U.S.-Japan War of Words Grows More Confrontational : Pacific: Verbal hostilities are escalating between the two trading partners over such issues as protectionism and racism.

Nearly five decades after the infamy of Pearl Harbor, Japan and the United States once again find themselves in a state of belligerence. This time, however, it is a war of words instead of bullets, and casualties are counted in terms of disputed opinions, warped perceptions and ruffled sensibilities.

So much fur is flying these days that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Japanese and Americans still basically like each other.

An influential Washington journalist earlier this year advocated “containment” of the Japanese commercial Juggernaut, making chilling use of Cold War parlance historically reserved for the Soviet global military threat.

A hawkish Japanese lawmaker recently argued in a controversial book of essays, “A Japan That Can Say No,” that white America’s “racial prejudice” lurks behind bilateral trade friction. His co-author, Sony Corp. Chairman Akio Morita, agreed that racism had been reflected in U.S. “emotionalism” about Japan.

And after Sony’s proposed $3.4-billion takeover of Columbia Pictures at the end of last month, Newsweek warned of “Sony Shock,” language alluding to the Sputnik scare of the 1950s that sparked the space race with the Soviet Union. The magazine went on to offer suggestions on how the United States can “fight back.”

The good news is that serious attention is increasingly paid to the strategic alliance that former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield described, in thousands of speeches and interviews over his lengthy tenure, as “the most important bilateral relationship in the world, bar none.” But what might have blossomed into provocative but rational dialogue is fast degenerating into an obfuscating game of rhetorical fisticuffs, and both sides are to blame.

Michael H. Armacost, Mansfield’s replacement in Tokyo, put his thumb on one symptom of the problem when he rebuked the Japanese press in a recent speech for flogging readers with incessant military terminology.

“In referring to U.S.-Japan relations, I often see terms such as ko-bo sakusen (offensive-defensive battle), dai issen (front line), kogeki (attack) and hangeki (counterattack),” Armacost complained. “A foreign reader is thus encouraged to see Japan as an armed fort. I urge you to search for some new metaphors.”

Verbal hostilities on the Pacific Front had their origins in the 1960s, when U.S. officials first noted with chagrin that Japan was emerging as an export powerhouse with a stubborn tendency to protect its home markets.

Over the years, a procession of products has been inserted into the formulaic, fill-in-the-blanks squabble over trade: textiles, soybeans, color televisions, cigarettes, automobiles, beef, semiconductors and, most recently, jet fighters.

Now, the contest has escalated to a new dimension. Both sides are assailing each other’s “systems” as the root cause of the intractable bilateral trade imbalance, which hovers above $50 billion each year in Japan’s favor.

The battleground is a new round of talks that began in September called the Structural Impediments Initiative, or SII for short, a name that at least one Japanese pundit has noted reminded him of America’s “SDI” (Strategic Defense Initiative), the space-based missile defense program aimed at holding off Soviet military might.

In the SII consultations, any macroeconomic flaw is fair game. The result has been a strategic stalemate. The Americans, for instance, are blaming the Japanese for saving too much money and therefore not spending enough on U.S. imports, while the Japanese fault the Americans for squandering too much of their scarce savings on Japan’s consumer goods.

The talks betray the hard reality that neither side is able or willing to wean itself from its own habits: American consumers are hopelessly addicted to Toyotas and VCRs; Japanese manufacturers cannot scale back their overcapacity and limit exports because they are addicted to growth and competition for market share.

Enter James Fallows, Washington editor for the Atlantic magazine, who spent a good deal of the past several years living in Tokyo only to conclude, in the May issue, that Japan’s threat of “uncontrolled, unbalanced economic growth” must be “contained”--for its own good.

“If Japan cannot restrain the excesses of its own economy, then the United States, to save its partnership with Japan, should impose limits from outside,” wrote Fallows, who also promised to reveal in a future article what “specific means of containment” might be advisable.

To many Japanese, Fallows’ logic--laid out in translation in the July issue of the prestigious magazine Chuo Koron--pointed toward a pernicious scenario of managed trade or, worse, economic protectionism.

Kazuo Nukazawa, a managing director of Keidanren, the powerful Federation of Economic Organizations, rebutted Fallows in the August issue of Chuo Koron with an array of trade statistics and accused him of “anecdotal economics,” a grave offense in his circles.

