On Bowing Back to Japan

Recent books on Japan tend to read like a call to arms. Two such are Gary Jacobson and John Hillkirk’s “Xerox: American Samurai” (Macmillan), to be published in May, and Robert Sobel’s “IBM vs. Japan, the Struggle for the Future” (Stein & Day), published in February. Both seek to draw lessons from the experience of embattled American companies that seem to be winning their battles. Both, unintentionally, may teach another kind of lesson.

Xerox--once, if we are to believe Jacobson and Hillkirk, all but vanquished in the copier business--has stormed back by beating the Japanese at their own manufacturing game. The techniques that initially enabled the Japanese to pull ahead, Jacobson and Hillkirk say, were three: superior relationships with vendors, quality control right on the assembly line (as opposed to quality checking at the end of the line), and “just-in-time manufacturing,” the computerized provision of parts so that staff and equipment always are used at 100% of capacity. Xerox has duplicated (or improved on) all three.

In Sobel’s account of IBM’s struggle with the Japanese, marketing strategy counts for more than manufacturing technique. The Japanese, Sobel says, “study the market, license technology when necessary, and then produce low-priced, high-quality goods, the aim being market share rather than immediate profits. This done, the Japanese upgrade, expand profit margins and await the inevitable complaints from the domestic companies. They counter threats of tariffs and quotas by establishing cooperative agreements and opening factories in the host country.” IBM’s relative success in holding the Japanese at bay, Sobel says, is that they have recognized this strategy in time, anticipated it where possible and matched it as a competitor within the Japanese market itself.

Both of these books make an honest contribution to the American understanding of the Japanese challenge. Both are written for the layman rather than only for those whose business it is to sell copiers or computers. Jacobson and Hillkirk’s may be the livelier of the two, but Sobel, too, tells an interesting, even a gripping story, one that involves Europe as well as America and Japan.

And yet neither book, so far as I can tell, was written with any knowledge of the Japanese language or any acquaintance with Japanese culture apart from its business manifestation. And therein lies an enormous--if also an instructive--limitation.

“You don’t have to know (fill in the language). They all speak English over there anyway.” What American tourist has not heard these cheery words on the eve of his departure? But, when competition rather than recreation is in prospect, were more naive words ever spoken? No, friend, you don’t have to learn the language, so long as you are content to know only what they want you to know. But bear in mind that if the Japanese had taken that attitude toward English, they would still be peddling wind-up toys. And if the Americans continue to take the same attitude, they may end up selling wind-up toys.

Jacobson and Hillkirk, otherwise sophisticated writers for two American newspapers, announce smugly in their preface: “We’d come 7,000 miles to see things relatively few Americans have ever seen before. ‘Generally speaking, we keep things classified,’ said Canon’s Keizo Yamaji, chief executive for copiers. ‘For you, we disclose everything. You are very unusual visitors. And you were shown many places we don’t show.’ ”

The stream of journalistic books on Japan suggests that the American reporters were not such very unusual visitors at all. And as for the “everything” that was disclosed to them, one can only wonder: How would they know? Could they test what the genial Keizo Yamajis of the Japanese copying industry told them by interviewing employees, by doing the kind of independent field work that they would have done as a matter of course in the United States?

One has to doubt it; and what goes for journalists has, at least until very recently, gone for businessmen as well. In the late ‘70s, it was estimated that there were 10,000 English-speaking Japanese businessmen in America, but only 200 Japanese-speaking American businessmen in Japan.

Neither Sobel nor Jacobson and Hillkirk denies that apprenticeship to America has been a key part of the Japanese success. Japanese quality control is the brainchild of William Edwards Deming, an American engineer who went to Japan in 1946, having failed to win many American converts to his do-it-right-the-first-time manufacturing philosophy. (The Japanese now give an annual Deming Prize for industrial innovation.) But when Deming lectured in Japan, he spoke English, not Japanese, and Jacobson and Hillkirk never stop to think about that. Neither does Sobel when he recalls Peter Drucker expounding his theories of management and marketing to Japanese executives.

Perhaps if the Japanese had won World War II instead of the Americans and if, instead of Hirohito renouncing his divinity on the radio, the world had heard Harry Truman confessing in faltering tones that America was not, after all, the last best hope of man, then the Americans might have been as assiduous in learning Japanese over the past 40 years as the Japanese have been in learning English. For the record, the Japanese have been extremely assiduous.

An American publisher who buys much of her printing in Japan tells me that not just in the print shops but also on the streets, she can reliably get directions in English from anyone. This is one reason why America is buying printing these days, she says, rather than selling it. The Japanese advantage consists of more than just low prices and high quality. The Japanese, having learned to talk to us in our own language, know what we want.

And they continue to improve on their knowledge. At the University of California Press, largely a humanities publisher, sales to Japan have exceeded sales to the United Kingdom for several years; sales of books on English linguistics are particularly strong.

Linguistic ascendancy is the mother of cultural ascendancy, and evidence of the Japanese cultural ascendancy over America abounds. The New York Times quoted Tom Hayden recently on the success of the Japanese as lobbyists in Sacramento: “Just as the Japanese have studied our technology and come up with a better version, they’ve taken our lobbying techniques and used them in a better form.” How many American companies have the linguistic and cultural knowledge to lobby in a Japanese provincial legislature?

“The Californian,” the monthly paper of the Golden State Mobilehome Owners League, reports that “Manufactured Japanese housing far superior in both quality and technology to its U.S. counterpart could conceivably be marketed in this country within the next two to three years. . . . Typical U.S. factories offer 15 to 20 house plans, while a typical Japanese plant can offer up to 2,000 options.” Here we may anticipate manufacturing as Jacobson and Hillkirk might describe it and a marketing offensive as Sobel might describe it. But not only that: The Japanese are likely to know what kind of house an American likes to live in. They can read House Beautiful. They can house-hunt with any real estate agent. Can Americans do the same in Japan?

In short, for an utterly obvious reason, Japan is still a closed book to America, while America is a wide-open book to Japan. And this state of affairs is not likely to change soon. Our ill-conceived “back to basics” movement in education militates against the learning of an “exotic” language like Japanese. Zen, noh, haiku --these are words that suggest the counterculture of the ‘60s to many. Better to direct our undergraduates into no-nonsense subjects like economics--whither they have repaired in record numbers during the period of America’s greatest business decline. No, neither government nor business offers the American student an incentive to learn Japanese because, for so far as one can tell, neither government nor business has noticed that the Japanese economic offensive began with the study of English.

If there is one thing that the Japanese knew in 1945, it was that the world was not going to adapt to them, they were going to have to adapt to the world. The abandonment of imperial ambition meant nothing if it did not mean that. Repentant of imperialism, resigned to being just itself, Japan knew that for some years to come it was going to be a net importer of culture from America.

Now, more gradually, with much less horror and drama than attended the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America is coming to a similar moment of post-imperial truth. The federal deficit (see p. 1), the municipal deficit (see p. 14, top), the uncollectable Third World debt (see p. 14, bottom), and the trade deficit--these are so many indexes that as the world is refusing to adapt to America, America may have to adapt to the world. And perhaps the beginning of the adaptation may be a decision to start talking to the world in languages other than English.

The decision to learn a new language is, quite literally, the decision to learn a new set of rules. But that decision can stand for a more fateful admission; the admission, namely, that people who speak by the set of rules I already know may not know all that I need to know; in other words, that my kind of people may not have all the answers. Forty years ago, Japan bowed to America in defeat. During the past 40 years, learning English, learning American arts and commerce, Japan has bowed to us repeatedly in acknowledgement. It may be time, at last, for America to bow back.