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Who's
Bamboozling Whom?
By Michael Alan Hamlin
November 22-24, 2002
Ivan P. Hall isn't your run-of-the-mill
disaffected gaijin, but he's trying hard to become one. Or at least
that's the way I felt after laboring through nearly 300 pages of
an emotional and repetitive rant titled Bamboozled! How America
Loses the Intellectual Game with Japan and Its Implications for
Our Future in Asia. The object of Hall's disaffection isn't necessarily
the Japanese themselves - although he's certainly hard on those
he has chosen to make a living among - but the U.S. intelligentsia
and the political class. They're just, well, too damn naïve
when it comes to Japan (Yawn here.).
In fact, Hall joins a substantial
list of Japan observers who have thrown their hands up in exasperation.
Unfortunately, Hall doesn't distinguish himself with his outspoken
exasperation with the U.S. either. Frank Gibney's modern classic,
Japan: The Fragile Superpower written at the onset of Japan's late
20th century renaissance, was entirely built around the premise
of Western ignorance - both malevolent and benevolent - of Japan,
its strengths, and its weaknesses. What Hall has provided is in
ways an updated, and unworthy, version of Gibney's original argument
that Westerners should spend more time and effort trying to understand
what Japan is and why. The difference is that Gibney's work is enduring.
Gibney's book, which was updated
for a third edition in 1996, provides still powerful insights into
Japan because the author actually worked in the trenches there,
first literally as an intelligence officer in World War II interrogating
Japanese prisoners, and eventually as a business executive following
a career in journalism, including a stint as Time magazine's Tokyo
bureau chief. The Fragile Superpower was written in the 70s, when
he was based in Japan as head of Encyclopedia Britannica for Japan
and Korea.
Hall was also a journalist, but has
always been an observer, rather than a participant, first as a student,
then a journalist, and now an academic. He notes in his introduction
that "I do think I have had enough experience from enough angles
on Japan to qualify the following chapters as 'notes from the underground'
- a counterintuitive challenge to our conventional wisdom that the
intellectual game Japan plays with America (and others) hardly matters
any more." But that statement was in reaction to a friend's
good-natured critique, "'Ivan, you're a Japan jack-of-all-trades
and master of none.'" I'm afraid the friend got it right.
Rather than counterintuitive, Hall
is untiringly conventional. America is naïve, it is being willingly
duped because the U.S. military and diplomatic corps need a powerful
ally in the Asia Pacific, and its willingness to put up with Japanese
intransigence over a wide spectrum of mutual interest issues - spanning
defense to trade to Middle East alliances - is undermining American
competitiveness. Worse, America may be abetting an increasingly
apparent slide to the same sort of rightist extremism that fueled
Japan's military expansionist policies in the first half of the
last century. Will history repeat itself?
For Hall, that isn't a question.
History is repeating itself. To illustrate his point, Hall points
to Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shintaro and "his self-appointed role
as Japan's political enfant terrible." In April 2000, Ishihara
called on Japan's Self-Defense Forces to protect Japanese victims
from foreigners who might "atrocious crimes," in the event
of an earthquake disaster, a call Hall believes is rooted in long-standing
racist attitudes toward non-Japanese - especially Asians - prevalent
among rightists. In that, he's probably right. Ishihara referred
to the foreigners as "sankokujin," or third-country nationalists,
a term associated with "the wanton killing of thousands of
Koreans in the panic following the great Kanto earthquake of 1923."
Hall says that 37 percent of the
calls to city hall in the two days after Ishihara's speech were
supportive of his stance, and notes that "considering that
many of the 58 percent protesting his racist ranting were probably
foreigners, the proportion of Japanese callers supporting him may
have been much higher." Or they may not have been. And, who
knows how many among 37 percent in support of Ishihara were from
the well organized far right? Clearly, no one knows the answer to
either of those questions.
But to support his suggestion that
the average Japanese does lean to the right these recession-plagued
days, Hall says "Given, too, that Tokyo's electorate is the
nation's wealthiest and supposedly most internationalized, this
(caller support for Ishihara) is the most ominous proof we have
had to date of how far Japanese public sentiment has slid toward
the xenophobic right." Well, if that's the most ominous proof
he has, Hall doesn't have much of a soap box, in my view.
To state the obvious, the non-scientific
tracking by a partisan government of calls to city hall is virtually
meaningless to anyone not out to manipulate the results. As an academic,
Hall should understand this. As a journalist, he knows the findings
make a good story, whether they are significant in any meaningful
way or not. Second, Ishihara's statements typically have little
practical impact outside the media, and this instance was no exception.
To the contrary, it is notable that Japanese courts are now levying
stiff fines on even bathhouses that discriminate against foreigners.
If you can lose millions of yen for not letting someone take a bath,
imagine what can happen for more serious offenses.
Hall, in fact, misses the point almost
entirely of Ishihara's election in 1999 as an independent following
a career as a conservative, and frustrated, member of Japan's dominant
political party, the Liberal Democrats, or LDP. Contrary to Hall's
thinking, Ishihara believes that it is Japan that is being manipulated,
not America, as he's argued in two not-very-thoughtful books. In
the latest, Sensen Fukoku No to Ieru Nihon Keizai (The Japanese
economy that can utter the declaration of war, "no"),
Ishihara "depicted the Asian financial crisis as an American
plot to establish global financial hegemony by undermining East
Asian economies through the new 'opium' of 'money violence' - a
'second defeat of Japan' jealously engineered by the 'merciless
American Jewish trio' of Madeleine Albright, Robert Rubin, and George
Soros," as Hall himself points out.
The point I want to make, though,
is not that Hall and Ishihara sound an awful lot alike when they
worry about the relationship between their countries. Instead, it
is that Ishihara's popularity among voters represents growing dissatisfaction
with Japan Inc; ie, the LDP and traditional, do-nothing politicians.
This is not a new argument. In fact, I first made it in an opinion
piece titled "A Radical Fix for Japan" published in The
Asian Wall Street Journal in April 2001. My argument, was - and
still is - that if mainstream politicians don't change the way they
do things, voters will desert them. Which means Ishihara could be
more than just a mayor. He could become prime minister.
But not because Japan is sliding
inexorably to the right. Rather, because Japan is going no where,
and the Japanese want that to change. If Ishihara, with all his
faults, is the only politician willing to take on that task, he
might get it. After all, the patient Japanese have spent more than
a decade waiting for someone else to do the job. It's not unrealistic
to assume that eventually they'll get tired of waiting.
The bottom line on Bamboozled! is that it may be Hall who's trying
to pull a fast one. Who's getting bamboozled is clearly in the eye
of the beholder. But one thing's for certain, and that is that regardless
of which side of the Pacific your standing, Hall's not arguing anything
very original or insightful. What he does do is provide a meandering,
mostly anecdotal commentary meant to shake America to its senses.
I'm not sure that's necessary, but I am sure this book isn't going
to wake anyone up even if it is.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing
director of consultancy TeamAsia and the author of three books on
Asian economies and companies. His latest book is Marketing Asian
Places, of which he is a co-author (Wiley, 2001). Write him at mahamlin@teamasia.com.).
Copyright © 2002 Michael Alan
Hamlin. All Rights Reserved.
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