Just Another Ordinary Different Place : A Meditation on the Soul of Japan, and the Myths that Hide It from Both Americans and the Japanese

We are all feeling the elephant. We are like the blind men in the fable, one touching the trunk, another the tail, another the leg, saying snake or vine or tree ; except that we all have our eyes wide open, staring and intent, so that perhaps we are looking too hard; and there are far more of us than three. For foreigners in general, and especially for Americans, Japan presents itself as a singularity in need of explanation. I have been, for example, to Israel, a country whose culture is as unique and strange as any on God’s crazy planet, but I felt content to watch and sometimes to laugh or shake my head. I felt no compulsion to explain. Japan is no more singular than that, it is no more strange, but we who come here see it as a knot to be untied, a puzzle to be solved; and so we go to work, each putting a hand out to touch, each looking for the whole within which the parts make sense. Of course, as is always the case, no two of us who examine the beast see quite the same thing or look at it in the same way; but whereas usually we blame ourselves for this and name as culprit the vagaries of human understanding, in the case of Japan we blame the elephant, and call it a mystery.

We have been mystified by Japan for at least a century, but at no time has our mystification run deeper or mattered more than now. Japan is one of the great powers, after years of merely promising that it would be. It has become, depending on which patch of the elephant you touch, a threat to other nations or an example to them, a challenge to the so-called “Western” way or a reaffirmation of the Protestant work ethic, the Jewish commitment to education, the strong Catholic family. We are here in droves now, all looking for the “real” Japan. Is it “really” a democracy, or is it something else, a regime built on hidden coercion and enforced conformity? Is it really capitalism, is it really a market economy, or is it something new, a third way between Adam Smith and Karl Marx? Is Japan free? Is it benign? Or is it dangerous?

Sometimes I fear that, in the din and the crush that we foreigners make, we see and touch mostly each other. I stayed only six months in Japan, but there were moments when I felt that every American intellectual was either in Japan or at home writing about it. For the first time, interest in the beast’s anatomy and internal systems has moved outside the circle of professors and diplomats who specialize, and into the reading public. And there, the specialists fear, as they look at the recent spatelet of books and articles creating a small but respectable commotion (“Rising Sun,” “The Coming War With Japan,” “In the Shadow of the Rising Sun”), the discussion is getting out of control. Well, out of control is just the way it ought to be. Japan is a major power, and the old relationship with the United States has become suffocating for both parties, and this means we will have to reassess Japan--not as an exotic island on the edge of the world, but as a large and powerful country. And the “we” no longer means “we specialists”: It means you and me, the citizens and voters and business people who must learn what to believe and feel about the place. And so in Japan I put out my hand to touch the elephant and tried to learn how I ought to feel.

Anyone who reads about Japan is likely to have noticed that there are the people who have been branded “Japan bashers” (an invidious expression) and the ones who have been branded “Japan handlers” (also invidious), and you can barely believe that they are talking about the same place. Japan is big and powerful and unstoppable and incapable of any but the most technical sort of finesse; it gobbles up foreign markets implacably, it earns mountains of cash, it grows and grows. (What does it want?) But it is also small and vulnerable and hesitant and delicate; it is peace-loving and eager to please; its people are gentle and want nothing more than to get along with each other and to be liked abroad. There are two prevalent pictures, and they aren’t consistent. Yet both seem truthful. Something is wrong. Isn’t it?

From far away, there is “Japan.” It is discrete, unitary, has goals and intentions and methods. In newspapers it is often spoken of as a person: “Japan” is beating American companies and buying Rockefeller Center, “Japan” believes that economic power is the key to national strength, “Japan” feels shame but not guilt for its wartime misdeeds. This is a natural way to talk, but treacherous. There is, after all, no “Japan.” Enter Japan and almost immediately “Japan” disaggregates.

The Tokyo in which one finds oneself on the first night is clean, except for cigarette butts. It is not beautiful. In stores and on signs the color sense is superb: rich primary colors well matched. The streets are crowded with black sedans, which are status symbols and so are new and spotless. Hair is moussed. Middle-aged men are not quite so prone to overflow around the middle. One notes on the street a sense of poise and self-confidence, especially among the younger men and women, who dress with great style and care. One would sense instinctively, even knowing nothing else, that this is a society in its building phase. There is a sense, among these men and women, of a people who have hit their stride and know it. Admiration is commanded. Awe, even. This was all rubble 45 years ago. Tokyo throbs with a feeling that what is happening is happening here. The only city that compares to it that way is New York, but New York has a stench of decay and fear.

