2 UCSD Scholars Wage Intellectual Battle Over Japan

Rarely does a chaired professor at a major university level strong criticism in print at another chaired professor, himself a longtime colleague, at the same institution.

But that’s what UC San Diego literature professor Masao Miyoshi, an iconoclastic, well-known literary critic, has done to UCSD political scientist Chalmers Johnson, the intellectual guru to a growing number of critics of Japanese trading practices, the so-called “Japan bashers.”

The two are on the cutting edge of the national debate over how Japan and the United States will co-exist, given their separate cultural traditions, and where to draw the line between legitimate criticism and rhetoric that resonates with racial and historical stereotypes.

Miyoshi, in a forthcoming book, argues that Western critics of Japan make oversimplified and sometimes racist statements when they draw broad generalizations about Japanese culture, behavior and values from specific economic situations.

Although Miyoshi himself agrees that Johnson and others--including American journalist James Fallows and Dutch writer Karel Van Wolferen--are on target with many points concerning Japanese economic behavior, he asserts that at times they go “beyond the pale” by expecting Japan to fit into an arrogant “Eurocentric” view of the world order--and that they conveniently ignore the uglier parts of the West’s own trade history.

The so-called Japan-bashers share a common theme--that Japan’s economic philosophy does not and never will follow the pattern of Western capitalism and that therefore the United States--and other Western nations--should adopt extraordinary measures to deal with Japanese trading practices. Their views clash with the traditional views of American scholars of Japan--now sometimes labeled as “apologists”--who see Japan becoming more like Western nations over time.

Johnson, no shrinking violet himself, has dismissed Miyoshi’s criticism as uninformed, saying in an interview that his colleague has “poached” into disciplinary areas that “he doesn’t know anything about.”

Although clearly irritated by the manuscript, which Miyoshi sent him for review as a professional courtesy, Johnson said he would basically ignore it as “irrelevant.”

“I can hardly restrain my enthusiasm for it,” Johnson said with undisguised sarcasm, “but I find it laughable that he finds me and others insufficiently pious about Japan.”

For Johnson, his view that Japan no longer should be treated with kid gloves, that Japan “was not remade in the American image” during six years of post-World War II occupation, does not carry with it the seeds of cultural arrogance and racism.

The interplay between Miyoshi and Johnson highlights their unusual relationship that began when both were well-known professors at UC Berkeley for more than two decades and has continued after both were recruited to UCSD as part of an effort to promote Japan studies at the La Jolla campus.

“Both are well-known, even brilliant in their fields, and both I suspect have a begrudging respect for each other,” said campus veteran James K. Lyon, professor of literature and provost of UCSD’s Fifth College.

Miyoshi holds the Hajime Mori Endowed Chair in English, Japanese and Comparative Literature at UCSD. Johnson is the first faculty member named to another endowed position, the Rohr Professor of Pacific International Relations in the UCSD Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IRPS).

Miyoshi heads the campus’s interdisciplinary Japanese Studies program, and Johnson is a member of its faculty, and they both have lobbied for greater resources to make the program more visible at UCSD.

But they often fail to see eye to eye, not only on political issues--Miyoshi opposed the Vietnam War and supports the goals of the Palestine Liberation Organization while Johnson proudly describes himself as a Republican and a nationalist--but on academic issues as well.

“He calls (my) school IR BS ,” Johnson noted of Miyoshi’s differing views over the direction the professional school should take in balancing a curriculum of economics, politics and humanities.

Miyoshi, a Japan-born specialist on Victorian literature, has moved in recent years away from the traditional academic view of literature. That traditional approach argues that there are objective measures and standards that hold for all literature, regardless of the culture that produced it. But those “objective” measures, Miyoshi argues, too often turn out to be Western measures.

Miyoshi plans to lecture at a half-dozen universities on his new book. The book, “Off Center,” to be published next year by the Harvard University Press, centers largely on cultural assumptions that both Japanese and American critics have used in judging Japanese literature.

In doing so, he expands his argument to include the so-called Japan bashers. He gives them credit for for realizing that Japan is different from the United States culturally but takes them to task for their conclusions that therefore Japan should be placed on morally inferior ground.

Outside reviewers of his manuscript for Harvard Press have lauded his willingness to argue that, just as Japanese literature should not be analyzed according to Western views, Japanese trade should not be seen as either virtuous or devious based on Western beliefs.

