Japan Bashing and the ‘Good Old American Con Game’

OK, so you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take it anymore.

You’re tired of reading about American companies that have lost to Japanese competitors who just won’t play by the rules. Worse, you’re sick of seeing those pictures of hard-working Americans standing out in the cold with their hands in their pockets while sleek, imported Japanese cars zip by. You’re afraid you’re going to end up supporting your brother-in-law.

You’re going to do something about it: By God, you’re going to buy American. And you’re going to start with the television. We invented the darn things, after all, and--except for that English stuff on PBS--we still make all the programs worth watching.

So, come Saturday, you’re down at the discount store shopping for a new TV. The big Mitsubishi looks great. But when the salesman tells you that the Zenith next to it is the only television still made by an American company, the choice is made.

But when you get your Zenith--a perfectly good TV, by the way--home, what have you got? You have a television made in Mexico by Mexican workers being paid wages that would insult even your brother-in-law. The Mitsubishi you passed up was made by American workers employed in a plant in Santa Ana. They are among the more than 58,000 Southern Californians who work in local manufacturing concerns owned by Japanese investors.

You’ve just crossed into the twilight zone of modern global economics, and you bought your ticket from a good old American con game that historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style” of American politics.

At the moment, it’s called Japan bashing. It is the grease speeding our slide into economic warfare with Japan. Worse, its more virulent expressions threaten those hard-won principles of legal equality and social amity that make a decent life possible in a pluralistic, multiracial society--particularly here in California.

Some of the most shameful moments in 20th-Century American life were spawned by prejudice against people of Asian descent and, especially, against Japanese-Americans, 120,000 of whom were incarcerated during World War II, even though they were innocent of any crime or disloyalty. It does not require a great deal of empathy to imagine how the survivors of that infamy and their families must shudder as they listen to the brutish Japan bashing that has passed for political rhetoric during Los Angeles’ wrangle over Sumitomo’s bid for a light rail contract or Washington’s endless bleating over the U.S. auto industry’s largely self-inflicted wounds.

Clearly, Japan and the United States are divided over some genuine economic issues. But it is hard not to see a racial component in many of our political leaders’ frantic attempts to exaggerate those divisions into a chasm. It is hard not to see racism in the insistence that Japanese attitudes toward trade are monolithic and uniformly intractable.

As Akio Morita, chairman of Sony Corp., said in a recent address, Japanese companies “can compete viciously on price because they pay their employees less for longer hours, operate on smaller profit margins and pay smaller dividends.” The trade surpluses built on such practices have become a source of international friction, Morita admitted, and the “crucial burden of change lies with Japan.”

Statements such as this seldom are reported in the American press--and never quoted by our politicians. On the other hand, when an aging Japanese parliamentarian called U.S. workers lazy in some rambling, offhanded remarks, the headlines were blinding.

A similar double standard prevails in our attitudes toward the U.S. activities of non-Japanese foreign firms. For example, in the furor created by Sumitomo’s successful competitive bid for the $122-million Green Line contract, no one seemed to notice that the job of building the system’s complex switching apparatus went to a company owned by Italians. They also ignored the fact that Sumitomo employs more than 1,000 Americans and, last year, exported more than $1 billion in U.S.-made products.

When Nintendo’s Hiroshi Yamauchi and Miru Arakawa recently offered to put up $60 million to help Seattle keep the Mariners in town, organized baseball treated them as if they’d made an indecent proposal. Apparently, Japanese money would contaminate the American national pastime in a way that the Canadian money that supports franchises in Toronto and Montreal has not.

British firms have had a particularly free ride in their American adventures. Not too long ago, Brooks Bros., whose signature sack suit and button-down shirt is the virtual uniform of the American Establishment, was acquired by the English clothing chain Marks and Spencer. No one thought much of it. If a Japanese retailer had purchased the store that once dressed Abraham Lincoln and Clark Gable, the symbolic indignity would have become a staple of stump speeches coast to coast.

Then there’s the case of the British conglomerate Grand Metropolitan PLC, whose callous mistreatment of its California workers is strikingly documented by accounting professor James W. Donovan in the current issue of the New Oxford Review. Grand Met is the world’s eighth-largest producer of food products. Its American subsidiaries include such familiar brands as Pillsbury, Burger King and Haagen-Dazs ice cream.

It also owns Green Giant. One year ago, it closed that company’s Watsonville processing plant, throwing 375 workers, most of them women, out of work. Shortly afterward, Green Giant reopened the facility--in Irapuato, Mexico. The Americans were paid $7.50 an hour; their replacements get $4 a day. It takes $26 per day to supply a Mexican family of four with the bare necessities of life. In 1990, the last year for which audited financial statements are available, Grand Met had a net income of $1.8 billion and paid a dividend of $1.85 per share.

Had Green Giant’s parent firm been a Japanese rather than a British conglomerate, what would the reaction have been?