You feel perfectly safe among the people, and also completely on the outside. As you walk in Roppongi, a busy night-life district, the closest thing to human contact is a boy’s “Hi,” followed by an excited smile when his magic word elicits the same in return. You notice something different and realize it’s that people are quite unfazed at being looked at. Within reason, you can look them straight in the face as you pass on the street. This is provocative if tried in the United States, where eye contact makes women embarrassed or fearful and men hostile or suspicious. But the Japanese either don’t notice or don’t care. This unaccustomed freedom to gaze raises mixed feelings. On the one hand, it is testimony to Japan’s safeness. Someone who looks at you is probably not going to hurt you. In Japan you are about an eighth as likely to be murdered as in America, a thirtieth as likely to be raped. On the other hand, one feels slighted, conspicuous yet ignored. I was always a little startled when I was addressed from time to time--if a bus driver wanted my attention, for instance--as gaijin-san, “Mr. Foreigner.” I suppose I felt the way a black man might feel if he were addressed as “Mr. Negro.” Gaijin is very frank. Literally it means “outside person,” and nothing could be more apt. It is a close relative of an equally frank and still more important word, gaikoku, “foreign country.” Gaikoku is nothing but gai plus koku, “outside” plus “nation.” Outnation, outland. Thus the more polite expression for “foreigner,” gaikoku-jin, literally means “outlander.” And that is just how one often feels among them, especially at first: outlandish. On the street in front of the Labor Ministry I was hurrying forward and brushed past a man whose cigarette scraped my sleeve and left ashes. Instantly he said, “Excuse me,” in English. He could barely have had a chance to look at me, yet he registered that I spoke English.

It must be reported that the Japanese are exceptionally beautiful. Though generalizing is hazardous, there is a certain type of beauty that is recognizably Japanese: balanced, self-contained, demurely radiant. At their best, the women are lithe and focused and have warm, dark eyes, which are shy at first but soon sparkle. The young men make no attempts whatever to hide their vanity. At their best, they have compact frames, with broad shoulders riding above slender waists, and perfect, straight carriage and a certain swaggerless lightness of bearing. The skin reminds you that, after all, the Japanese are Pacific Islanders, like the Balinese or Polynesians: It is very smooth in texture, glowing gold-brown in color, and ideally set off by the thick black hair. One feels that no other combination--skin brown-gold-pink, hair crisp black--could be as right.

It is frustrating and grueling to come here as an outsider and try to work the system: All the knobs and levers and buttons are on the inside. To enter any Japanese social system you must first get past the sign on the front door, which invariably says, “By introduction only.” I cannot think of Japan without thinking of Kochan, the master sushi chef. To screen out the frivolous he required an introduction, and he hid all his fish under the counter. When strangers wandered unintroduced into his tiny Ginza restaurant, he would tell them he was fresh out of everything. I saw this happen once. A couple came in asking for a table. Kochan shook his head: Sorry, no fish today. They knew he was lying, since the restaurant was full of people eating fish--but it was a polite lie, understood for what it was and therefore acceptable.

If you try to work the Japanese system without being properly introduced, the polite lie is what you’ll get, or maybe just a stony silence. However, if you are content to learn, to explore, to talk, rather than to compete or to join or to operate, then the Japanese lay themselves open to you often with a frankness that takes you aback. One expects remoteness, indirection, suspicion masked by extravagant politeness. In fact, one finds rather the opposite, precisely because one is foreign. I asked people’s salaries. (Perhaps salaries are a big secret only in America, where money is measure of worth.) I asked people whether their lives were satisfying, and here, too, got the truth. An innkeeper in the mountains told me that his dream was to travel, but like many Japanese he took only a few days’ vacation every year, and those were enough to take him and the family only as far as nearby Fukuoka. Work was all he had known. I asked him how he would feel about the life he had led if he learned it was soon to end. “ Kanashii, “ he said--sad. “We Japanese have satisfied our stomachs and our pockets,” he said, “but not our hearts.”

In the course of weeks or months, the feeling of being on the surface here may diminish. In my own case, the glass wall broke one night a few weeks after I arrived. Wholly of its own accord, the neon surface of Tokyo cracked open and Japan never again seemed impenetrable. In central Tokyo I stumbled into a yakitori restaurant, a place full of Japanese men and cigarette smoke, and when I said I was alone the hostess put me at the counter. The man on the stool to my right smiled unsurely at me, as though he wanted to say something. He was young and had an open face with a beaming smile and bright eyes, though I recall his eyes were red that night from the day’s work. I said, or tried to say, that I couldn’t read the menu. He nodded. At that moment his companion, whose seat I had just taken, returned. I tried to give back the seat but the newcomer gestured emphatically “no” and sat down on my left. The men I was now sandwiched between turned out to be Messrs. Nakahara and Sasaki. They were both salary men, low-level white-collar workers at a small trading company nearby. The older bought and sold machine tools, the younger would do the same in five or 10 years. Sasaki, the young smiler, was 26, about 5 feet, 8 inches tall, and stylishly dressed in an unvented suit with wide shoulders and full-cut pants. Nakahara was 38, short, and dressed in the merely serviceable kind of suit that men of his generation typically wear. Good will having been established, the problem was to communicate.

