Japan as Number One...and Pulling Away : THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY <i> by Steven Schlosstein (Congdon & Weed: $22.95; 537 pp.; 0-86553-201-0) </i>

Steven Schlosstein doesn’t necessarily want a trade war with Japan, but he would settle for a cold war. “From now into the next century,” he writes, “the ideological challenge to America will not be Communism . . . but a softer brand of authoritarianism from Japan . . . called turbocharged capitalism.”

He belongs neither to Richard Gephardt’s school of losing through Japan-bashing (in 1988, at least) nor to the cadre of Japan-won’t-change revisionists who oppose punishing our rivals for beating us fair and square. He does believe that the powerful, strategically directed, “goal-oriented” economies of Asia--not only Japan but Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore--could relegate the United States to the condition of a geopolitical and economic backwater in the next century.

Avoiding this outcome, in his view, will require rigorous economic, political, educational and cultural reforms. A Sputnik-like scare, such as a recession, might also be needed to rouse the American people to the new international dangers they face even as the author of the old ones, the Soviet empire, finally implodes.

The litany of national ills that Schlosstein recites, while increasingly familiar since Ezra F. Vogel kicked off the “Japan Is Number One” 11 years ago, is troubling indeed. Our eighth-graders score 12th in mathematics out of 14 industrial nations. Our non-military Research and Development runs well behind Japan’s, and our neglected manufacturing sector is lagging badly as well. Our “fiscally irresponsible Congress,” paralyzed by the legal corruption of special-interest politics, is unable or unwilling to adopt measures to reduce the deficit, boost savings and provide the kind of incentives to strategic industries that the Japanese and Koreans do.

Three-quarters of the education money we spend per student goes to entrenched bureaucrats rather than teachers. Meanwhile, American business has to spend $30 billion a year on teaching high school graduates to read, write and add well enough to go to work.

We have “the highest divorce rate in the industrialized world . . . (and) the largest ratio of single parents to traditional two-parent families,” and our children are suffering greatly for it. Yes, the Reagan boom is booming away, but one of Schlosstein’s Japanese authorities sums that up nicely: “Individual prosperity, national misery.”

Those most concerned with immediate social ills such as homelessness, ozone depletion and drug abuse will find little to inspire them here. Implicit in Schlosstein’s analysis is that we will no longer be able to address such problems at all if we lose the capacity to create and preserve wealth.

So how do we halt the ravages of our great-power malaise (what the Japanese call “the English disease”)? He lays down brisk, confident prescriptions, as if writing editorials in the Economist, but there’s not much about how to get from here to there. He concedes sotto voce that “we cannot emulate the Japanese; we must find our own flexible solutions to these problems.” But this Japanese-educated writer and consultant finds so much to admire in the vibrant capitals of Japan and the Pacific’s “Little Dragons” that one wonders whether in his heart of hearts he believes America is irredeemably wedded to its sloppy, self-indulgent ways.

In the epilogue, basically an executive summary of the book, he waxes eloquent about America as “the most precious experiment in human history.” And yet when he looks into our national petri dish he finds a disturbing amount of mold around the edges. For instance, he thinks the morally illegitimate American habit of nonchalant divorce is so damaging to the welfare of our children, those oft-heralded leaders of the future, that he wants to boost income-tax exemptions to keep Daddy at home and hit him with a penalty if he insists on leaving. Meanwhile, Mommy might lighten up on what one of the Bush kids once called “the Big A.”

In one of the author’s many “We shouldn’t emulate them, but dig this “ passages, he reveals, “Asian cultures have a more tolerant view of sex. . . . Marital expectations are lower and the frustrations fewer, but appropriately controlled outlets are condoned and strictly monitored, from Turkish baths to love hotels. And mistresses, an established practice in old Europe, are still a favored tradition in Japan.”

As for the kids themselves, his investigations took him to schools all over Asia, and his heart went pitter-patter as the children of Singapore marched around in single file in their crisp cotton skirts and white shorts (“not shotgun-like, as one might expect of American youngsters”) and the children of Taipei and Tokyo merrily scrubbed down their classrooms.

No one who has stood in line behind a group of suburban American teen-agers at McDonald’s and eavesdropped upon their tribal dialogues can help but share the author’s concerns about the future custodians of Jefferson’s covenant. Still, there is a grudging, even troubling admiration in Schlosstein’s passages about Asian authoritarianism. He goes out of his way to excuse Lee Kwan Yew’s limited tolerance of freedom of the press in Singapore, for instance, and is as supportive of Ferdinand Marcos’ imposition of martial law in the Philippines in 1972 as many other commentators were then (though they’d be loath to admit it now).

Lee is one of the great nation-builders of our time, and Marcos at his best held out more hope to the Philippines than President Aquino’s apparent capitulation to the oligarchic status quo. And yet neither offers America many applicable lessons, and America is the ostensible subject of Schlosstein’s inquiry. If he did not want us to think Asian models deserved to be studied and even appropriated by the United States, one wonders why he devoted so much space to them.

Just as none of our problems is of Asia’s making, neither do Asian systems hold the answers. Unlike Japan and the Little Dragons, we are a sprawling, complicated, culturally and racially diverse nation whose principles of equality, justice and free enterprise never will be and need not be sacrificed at the altar of productivity.

The only valuable thing the Far East can probably give us is as many of its people as it can spare. Already more than half our legal immigrants are Asian. If I were President Bush I would resolve to admit 2 million Hong Kong Chinese to the United States before 1997--when, Schlosstein believes, and diplomatic developments since he finished his book have seemed to confirm--Beijing will smother the colony like a blanket.

The author notes that “all eleven of New York’s Westinghouse science finalists in 1988 were Asian-American. . . .” The operative word in that compound is “American,” and therein must lie the solution to many of the problems he sets out so forcefully--not so much in the importation of Asians, which sounds crass and mechanical, but the capacity for this nation to renew and redirect itself to address new challenges.

The postwar boom that made America the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation is over, and to sustain both our position and our values we must rise to the economic challenge being posed by our single-minded competitors in Asia. Those of us who have grown fat on America’s postwar orgy of consumption might get back to fighting trim when confronted by a new wave of enthusiastic, highly skilled immigrants.

Schlosstein does not sit in his office and collate statistics; he travels widely and speaks to a broad array of authorities wherever he goes. What would otherwise be a dry book benefits greatly from his digressions and descriptions (although perhaps even George Will himself would recoil from the suggestion that he has a “patentable, boyish grin.”

He writes well, although in tackling everything from NATO to day care he makes a number of the generalist’s small errors. For instance, Deng Xiaoping was many things but never premier of China; the United States was driven out of Vietnam in 1975, not 1974, and the “Soviets” didn’t lose to the Japanese navy in 1905 since Russians weren’t Soviets until 1917.

What Schlosstein knows all too well is our great new adversary. He includes a chilling account of a dinner he attended where some Mitsubishi executives burst into Imperial Japanese Navy marching songs. He even raises the specter of a newly militarized and even nuclearized Japan that might use its power against us.

Unlike many, however, he does not counsel fear, resentment or punitive sanctions; just discipline, so our economic health is not forever hostage to Japanese capital, and healthy competition. Indeed, how we handle our new adversary might well dictate the fortunes of our old one. Mikhail Gorbachev looks like a dove in Europe but a hawk in Asia, where he has been conducting a mighty military buildup even as he courts Japanese technology.

U.S. protectionism could well plunge what is now the favored policy of a minority in Tokyo--a turn toward Moscow for investment opportunities, resources, and new markets--into the political mainstream. Gorbachev would like a neutral Germany, but he’d love a neutral Japan. If the protectionists get their way, he might get his.