SPECIAL REPORT: Seeking a New World...

Last spring, an unusual series of adult comic books called “The Silent Service” turned into a minor best seller on Japan’s big-city newsstands.

The reason was its daring story line: “The Silent Service” was the saga of a Japanese navy submarine crew that obtains nuclear missiles, provokes a confrontation with the United States and declares “a war for Japan’s true independence.”

No one in Japan took the story seriously, but it seemed to connect with a growing mood of Japanese nationalism--and anti-Americanism--that has both U.S. and Japanese officials worried.

“There is anti-American emotion under the surface here,” says Atsuyuki Sassa, a former national security adviser to several Japanese prime ministers. “If there’s a real crisis, an isolation of Japan, then all of a sudden a new conservative nationalist party will arise. . . . We have no military capability now. But if we are pushed around, we can’t stop the rise of nationalism.”

A Wall Street Journal poll found that more Japanese teen-agers listed the United States as their country’s most likely enemy in war than cited the Soviet Union (30% named the United States, only 23% the Soviet Union).

The developments are worrisome by any measure. Few countries are as closely linked as the United States and Japan. Half a century after World War II, Americans and Japanese buy each other’s products, invest in each other’s securities and even admire each other’s culture; UCLA sweat shirts are as ubiquitous in Tokyo as sushi is in Westwood. Yet underneath, a subtle and dangerous resentment festers on both sides.

As a result, while U.S. and Japanese officials talk publicly of a vibrant “new partnership” between their countries, they privately warn that the relationship may be heading for its worst crisis since--well--1941.

“This is the one relationship that is as important to us as the Soviet Union or Germany--only, unlike those two, we haven’t been able to move ahead,” a senior State Department official says. “It’s been a real disappointment.”

Indeed, over the past 18 months the U.S.-Japanese relationship has seemed to grow increasingly sour. It is as if the two countries are discovering that the only glue that bound them together for 40 years was a shared fear of the Soviet Union, and now, with that gone, they have little else in common.

“I don’t think Americans understand Japan at all,” confesses a senior U.S. official in Washington. “I think it is too early to say what kind of society now exists in Japan--and how much of it is traditional, how much it has sincerely been changed by the experience from 1945 on, whether it is truly a democracy. . . .

“If you look at the way the system in fact operates, you can read about the Japanese political system in the 1920s--kind of an oligarchical system with power groups sharing and arranging things--and it’s not all that different. In the past, it led Japan in very dangerous directions. I don’t anticipate (a rebirth of U.S.-Japanese hostility). But . . . I don’t know.”

A Japanese diplomat agrees about the gulf separating the two peoples. “I was talking with one of our negotiators the other day,” he says, referring to the latest round of U.S.-Japan trade talks. “He said the people on our side despise the people on your side. They don’t have any respect for them. They say, ‘We’re talking in terms of 20 years, but the Americans think only of today.’ ”

Americans and Japanese have long criticized each other’s policies, but now they are beginning to criticize each other’s way of life--a breach of far deeper proportions.

Americans are increasingly accepting the arguments of the Japan scholars known as “revisionists,” who charge that Japan’s political and social structure are so different from America’s that they will never play “fair” by U.S. standards. Japanese are increasingly listening to nationalists who argue that American criticism is unjustified carping--and that it is Japan, not the United States, that has been making too many concessions.

A tone of mutual dislike has crept into the two countries’ endless dialogue; Americans and Japanese are beginning to use language about each other that they would never use to describe other allies--say, Britain or Germany.

When the United States complained about Japanese trade practices, for example, a leading opposition member of Parliament, Masao Kunihiro, sneered that his colleagues viewed the U.S. protests as “the whining of a crybaby.” And when Japan’s first offer of aid to the military deployment in the Persian Gulf was a disappointing $1 billion, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) denounced it as “contemptible tokenism.”

Part of the problem may be that the two countries share a set of mirror-image anxieties. Americans are upset about the idea of Japan surpassing the United States in economic strength and political clout. Surprisingly enough, many Japanese are too.

“We don’t want to be No. 1,” confesses Hideaki Kase, a prominent Japanese nationalist. “We want to stay in the back seat, because it’s much more comfortable.”