This proved possible, though it required some ingenuity. That I spoke barely any Japanese, and that they had only a miscellany of English words and phrases (“I haven’t seen you lately.” “Just a moment please.” “OK OK OK!”) made communication difficult. Still, we managed to say quite a bit. It was not, granted, the sort of conversation to which Johnson treated Boswell:

I: Where does Nakahara-san live?

Nakahara: In an apartment. Forty-five minutes away, by train. Very small, 14 tatamis, plus bath. (This would probably be under 300 square feet.) With wife. Small but close to work.

I: Very small, yes?

Nakahara: Yes. When children come, we move. Expensive to live in Japan. Jona-san has a big American house?

I: No. Small apartment. Bigger than Nakahara-san’s but still small. Both countries, young people, same problem, expensive house. And Sasaki-san lives where?

Sasaki: In Tokyo, just across the river.

I: This beer, Japanese beer, is OK. But not so good. Bass Ale: much better.

Nakahara and Sasaki: Oh.

And so the conversation went. It was scintillating, although you had to be there. After a couple hours, Nakahara wrote a time and date on his business card. In two weeks, same place at 6:30, we would meet again. I went off into the night whistling and exuberant. I liked these two, the genial Nakahara and bright-eyed Sasaki. Two weeks later, when I came back, the restaurant was closed and my salary men didn’t show up.

I did, at their office, a few days later. The place was entirely uncarpeted--all shiny linoleum. The furniture was metal. The men sat at desks alongside one another, without dividers or any other concessions to privacy. Add sleeve garters and eyeshades, and you were in an American office from the ‘20s or ‘30s. At least by American standards, Japanese singularly lack vanity about their offices. It was not uncommon to find executives sharing offices with their assistants, or even two assistants. And it was quite common indeed for the boss to be set off from his charges only by a desk placed a little farther from the others, or next to the window. If the Japanese are good at working together, it must be partly because they sit together.

The salary men had found the restaurant closed and assumed that I wouldn’t meet them. My appearance in their office, they later assured me, occasioned no little surprise among their co-workers. We went out for dinner again and then again. Communication became steadily easier. We had a birthday dinner for Sasaki. We discussed the perils of traditional Japanese toilets (which American travelers sometimes describe as ceramic holes in the ground), the travails of hair loss, vacations. (They were entitled to extended vacations but never used them; if they were gone for more than a long weekend, bosses would growl, colleagues would get overburdened. Nakahara had not had a whole week’s vacation since his honeymoon. “I don’t get no satisfaction” he said, in Rolling Stones English.) We inspected Sasaki’s life plan. Thus did we spend evenings in Tokyo, this improbable pair of honest salary men and I.

You mustn’t hurry through Japan. Not only will you miss the show, but people will be annoyed with you. To welcome you they will be generous with their time, and if you are always getting up and rushing off, they will wonder what it is that is so much more important. Rarely do people want to dive right into business; they share time together first, so as to establish a commitment. Social time scales, too, are extended. For the foreign visitor, the question of how to leave parties becomes a delicate one. On weekends, I would be invited for an afternoon party beginning at 2 or 3, and it would still be going strong at 8. Finally, I would make excuses to leave, feeling like a member of the old Supreme Soviet who is barging out before the end of the party leader’s five-hour speech. The truth was that I had no pressing business at home. It was just that at such a party I was “getting nothing done.” To me, efficiency has always meant moving through tasks as quickly as possible and then counting them up at the end of the day. I am always leaving jobs three-quarters finished--finished enough; there’s so much to do--and hurrying on to the next thing. This is not the Japanese way. The Japanese reminded me of a remark attributed to Gypsy Rose Lee, the striptease artist, who said that anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.

In Japan, efficiency has more to do with perfection than with speed. The famous Japanese preoccupation with quality control is, I think, the natural outgrowth of an aesthetic that calls for every detail to be dwelt upon as though essential and every moment to be wholly occupied. The task at hand is everything: All thought of other tasks and other moments is to be banished. The Japanese sense of beauty is sometimes described as “refined,” but a much better word is “concentrated.” The aesthetic of concentration can be seen on assembly lines and in schools. Its purest expression, however, is in the no , which at its best is a startling experience. No is an ancient kind of drama, passed down intact from the 14th Century. Texts are brief (you can read a whole no play in 10 minutes), stories are simple, music sparse and unmelodious. Plays may lack even action and character. Where concentration is lacking in performance, the no is excruciatingly dull, not to mention strange. But when concentration is present, the no is enthralling, mesmerizing, commanding. To my amazement, I sat riveted one day as an actor did ostensibly nothing but walk with almost inhuman slowness around the periphery of the stage. I say “ostensibly” because in fact the actor was “doing” a great deal. So intently did he control his rhythm and step, so utterly had he mastered even the slightest extraneous finger twitch or lip tremor or eye movement, that one could imagine his procession continuing untouched through a tornado. Between each footfall, a suspension, a lifetime. It’s no wonder, I suppose, that a culture that can bring off so improbable a non-drama can also build a good car. A car happens to be useful. The no or the tea ceremony is not particularly useful. But from the point of view of the Japanese aesthetic, they are all beautiful in much the same way. The beauty is not so much in the product as in the concentration achieved in the making of it.

