Critic of U.S. Survives Lion’s Den--Detroit : Competition: The Liberal Democratic Party member and co-author of ‘A Japan That Can Say No’ finds tough questions--and cordiality--on his visit to a city hard hit by imports.

Before last fall, not many Americans had heard of Shintaro Ishihara, grand theoristof the new Japanese nationalism and supporter of the notion that racism underlies the two countries’ trade tensions.

He achieved overnight notoriety in the United States when a bootlegged translation of a book he co-authored, “A Japan That Can Say No,” began circulating on Capitol Hill. Its biting tone re-energized congressional debate over trade policy. Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.), a harsh critic of Japanese trade policy, thought it so significant that he put the translation into the Congressional Record.

Written with Sony Corp. Chairman Akio Morita, another Japanese leader who bucks his country’s conventions, the book was seen here as a manifesto of Japanese pride and nationalism. The uproar in the United States helped push sales of the hastily produced book, which was intended only for a Japanese audience, to more than a million copies in Japan.

In often condescending words, Ishihara portrays the United States in the chapters that he wrote for the book as a meddlesome, declining power that Japan needs to tell “no” more often.

The United States used the atomic bomb against Japan out of racism, Ishihara wrote, and continues to fear Japan’s advances because its people are not white. In his view, America is unable to remain competitive because of decay at home, but it lashes out at Japan instead of solving its problems.

With its newly gained technological prowess, Japan could alter the global balance of power by withholding computer chips from the U.S. military and perhaps selling them to the Soviet Union instead, he wrote. If the United States remains intransigent, Japan should strike off on its own and “protect itself with its own power and its own wisdom.”

Ishihara, a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party whom Tokyo voters have returned to parliament for more than 20 years, recently visited the United States to defend his country face to face before people who see Japan as a destroyer of American companies and jobs.

As he waited recently in Detroit for his first encounter with ordinary Americans to begin, Ishihara joked a tad nervously that he was worried someone might throw stones. His concerns proved to be unfounded.

During a two-hour town meeting, with security agents standing in the wings, Ishihara found that Americans can be cordial to people whose views they consider outlandish. And the Americans in attendance found that the stereotype that Japanese don’t speak their minds can be untrue.

“Racism underlies the relationship,” the 57-year-old Ishihara told the 200 or so people at the gathering, which was organized and chaired by Levin.

“Whites in the United States feel some sort of superiority, which is very natural and in some ways has historical legitimacy,” because they played the key role in creating modern technological society.

As for America’s flagging economic role today, he said: “Many parts of the problem lie here in the United States. I would urge Americans to recognize this. . . . But there is no reason why you can’t resuscitate yourself in a very short period of time.”

And: “I don’t have any intention to buy a Dodge.”

Detroit, capital of the auto industry, has been hit harder than any U.S. city by Japanese competition. Asked in an interview before the debate if he was worried that workers here might confront him angrily, Ishihara said any hostility should be directed not at Japan but at “American management, which hasn’t done much to restore U.S. industry, and at the American political system.”

At home, Ishihara acquired a national reputation years ago, first as a prize-winning novelist, then as a charismatic, well-tailored parliamentarian with a jingoistic bent. In a country where most people lead quiet lives of work and conformity, Ishihara stands out. He is an accomplished yachtsman, plays tennis, scuba dives and dines with movie stars.

He was a candidate for prime minister last year, but most analysts believe that his views and lack of control of a faction of the ruling party will keep him forever a maverick. Masaru Tamamoto, an assistant professor of international relations at American University, said Ishihara is taken far more seriously in the United States than he is at home.

Others, however, find him less easy to dismiss. They feel that he gives voice to something many Japanese believe but do not say: that their country is treated unfairly in world affairs and needs to assert its independence.

Generally forgotten in the uproar over the book is that Ishihara is one of the few Japanese politicians who will say that his country’s economic system is often rigged against imports. He said in Detroit, for example, that Japanese bureaucrats had kept a high-quality cellular telephone made by Motorola out of the Tokyo market and that he had to use a substandard Japanese product.

Despite Ishihara’s use of charm and humor--not to mention the expertise of the public relations firm Fleishman-Hillard, which works with him in the United States--questions and comments from the audience were generally unfriendly.

“Until the playing field became uneven,” declared Milton Stetkiw, a retired General Dynamics employee who took the microphone, “there was no problem with race relations.” He said the United States had generously helped Japan rebuild after the war and was getting no gratitude.

Political science student Charles Gerlach, however, suggested the problem is that consumers here have become addicted to Japanese products. “Japan is giving us the dope that we take freely,” he said. “Until we cure that, we have a problem.”

The group laughed at Ishihara’s jokes and applauded him several times, reflecting a mood that was a far cry from the one prevailing in Detroit in the early 1980s, when angry auto workers were known to smash Japanese imports to vent their frustrations.

Part of the reason emotions are cooler now may be that Japanese companies have since become major employers in the area. Mazda Motor Corp. has built a production plant in the suburb of Flat Rock, with small plants run by Japanese suppliers setting up nearby.

Nissan has a large engineering facility in Detroit, Toyota a testing center in Ann Arbor.

Still, investment has not smoothed all the fur, particularly on the production floor. Labor relations are tense at the union-organized Mazda plant. David Cole, director of the University of Michigan’s office for the study of automotive transportation, said, “There’s very little warmth in the blue-collar worker’s heart toward Japan.”