America as Japan’s Puppet : AGENTS OF INFLUENCE: How Japan’s Lobbyists in the United States Manipulate America’s Political and Economic System <i> By Pat Choate (A Borzoi Book/Alfred A. Knopf: $22.95; 295 pp.) </i>

“Agents of Influence” is about Japan’s newly found powers of political and intellectual persuasion--and intimidation--within the borders of the United States. Emphasizing author Pat Choate’s point, albeit expensively, was his own dismissal by the mighty TRW conglomerate, which apparenly feared for its Japanese business.

The Japanese might find poetic justice in this account of how American lobbyists and intellectual apologists have abetted the massive transfer of wealth and power from their own country to Japan over the past decade. When the United States held the upper hand in the postwar years, it often could get its way with a jab at the top of Japan’s political hierarchy. Now Japan, with indispensable American advice--greedy, gullible or gratuitous--has learned to manipulate the levers that move America’s democratic politics and open marketplace of ideas, from the bottom up.

Choate shows how the Japanese have moved like a balled fist of coordinated national purpose through the loosely knit and self-serving ranks of the American political elite--particularly those who ride the “revolving door” between high government office and private practice--to buy influence, advocacy, intelligence and other support for Japan’s economic goals. With names like Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Robert Strauss, William Eberle or Harold Malmgren flashing across its pages, it is no surprise that Washington is now in an uproar over what Choate admits is fundamentally a problem of American political ethics, only tangentially related to Japan.

Yet the pattern of Japanese behavior described here remains disturbing because of the purposes the author ascribes to it. These boil down to keeping America’s market open and Japan’s closed, achieving sufficient economic leverage over the United States to perpetuate that result, and camouflaging the fact that these are Japan’s real goals.

If Choate is right (and I see little in Japan’s concrete actions to date to suggest that he is not), then his later chapters on Japan’s soft-core campaign for the American mind become especially worrisome--less sensational than the hard-core Washington lobbying, yet more significant perhaps in the long run.

Here he first systematically marshals, and demolishes, Japan’s current propaganda themes, including the plea of cultural uniqueness and the promise of a borderless world just around the corner where national interests won’t matter any more. He also details Japanese efforts to discredit and intimidate “revisionists” like James Fallows and Karel van Wolferen. (Since these writers, like Choate himself, are in the old U.S. tradition of hard-headed political scholarship and journalism, I find the eagerness of so many Americans to join the Japanese in silencing them--Choate even mentions a U.S. embassy official--yet another sign of decline in American political ethics.)

Finally, Choate describes Japan’s effort to instill favorable images of itself in America’s school curricula, in university teaching and think-tank research, in press coverage and television programming. Methods include direct funding, invitations to Japan, prospects of access to a closed “insider” society--and the implicit threat of withdrawal of such favors if the recipient gets too far out of line.

Why do some American intellectuals take the bait? Choate points to the need for money and access, but one also could add the sheer excitement and sense of importance--the academic jet-setting, the hobnobbing with both Japanese and American elites--which often go with “cultural bridging” to Japan. Or the fact that our Presidents, diplomats and foreign-policy establishment still hold to the old postwar notion that Japan’s military and political cooperation can be secured only through indulgence on trade issues and by flinching at every calculated threat of “anti-Americanism” in Japan. With our own executive branch on their side, why should Joe Japanologist feel any divided loyalty in taking Japanese money--or policy positions?

There is much I have seen in Japan that would reinforce its propaganda advantage over the United States.

Choate’s great and hope-inspiring service, however, has been to relocate in American conduct and in the interplay of ideas--two areas over which we retain considerable control--the roots of our present difficulties with Japan. In conclusion, he suggests eight ways to restrain the “virulent strain of political corruption--completely legal, completely unethical” and symbolized by Washington’s revolving door. On the intellectual front, Choate makes no formal proposals, but, based on his book and my own experience, I would make several observations and recommendation:

--Americans should be skeptical of the personalized charges of racism, McCarthyism or unhappy sojourns in Japan used to put down our critical analysts. The Japanese have chosen to play hardball in the American political system and will have to live with the frank criticism and open debate that comes with the turf.

--Japan’s efforts to create favorable images for itself in U.S. education and journalism are an argument for more, not less, focus on Japan in our schools, universities and mass media--solid knowledge and funding, but in American hands. As Choate points out, the Japanese simply have been filling an intellectual vacuum of our own making.

--From my own past participation I know that binational groups set up to foster friendly Japan-U.S. relations tend to be stacked with Japan fans on the American side. We should insist that any new committees for “mutual understanding” include on the U.S. team a more skeptically minded element--what Kevin L. Kearns of the State Department has called a “Team B approach”--lest we stumble once again down the old primrose path.

BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “Agents of Influence,” see the Opinion section, Page 2.