Japan liked the Cold War, it turns out. The old balance of terror gave the country a secure and stable role as an economic powerhouse that didn’t have to spend much time--or, until recently, money--on international political issues.

“The U.S.-Soviet confrontation was in our national interest,” says Sassa, the former national security adviser. “The rapprochement of the two countries makes our position very awkward. . . . All of a sudden, we’re the pacesetter, and we don’t know how to do it.”

Also, as formidable as Japan looks from afar, the island nation is driven by doubts about its future and haunted by a sense that disaster may lurk down the road. Along with the wealth that has made Tokyo throb with power and glitz have come worries about a stock market crash, a puncturing of the outsize “bubble” in the real estate market and the nagging fear that Japan’s long boom might somehow be coming to an end.

“I am inclined to believe that Japan has reached its peak in terms of material affluence,” Kunihiro says. “We are losing our work ethic. Young people today are long on hedonism and short on industriousness.” Such pessimism makes Japan reluctant to make concessions on issues such as trade.

“Deep in our psyche is . . . anxiety that we are weak, that we can be persecuted by the white Christians,” Kase says. “U.S. trade pressure, if we begin to suffer economically, will be seen as a threat here.”

As trade frictions increase, predicts State Department strategic analyst Michael Vlahos, “the Japanese will declare their national sovereignty threatened . . . at the very time they are coming to believe that Japan need not look to anyone else for (its) security.”

Nationalism is probably only natural in a country that is widely considered the world’s greatest economic success, in part because of its people’s industriousness and management genius. But many Japanese seem a bit frightened of their own nationalistic bent, as if they fear a return of the authoritarian militarism that led the country into World War II.

That fear, only just below the surface, helps explain the fury of the Japanese popular protests against Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu’s abortive proposal to send Japanese troops to the Persian Gulf. The Japanese armed forces--constitutionally known as the “Self-Defense Forces”--pushed discreetly for what would have been their first deployment outside Japan since the end of World War II. But a wide range of public opinion decisively rejected the idea.

Some Americans share those fears. Earlier this year, the commander of U.S. Marines on Okinawa, Maj. Gen. Henry C. Stackpole III, indiscreetly described his mission as keeping Japan’s impulses toward militarism under control. “No one wants a rearmed, resurgent Japan,” he says. “So we are a cap in the bottle, if you will.”

Still, there is a significant and growing lobby in favor of a larger military force. One member is former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who commissioned studies while in office on whether Japan should have an independent nuclear force. Unless the restrictions on its military power are eased, Nakasone says, “Japan cannot survive in the world.”

Gen. Hiroomi Kurisu, a former chairman of Japan’s joint chiefs of staff, agrees, noting that Japan’s economic machine depends increasingly on manufacturing plants in the neighboring countries of Southeast Asia. “Japan needs the power to protect Japanese interests in these countries,” he says.

In fact, Japan has already quietly built a significant military force. Its navy already boasts the largest surface fleet in the Far East, the third-largest in the world. When the yen is high on the foreign exchange markets, Tokyo’s defense budget ranks as the third-largest in the world--outstripped only by those of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The government does its best to keep the new military might--and the spirit accompanying it--out of sight. A reporter’s request to visit the huge naval base at Yokohama was turned down with the excuse that no ships were in port; in fact, two ships, the escort Katori and the training ship Shirane, were happily welcoming the Japanese public up the gangplank for tours.

But the Defense Agency’s proffered substitute--a visit to an air force transport base near Tokyo--proved equally revealing. There wasn’t a combat plane in sight--as the Defense Agency no doubt intended. But in the lobby of the unit’s headquarters stood a striking, heroic statue: the figure of a World War II Japanese pilot returning from a successful mission, leather flight cap in hand.

“The Americans ordered it destroyed at the end of the war,” said air force spokesman Ben Kobayashi. “But the villagers buried it instead, and after the Americans left, they dug it up.”

U.S. TRADE BALANCE WITH JAPAN (In billions, U.S. dollars) 1980: -12.4 1981: -18.6 1982: -19.5 1983: -22.3 1984: -37.7 1985: -50.8 1986: -62.6 1987: -61.2 1988: -53.8 1989: -54.4 SOURCE: REUTERS