PACIFIC PERSPECTIVE : Bush Tour’s Message Invites Scorn : The American Century ended in 1980, and auto industry woes are but one result of our unwillingness to change.

President Bush’s trip to Japan, long overdue, is an important one. Ironically, among the people he brought along are the heads of the Big Three auto companies.

It won’t work. It won’t work at home, where there will be some residual sympathy for the workers but little for the men who head the companies. And there will be none in Japan, where bringing the auto executives as special guests on a trip designed to underline the unfairness of Japan’s trade policies may generate some surface action, but will primarily create far greater private scorn for us as an economic power.

The Japanese protect new, ascending and, to them, more valuable industries. The Americans protect older, declining industries.

Automobiles are a case in point. Even if the Japanese make concessions here, they will do so with secret contempt for America. To them it is America at its worst, a victory they won the hard way by paying a higher price and producing better cars against all odds.

If we were once contemptuous of them, they now, albeit privately, return that contempt. To many Japanese, being pressured by America on autos becomes an example not of their own nation’s lack of response to legitimate American trade grievances, but of the whining of overpaid executives in a nation whose best and most vigorous days are in the past.

To the Japanese, this was an industry where the leaders were obsessed not with quality and modernity of product but with financial profit. Their customers were not the people who bought the cars but the people who bought their stock. They operated with great success for a long time in a de facto monopoly (with the unions as junior partners). They did not listen to their best engineers, and they did not seek engineering or manufacturing excellence.

To the Japanese auto men, though they are polite in public discussion, the American manufacturers are men who made almost every wrong decision, were distanced from their plants and their products, and remained oblivious to historic changes in their industry. And, worst of all, who rewarded themselves far too handsomely.

In recent years, the one manager who worried them was Lee Iacocca, because he was so smart, forceful and verbal; a man, in their eyes, with both significant industrial and political skills who could possibly change not merely a company, but an industry, and finally a country. In the mid-1980s, when Chrysler made its partial comeback and Iacocca took out $31 million in compensation in a two-year period, his Japanese peers relaxed. As far as they were concerned, for all his talent and brilliance, in the end he was like the others.

When he is talking about the Japanese, Iacocca likes to talk about the need for a level playing field. What he does not understand is that by 1980, for the first time in 35 years, the playing field had become in the larger sense level. The American Century was coming to a halt. There were other people out there who did things as well or better than Americans, albeit with different capital formation, different forms of labor relations and unions, and different forms of education.

The Japanese are not always good at doing the things we ask them to do. They are as poor at being Americans as we are at being Japanese. But in the case of the auto industry, they in fact responded (in no small reason out of self-interest) rather positively to a number of our demands.

We asked them to set a limit on their imports. And they did (going predictably to more expensive cars in the middle and upper range, with greater value added per car). We asked them to harden their yen. And they did. This was a profound change within an economy as narrowly based as theirs, and one that caused great hardship on their workers.

But they overcame it by making their industrial process better and even more efficient. And, finally, we asked them to set up manufacturing plants here in America. And they did, both reluctantly and fearfully. In the end, the ventures here have met with success that has surprised both them and us, and that, because of the hardening of the yen, they achieved at bargain-basement prices.

They are good because they are good. They are process-driven. They have given manufacturing excellence a far higher priority than we did in the years when we blew our great lead. Their work force is strong and well-educated. Their domestic competition remains fierce, so they pour resources back into their plants. If a given company makes a breakthrough in terms of technology, it goes into production immediately. Many of their top executives have run their companies’ manufacturing lines.

If, in the last 10 years, some American companies, most notably Ford, have gotten the word and have dramatically improved their quality, then we have also learned that the Japanese are not a stationary target. We get better, but so do they.

It is important to remember that they beat us from a standing start, when we were rich and they were poor and we were vastly ahead of them in plant technology. Now they are ahead of us in plant technology and they are far more liquid than we.

What I am talking about here is, of course, not merely a company, General Motors, nor an industry, autos, but a country, the United States. What has happened with autos is just the tip of the iceberg. The world has changed, and the rest of the world has caught up while we remain on automatic pilot.