Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 8, 1990 TAG: 9004080306
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: NEW YORK - LENGTH: Long
There wasn't an argument or even a minor contretemps at the affair. Many of the American employees just didn't show up. It seems they didn't know about it in time, explains Kusumoto, president of Minolta USA in suburban Ramsey, N.J.
"At Japanese companies, we have very nice horizontal communication," he says. "Everybody listens to what the other guy is talking about over the phone. After office hours we associate."
So plans for just about everything spread chattily through the ranks - in Japanese, of course. Formal notice, American-style, is almost an afterthought.
"The Americans didn't hear about the party," Kusumoto says. "And when they discovered the date was decided months ago they got upset."
A simple miscue, but behind it lay a gulf of misunderstanding that somehow has defied nearly 50 years of U.S.-Japan amity and more than a century of cultural exchange since 19th century Japan, under American prodding, cast off its feudal kosode (robes).
Today more than ever, the world's two most powerful economies have become inextricably wedded. But too often the relationship seems like a bad marriage characterized by frequent squabbles and little in common apart from money.
The tensions have appeared in numerous forms, despite the best efforts of both sides to avoid them: in charges of discrimination by American employees of Japanese companies, in a hardhearted new appraisal by Washington of its one-time protege, and vice versa. And not least, in an undercurrent of racism.
The racism often surfaces subtly. When Japanese companies purchased such American corporate icons as Columbia Pictures and New York's Rockefeller Center last year, the headlines often read "The Japanese Buy . . . ," as if the entire nation were bent, samurai-like, on the takeover.
In contrast, other major foreign purchasers - British, Canadian, Dutch - have been described more accurately as individual companies.
Part of it is the sheer cultural impact of Japan's new wealth, an economic sea change that made Japan the world's largest creditor by the end of the 1980s, and its former patron, the United States, the largest debtor.
"It's the Japanese rate of buying that's frightening," says Marlene Rossman, a New York-based consultant to New York companies.
Japan is now second only to Great Britain in U.S. investments. From May 1987 to last May, the number of U.S. factories with at least partial Japanese ownership nearly doubled from 550 to 1,043, according to the Japan External Trade Organization.
Japan's total investment in U.S. real estate, corporations and subsidiaries soared from $4.7 billion in 1980 to $53.4 billion in 1988, according to the most recent Commerce Department figures. Japanese companies now hold about 50 percent of the commercial real estate in downtown Los Angeles, more than 20 prime properties in Manhattan, including Tiffany's, and substantial holdings in Washington.
It is not over the issue of Washington real estate, however, but closer to the heart of the nation's capital that U.S.-Japanese tensions have perhaps cut deepest.
Particularly irksome were the 1989 trade figures released in February. The United States enjoyed a $1.5 billion surplus with the 12-nation European Community, a sharp turnaround from a $9.2 billion deficit in 1988. But with Japan, despite a sharp decline in the dollar engineered to help U.S. exports, the deficit was a stubborn $49 billion.
That was no appreciable improvement from the previous year's $51.8 billion deficit with Japan, even with an 18 percent increase in U.S. export sales, says J. Michael Farren, undersecretary for international trade in the Commerce Department.
The trade frictions are aggravated by what many in Congress and the Bush administration see as the Japanese government's xenophobic resistance to open markets and cultural disposition to treat trade as economic warfare.
"The fallacy in asking the Japanese to open their markets is they haven't got the foggiest idea what an open market is," says Clyde Prestowitz, a former Commerce Department negotiator whose influential 1988 book, "Trading Places," portrayed Japan as having carefully planned its export-fueled ascendancy.
In Tokyo, Foreign Ministry spokesman Taizo Watanabe said U.S. analysts were wrong in arguing that Japan's culture was an unchangeable barrier to concepts like an open market. On March 22, U.S. and Japanese trade negotiators reported a breakthrough over the key issue of opening supercomputer exports to Japan.
In addition, experts point out, Japan has been moving from an export-based to a domestic market-based economy.
Japan has a long history of adapting foreign ideas, Watanabe said, "and there is no reason why we cannot continue to do so."
One reason, however, is that the Japanese are not as keen on foreign ideas these days, an attitude born of Japan's pride in its postwar "miracle" and a growing contempt for the United States' persistent problems.
According to a Business Week poll released Dec. 7 - Pearl Harbor Day - more than half of the Japanese don't have much or any admiration for the United States, its economic success or its people.
A recent book published in Japanese, "A Japan That Can Say No," stunned Washington when word trickled back of its harsh view of the United States. But in Japan it has ruffled few feathers because much of its content "has been expressed privately by (Japanese) journalists and businessmen who deal with America," Taro Kimura, a former anchorman for Japan Broadcasting Corp., commented in a newspaper column.
One of the book's authors, Shintaro Ishihara, a right-wing former Cabinet minister, went beyond the usual criticisms of U.S. corporate shortsightedness and product quality. He wrote that racial prejudice is at the base of U.S.-Japan frictions. American whites, realizing their culture is declining, fear losing leadership to the "yellow-race Japanese," he said.
But Ishihara's outspokenness still represents an extreme. The irony of U.S.-Japan frictions is that both sides - the Japanese in particular - seem to try so hard to avoid misunderstanding.
Many Americans - even President Bush - say they welcome Japanese investment here. And no one denies that many Japanese are still more mad for the West than mad at it. Japanese companies still pay out monstrous fees for endorsements by such American celebrities as Michael Jackson (who are rarely if ever is seen in U.S. ads). Most Japanese cigarettes and many other products bear English names like Peace and Seven Stars, giving them the kind of cachet that French-sounding brands once had for Americans earlier in the century.
In February, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Nakayama, in an apparent reference to recent polls, worried that "some (Americans) are expressing the view that the economic threat from Japan is more serious than the military threat from the Soviet Union."
"The big problem underlying such a fear," he said, is "that it is impossible to guess where Japan's huge economic power is headed, and under what philosophy or principles.
"What we need is to make further efforts to convey our views and way of thinking clearly to Americans."
Accordingly, kokusaika, or "internationalization," has become the official rage in Japan. The government, for example, has proposed tax breaks for companies that increase imports to Japan or make donations in the United States.
Most Japanese companies have rooted themselves in America as successfully as their products - and more successfully than their European competitors, according to a survey released last year by Columbia University's School of Business.
The study found that, on average, Japanese firms in the United States have outperformed European competitors in terms of low absentee rates, low manager turnover and high product quality, among other criteria.
In addition, recent polls have found that while mistrust is on the rise, a majority of Americans still have favorable feelings toward Japan.
So, trade frictions aside, what's wrong?
For one thing, many Japan observers contend that at the level of top management, at least, "Americanization" of Japanese-owned firms in the United States is just window dressing, a commercial ploy like the marketing of Christmas in Tokyo department stores, where few shoppers are Christian.
While Japan's famed worker-participation techniques, such as quality circles, may work on the factory floor, American managers of Japanese subsidiaries are still under the yoke of a "shadow system" of command from Tokyo, some experts say.
According to the first systematic survey of American managers in Japanese corporations, released last fall by the University of Michigan, most are excluded from planning and decision-making inside the companies and have little access to strategic information.
Minolta's Kusumoto, who has been in the United States more than 20 years and recently published a book on his experiences, "My Bridge to America," asks that Americans be patient and recognize that Japan's tightly knit society can unravel itself only so fast.
by CNB