Miyoshi does make a point to credit Johnson with careful scholarship in his pioneering work of the early 1980s that showed how Japan invented new government institutions different from those in America and used them to promote industrial financing, business groupings and a savings system.

Johnson posits that Japan is not going to willingly open its markets as widely as has the United States or adopt American-style governance--where regulation rather than development is the rule for industry--or turn into a similar consumer-driven economy. As a consequence, he argues that the United States must create its own national industrial policy and have the political will to retaliate economically against Japan if that nation refuses to recognize free trade principles.

Miyoshi agrees that it’s unfair for one nation to engage in one-sided economic expansion, as Japan increasingly has done during the past decade. But he is highly critical of Johnson’s rhetoric about Japan’s differences in public forums, where Johnson is fond of saying, “The Cold War is over and Japan won!” as well as the way Johnson’s works have been used by the popular media to fan a view of Japan as an imminent danger to the West.

Writes Miyoshi, Johnson “is uninterested in recalling that the West’s domination over the rest of the world lasted for more than two centuries, and, during that time, trade imbalance--exploitation and expropriation, to be more accurate--was also taken for granted.” If Johnson and others want to view such trading practices as “unfair and immoral transgressions,” then why do they ignore similar practices by the West historically? Miyoshi asks.

“This historical imbalance is as glaring as the trade inequity that the West now protests,” Miyoshi writes. “And it pays little attention to the fact that the Japanese are, right or wrong, fully mindful of the West’s historical mercantilism and imperialism when they engage in (trade) that now looks so blatant to Americans in the last decade of the 20th Century”

“Chalmers is really good at making a trade analysis, but in every one of the trade issues, as soon as you start generalizing, cultural criticism creeps into the argument,” Miyoshi said in an interview.

Miyoshi is particularly critical of viewing free trade as a universal, and not a Western, concept. It never existed in a pure form, he said. “Rather, it was the right of the West to invade and exploit. Now that the natives have grown up and the Japanese have said they will infiltrate the world’s markets, Johnson and others rightly point out that the Japanese should not deny reciprocity.

“But, when he and others take it beyond that to generalities about Japanese behavior and culture, they are off base.”

In that category he clearly places Fallows, who argues that trade problems stem from Japanese people placing group and personal loyalties over Western ideals of charity, democracy and world brotherhood.

For one thing, Miyoshi says, Fallows oversimplifies the Japanese culture’s preferences. And secondly, he argues, who is to say that the Western ideals are better?

“It’s not whether the West or Japan is now morally right,” Miyoshi writes, “but in what relationships history has placed the West and Japan, and how the world as a whole is going to be affected by them in the coming century.”

Johnson, a world-recognized scholar on both China and Japan dating from his years as chair of Berkeley’s political science department, fired back with equal enthusiasm during an interview.

“I think he resents the cultural imperialism of English-language modes of thought, of English-language cultural domination of much of the Third World,” Johnson said.

“I don’t like the term ‘Japan-basher’ because it reflects the sense of Japan as victim, and I think that we (critics) are the only real friends that Japan have because we are showing that, unless changes occur, Japan and the U.S. are on a collision course” politically.

“But he can’t deal with those of us who have the nerve to criticize . . . here is a guy who left Japan, who then wants to be critical of Japan himself, but who is irritated by others (non-Japanese) who dare to be.”

Johnson defended the major Japan critics as people who have seriously tried to study what makes Japan different economically from the West.

“I have looked at labor relations, for example, and how it has moved across cultures” as the Japanese have brought elements to their industries in the U.S. “I’ve looked at their savings rates, and their quality control” and their relation to U.S. practices.

“That Miyoshi should be some kind of a cultural czar . . . well, he is not making cultural criticism but making ethical judgments about what he believes is good.”

Johnson concedes that the so-called bashers do provide intellectual ammunition for those who want to see the U.S.-Japan relationship in racial terms.

“Racism is ideology, it is the politicization of an ethnic marking, and a substitute for serious thought,” he said. “I don’t think that I can be held responsible for racist interpretations that could be put on what I am saying. I’m satisfied that I’ve walked the narrow line, and I’ve been more sensitive to this than Miyoshi has been when he spouts off.

“I don’t poach on his (academic) turf but he’s poaching on mine.”