Moreover, the Fallows article “gives the impression that America, as the paternal protector of established world order, is breathing down on the expanding influence of Japan, the unwanted intruder,” Nukazawa said. Fallows promotes the “once-fashionable modernization theory” with “a highly moralistic tone and with great reformist zeal.”

Fallows is not alone, however, in zealously advocating a policy of confrontation rather than appeasement. His thinking was influenced by Karel van Wolferen, a Dutch journalist based in Tokyo who indicted a supposedly amoral Japanese system in his book, “The Enigma of Japanese Power,” earlier this year.

“Trading Places,” a hard-hitting book published last year by a former U.S. Commerce Department official, Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., also shaped the Fallows view.

The three were dubbed the “triumvirate of revisionism” by Business Week, in an article that summarized their message as holding that Japan is so different that the conventional rules of free trade no longer apply.

“Once such views would have been dismissed as ‘Japan-bashing,’ ” the magazine commented, “but now they have an intellectual base.”

Add Chalmers Johnson, a political science professor at the University of California in San Diego who has done ground-breaking studies of the Japanese bureaucracy and its industrial policy, and the triumvirate becomes what Japanese trade officials warily refer to as the “Gang of Four.”

Wrangling in Washington earlier this year over an agreement to transfer American technology to jointly produce Japan’s next-generation jet fighter, the FSX, blew up into a kind of test case of the so-called revisionist point of view, and resulted in some serious nerve-rattling in Japan. Even within U.S. government and academic ranks, the “revisionists” or, if you will, the “bashers,” faced off against the “apologists,” aka the “Chrysanthemum Club”--scholars and officials with views sympathetic to Japan.

Mike Tharp, a seasoned correspondent of the trade war, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and now with U.S. News & World Report in Tokyo, was disturbed enough by these developments that he felt compelled to sound an alarm.

“No one is predicting another shooting war between the United States and Japan,” Tharp wrote in May for his magazine. “But sometime in the next decade or early in the next century, 1989 may be remembered as the year the U.S. lost Japan, the year that the bilateral relationship . . . began an irreversible downward spiral.”

Indeed, opinion polls suggest that more Americans now fear Japan’s economic challenge than the Soviet Union’s formidable capabilities for waging thermonuclear war, an attitude that puts a new twist on Mansfield’s “bar-none” relationship. Even the venerable Mansfield has been subjected to criticism that he was too much of an apologist for Japan.

To Shintaro Ishihara, a right-wing member of Parliament from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and an also-ran in a three-way contest for prime minister in August, something smacking of white supremacy lurks behind the American apprehension over Japan’s growing economic clout.

“I think a stubborn racial prejudice exists at the base of the friction between America and Japan,” Ishihara wrote in an essay in “A Japan That Can Say No,” which was a treatise on how the country should stand up to a weakening, yet still pushy America.

Friction would probably not be so intense if it were Britain or Australia in Japan’s position, Ishihara reasoned, because America sees itself as a guardian of the culture of modernization that “white people built.”

The Japanese best seller raised hackles in Washington, where a bootleg English translation circulated this summer, and it was made even more controversial because Sony Chairman Morita, now the conqueror of Columbia Pictures, contributed as co-author. Morita, highly respected and admired abroad, appeared to have lent legitimacy to Ishihara’s extreme views by collaborating.

The Sony chief is already known for his outspoken views and said little that was not a rehash of his usual themes, such as faulting America for “forgetting how to produce goods.” But he concurred with Ishihara that “maybe racial elements are at the root” of the kind of “emotionalism” displayed in the congressional backlash against Toshiba Corp.

Congress sought to impose sanctions on Toshiba after its machine tool subsidiary was revealed to have illegally sold strategic technology to the Soviets.

Where the war of words will go from here is anybody’s guess, but there are few indications that the discordant debate has spent its fury. Japanese government officials confide that they consider they have a serious public relations problem on their hands, one that will require renewed effort to “correct misperceptions” on the part of American critics. The American side, on the other hand, is growing cynical about the Japanese thought lobby.

Still, tough talk aimed at the Japanese may prove counterproductive, warned Kenichi Omae, a Tokyo business consultant and an articulate spokesman for the so-called Japan apologist camp.

“Americans should not forget that Japan-bashing only weakens their country. The more the Japanese get bashed, the more effort they make,” Omae wrote in a Chuo Koron article adapted for the Japan Times. “The Americans, thinking they have solved the issue with words, make no effort. Ironically, in the end, it is Japan that grows stronger. Thus, we have the U.S. to thank for pushing us to bigger and better efforts.”