a series of good books over the last year or so. Frankly, I suspect that this is because of the time lag in publishing; these books were probably planned in days when Japan seemed sexier. Recent entrants include Sheldon Garon's Molding Japanese Minds, Kent Calder's Pacific Defense, and Michael Armacost's Friends or Rivals? The two books reviewed here can be added to the list. Both are engaging and worthy works of history, and that history is a starting point for looking at Japan's future.

Altered States, a meticulously documented diplomatic history of postwar Japan by Michael Schaller, a professor of history at the University of Arizona, is a distinguished work of scholarship, painstaking and eminently reliable. Schaller focuses on the period from 1945 to the early 1970s, with a brief section taking U.S.-Japanese relations to the present. This is not exactly virgin ground, but Schaller covers it comprehensively and stylishly, with new details throughout.

Walter LaFeber's history, The Clash, is a bit different -- and a better read. LaFeber is a historian but not a Japan specialist, and there are a few minor mistakes as a result (at least in the advance review copy that I read), but he brings a fresh eye and a wonderful historical sweep to his work. Indeed, he writes so knowledgeably without the benefit of the Japanese language that I wondered why any of us ever bothered to slave away over it. LaFeber covers the period from the 1850s to the present, recording the drama of the opening of Japan, the Meiji restoration, the victory over Russia in 1905, the buildup to World War II, and the upheavals since. Japan's rise from the sealed-off island nation of the nineteenth century to one of the world's great powers today is an extraordinary story, and LaFeber tells it with gusto. The Clash emphasizes that Japan and the United States have regularly been drawn into conflict, often because they operate by different systems of capitalism, the chaotic American kind versus the centralized, heavily regulated Japanese variety. He emphasizes that China has always added an unstable element to U.S.-Japanese relations and predicts that Washington and Tokyo will continue to clash.

I tend to disagree. My best guess is that the era of Japan as a prime bogeyman is over, partly because Japan's economy is becoming more open and trade disputes are now more abstruse. Washington and Tokyo are battling it out over trade issues like complex Japanese port practices, which are not the kind of thing that figures easily into American campaign speeches or the six o'clock news. Moreover, as Japan's population ages, its savings rate should drop and its current account surplus is expected to decline, further easing the tension. But more important, Americans are not just monotheistic but also monodemonic. They like to have an evil force out there, but only one at a time. The United States had Japan audition for the role as the Soviet Union collapsed from Evil Empire to Pathetic Empire, but now China seems more likely to get the part and seems better cast to stir an American audience. China's trade surplus is becoming more ominous and Beijing is indisputably protectionist, so that the Chinese government can be perceived simultaneously as a trade, human rights, and arms proliferation villain. So while LaFeber is right that there will be clashes in the future, my guess is that they will be more subdued in the coming decades.

FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD IMPRESSIONS

These two books are serious and scholarly, the kind that you can put down. Yet both are gracefully written, with an eye for an amusing phrase or colorful quote, and they are sober in their judgments. Indeed, one wishes they had been a bit less sober, perhaps, a tad more inclined to make arguments instead of simply recounting the past. Both are conventional histories, recording dates and facts rather than presenting a major new argument or interpretation. Still, both have benefited from materials released in recent years, such as declassified American documents about CIA payments to the Liberal Democratic Party in the 1960s.

The history of U.S.-Japanese relations is important because America and Asia have always talked past each other, attracted to each other and seeking approval but quarreling nonetheless. If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then Asians and Americans are from different galaxies.