Morning in Asian-Pacific America : THE THIRD CENTURY : America’s Resurgence in the Asian Era <i> by Joel Kotkin and Yoriko Kishimoto (Crown: $19.95; 320 pp.) </i>

When Americans buy a cerebral book these days--and this unsuspected vice seems to be growing among us--its theme is apt to be black and gloomy: One way or the other, the country is going to the dogs. Either we have shot our bolt as a political mover and shaker, about to join the British Raj and Austria-Hungary on history’s imperial dust-bin; or else we have squandered our economic advantages so shamelessly that America’s only hope is to follow and, if possible, imitate every chapter in Japan’s current business success story. (This mood of intellectual pessimism contrasts interestingly with the tonnage of self-congratulatory essays on Japaneseness ( Nihonjinron ) now being ground out by our transpacific neighbors in Tokyo.)

At long last, however, two optimists have raised their heads among us. Joel Kotkin, an editor of INC magazine, has been reporting very knowledgeably on economic doings in the Pacific Basin. Yoriko Kishimoto is a management consultant whose careful research and Japanese background is evident throughout this book. The subtitle sums up their book’s message: America’s resurgence in the Asian era.

The authors would probably admit that the resurgence is as much aim as actuality. Their charted path for a new American future could in fact use a few more pinches of pessimism. Yet they have produced a thoughtful, stimulating and very readable book. It incorporates knowledge, insight and good reporting about an area where all three elements have been in short supply. If you believe that we are really heading into the Pacific Century--and you should--you will find this book an excellent set of sailing directions.

At the outset, the authors have compiled ample evidence on U.S. trade and investment with Europe and the Asian Pacific nations to support their claim of “an enormous shift in the center of economic gravity.” (In 1986, the $215 billion worth of U.S. transpacific commerce exceeded by 50% the transatlantic total.) Add to this the swift transformation of the Asian-Pacific nations from sellers of commodities and rather primitive manufactures to producers of automobiles and high-tech electronics. All this, they say, impels Americans to turn their attention to the Pacific--and with it makes a corresponding adjustment of cultural and political, as well as economic priorities. Their documentation of the long American inter-relationship with Japan, China and other Asian-Pacific nations over the last two centuries bears out their statement that the United States was as slow to learn from these interconnections as American businessmen were slow to appreciate the long-term effects of competition from Japan, first, and ultimately Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and others.

In coping with this new Pacific world and adjusting to it, Kotkin and Kishimoto reject the advice of “statists,” e.g., Robert Reich, Ezra Vogel and the “Theory Z” consultants, who urge the United States to develop a new industrial policy to bolster American business in international competition. Equally they oppose the conventional wisdom of John Kenneth Galbraith, among others, which holds that the entrepreneur is an endangered species in a world dominated by big companies and their concerns. On the contrary, they argue, the entrepreneur is alive and well and living mostly in the United States. Citing the examples of numerous successful transpacific businessmen--a good many of them from California--they make a case for the value of creative American entrepreneurship in a radically changing business and technological environment.

It is here, they feel, that the Japanese competition bogs down. Handicapped internationally by their own stubborn ethnocentrism and domestically by a two-level economy and a business society that sets far too much store on hierarchy and corporate discipline, Japan’s economic miracle-makers may be running into trouble. Some of the most valuable portions of this book are its analysis of modern business Japan, now hard-pressed by Korean as well as United States competition; and far from the simple growth society it used to be.

The real “latent strength” of the United States--its sokojikara , to use their Japanese phrase, is the openness and receptivity of American society, its traditional hospitality to new people and new ideas. This, they say, is totally unlike the narrow nationalism or racism of most Europeans or Asians--although, as the authors concede, American nationalist racism has itself had some ugly manifestations. But the openness of American life makes its own advertisement. Not only do Americans tend to look across the Pacific for ideas and new businesses, but the considerable brain drain from Asian immigration has proved the latest--and a highly valuable--menu addition to the American melting pot. Thanks to heavy Asian and Latin American immigration, Los Angeles, the authors tell us, has become “the ultimate Third Century American town.” Its growing prosperity and manufacturing strength reflects this fact.

The authors argue quite correctly that it was American example, epitomized in the U.S. occupation, that laid the foundation for Japan’s post-war economic successes. Similarly, it was American obtuseness and Europe-centeredness that made us late in learning useful Japanese lessons. They see a new era dawning in which intensified trading and cultural relationships can profit all the Pacific neighbors. The increasingly heavy Japanese and other Asian investment in the United States they see, not as a threat--Europeans, after all, still own considerably more of our turf--but as proof positive of America’s role as the great continental power of the Pacific, “the ultimate focus of Asian ambitions, financial power and technological progress.”

Kotkin and Kishimoto, while optimists, are not uncritical ones. Summing up their book, they offer five basic premises for America’s resurgence to succeed:

1--”The center of the world economy is shifting from the European-Atlantic Basin to the Pacific Basin. . . .”

2--”Rising number and impact of new Americans, particularly from Asia and Latin America, are changing the United States from a European offshoot to a multiracial ‘world nation’. . . .”

3--”In the battle to regain the economic initiative, America’s best weapon lies in exploiting its wealth of entrepreneurial, smaller organizations. . . .”

4--”Despite the recent celebrations of an emerging “post-industrial economy,” manufacturing will remain a critical element in determining the economic winners and losers in the Third Century. . . .”

5--”To meet the Asian challenge, American business must evolve a new set of ethics and approaches toward management . . . .”

All of their ideas are well supported by a wealth of documentation and quoted authority. Indeed, if there is one criticism of the book, it is that the authors have cited too many authorities of past and present to make their points. (Herodotus, John Quincy Adams, Oswald Spengler, Theodore Roosevelt, Gen. Ishihara Kanji, Machiavelli, the Emperor Meiji and the editor of Consumer Electronics make quite a mix.) They are good enough to speak on their own.

A more basic caution should be given, especially about points 4 and 5. How can American business make itself truly competitive, still less dig up its long slumbering sense of ethics, when so many of its leaders abandon themselves to an orgy of greedy and costly take-overs and mergers, crippling our national productivity just when we need it most? Despite the heartening talk about growth in the service industries, i.e., among waiters, lawyers and investment bankers, U.S. manufacturing continues to be in trouble. Can we really count on Adam Smith’s tired invisible hand to do the job for us? Or might it not be time for some vigorous industrial policy after all?