Ex-President Is a Super Salesman for the Idea That Japan Can Win : Reagan: The former President was the perfect guest on his Japanese junket--he said just what his hosts wanted to hear.

Former President Ronald Reagan pocketed a cool $2 million for his eight-day junket in Tokyo, comfortably more than he earned during his eight years in Washington. From the standpoint of Reagan’s sponsor, the Fujisankei media conglomerate, $250,000 a day wasn’t such a bad deal--but then the Japanese are used to paying well more than market value for what they feel is worth owning.

Ronald Reagan the pitchman rarely disappoints a corporate backer, and his Japanese tour was no exception. This time, though, it wasn’t refrigerators that the Great Communicator was hawking. The former President was shilling for no less than an entire nation--Japan. The script called for looking Americans in the eye and saying that, bad press notwithstanding, the Japanese are just like us, committed to free markets and free people.

Most advertising people would question the wisdom of hiring Ronald Reagan for such a public relations job. It was on Reagan’s watch, after all, that the trade deficit with Japan ballooned from $12 billon to $60 billion. The person who did in fact employ him, Nobotaka Shikanai, the chairman of Fujisankei, is by no means stupid. He knows that far fewer Americans will be buying what Ronald Reagan is trying to sell today than might have a decade ago, when he took office. Fujisankei is rather more concerned in this particular campaign with meeting domestic demand.

In the foreign press, Japan has been portrayed as a “reluctant power.” It has been thrust, we’re told, onto the world stage, but it is still struggling to reach a consensus about what its role there ought to be. That makes great copy in the States, but it has nothing to do with reality as seen from Tokyo. The news here is all about what Masao Kunihiro describes as the “Japan As No. 1 Syndrome.” Kunihiro, who has been called both Japan’s Henry Kissinger and its Walter Cronkite, explains that “Japanese people have become more arrogant and haughty. Japan is moving in the direction of self-aggrandizement.” The press in Tokyo does its utmost to help the movement along. In near-unison, it exhorts the nation to assert its economic and technological might in a bid for world preeminence.

Americans are at last getting a glimpse of this less kind and gentle nation, thanks to an unauthorized translation of “The Japan Than Can Say No,” by Sony’s Akio Morita and Diet member Shintaro Ishihara. But most of the new Japan remains untranslated. “The Japan That Can Win,” for example, is a creation of the Japanese Olympic Committee, which calls for massive funding in the hope of increasing Japan’s metallic lode at the Olympics of the 21st Century. “From Economic Superpower to Cultural Superpower” is the title of numerous articles in a variety of periodicals, all of which suggest that Japan must do more to disseminate its culture world-wide. Little is written of the merits of Japanese culture per se, but of the incongruity of the premier global economic power not having commensurate cultural clout is bemoaned.

What is Ronald Reagan doing in this picture?

Dutch Reagan stands for nothing if not the right to make a buck. Pulling down $2 million for a couple of 20-minute speeches and some photo opportunities is just putting his money where his mouth is. In terms of statesmanship and diplomacy, however, this dismal performance reeks of the Gipper being used.

Boring details are not Ronald Reagan’s thing. That’s why Fujisankei hired him. They figured that he would stand tall in his ideological saddle and lambaste in wide strokes those of his countrymen who “bellyache” about Morita’s Columbia acquisition as being sissies on free trade. They had a pretty good idea that he might press the Japanese for “fairness” and “open markets,” meaningless terms in a corporate state but ones that allow for the creation of endless studies, commissions and negotiations as Japanese industry hums along to dominant market share. They counted on Reagan’s glad hand to lend Teflon at ceremonies for the preposterously named Praemium Imperiale, a prize for lifetime achievement in art and literature. The award has been criticized as a bumbling attempt by the Japan Art Assn. (whose chairman happens to be Fujisankei’s Shikanai) to buy national prestige by aping the Nobel prizes.

But masterpieces of inadvertence are what render the former President cheap at any price. Urging fast action on opening markets to avert clashes with the United States, Reagan proclaimed, “Americans are not as patient as the Japanese,” a stereotype that many in Japan accept as an article of faith, but few would ever voice in front of an American.

Discussing Tian An Men Square, he appeared to imply that by going too far, the students had hindered more moderate progress and possibly even strengthened China’s Communists. Japan’s plodding response to the massacre was based, in part, on similar victim-as-culprit conclusions, although no public person was foolish enough to voice them.

Addressing the contention, ubiquitous in Japan, that the United States is a superpower in decline (in contrast to Japan, an ascending star), Reagan said nothing memorable, but the fact that a U.S. President felt compelled to rebut the argument probably spoke volumes to his audience.

When the Japanese bought “Lawrence of Arabia,” some Americans claimed that a national treasure was lost. Would they say the same about Ronald Reagan?