One must always be careful to distinguish between people and social institutions. I liked the Japanese--much more, indeed, than I had planned to. I did not much like their social institutions, although I came to distrust my feelings about them, since success is hard to argue with. The Japanese are quite open and transparent; but their social institutions are quite otherwise. For the foreign explainers, it is the social systems that are elusive and must be grasped. It is they that confuse and confound us. I found that I began to understand them when I grasped the meaning of Japan’s national lies.

Lies in a mild sense, a non-moral sense. Lies not in the sense of an attempt to deceive others, but of a useful self-deception: a social myth, a public belief, that is necessary and convenient, like Christendom’s God and heaven. You can hardly learn more about someone than by looking at the lies he tells himself.

The first is the myth of homogeneity, recounted from parent to child as folklore and invoked as the explanation for everything from economic success to a low crime rate to good schools. In its stronger form it is a tribalist lie, insofar as it says that people come in types and that “our” type, the Japanese type, has something in common because of common ancestry. This virus is in the air in Japan, and often foreigners who stay in the country catch it. One bright young American I met announced to me earnestly that implacable self-discipline is in the Asian blood. Of course, the truth is that common blood is no real commonality at all. In all cases, including the Japanese case, the differences between individuals within presumed kinds are vastly greater than the similarities.

Nonetheless, although I thought I knew better, I was startled by the enormous differences I found, because I had read so much about the people’s conformity and sameness. Homogeneity of broad physical type was the only kind that I found, and even this broke down into meaninglessness in particular cases. I found no fundamental similarity, no template, no recipe for “Japanese-ness.” The closest thing to such a recipe, perhaps, is the general belief that one exists: the belief that somehow wareware nihonjin, “we Japanese,” are all alike.

Time and again I talked to Japanese, especially of the intellectual class, who saw themselves as the rare individualist in a crowd of conformists; and after I had lost count of the rare individualists I had met, I began to get suspicious. One day I was giving a speech in northern Japan. The subject turned to Japan’s rice market, which is closed to imports and which everyone knows is sacred. I asked how many people favored liberalizing the market--and the great majority of hands went up. I was surprised, but the audience was more so: Each had assumed he was the rarity.

Undeniably you do see fewer outward signs of human diversity in Japanese society than in American society, but that is an artifice, a strategy. The myth of homogeneity isn’t substantially true in any non-trivial way, but it is behaviorally true, insofar as it shapes expectations and pretense. Why do people work so hard to preserve it? In order to cope with the most basic of all social problems: the problem of conflict.

Japan relies more heavily on conflict-avoidance than any society I have ever seen. It seeks to deny the reality of conflict by emphasizing, at every turn, the fundamental alikeness of “we Japanese” and dismissing differentness as incidental. Conflict-avoidance is the meaning of shoganai . I first heard shoganai from my friend, Nakahara. In the yakitori restaurant, he told me how he used to spend three hours each day on jammed trains commuting to and from work. He would rise early in the morning and come home after his wife had gone to bed. Every day, the same ordeal. A hard life, I said, baiting him to complain. “ Shoganai, “ he said. I didn’t understand, so he wrote it down in capital letters. SHOGANAI. “It can’t be helped.” Actually, people do help things here, all the time, the same as they do everywhere. The salary man, after all, had finally moved closer to town. But they would not expect to help things. In America, if helping things means confronting someone, then so be it--we confront. In Japan, when helping things would engender conflict, then perhaps things “cannot be helped.” Better to steer around the confrontation.

An American I know, who lives in Tokyo with his Japanese wife, told me a story. One day his wife discovered that their new dry cleaner was overbilling them. My friend was furious. He was going straight to the cleaner’s to complain. “No, no,” his wife said firmly. To confront the cheater directly would only result in heated denials and a messy scene. Nothing good could come of it. “That is not the way to handle this,” she said. “Not in Japan.” The next morning, when the boy came from the cleaner’s, there was no laundry for him. Next day, still no laundry. And the next and the next. And on the following day, the dry cleaner himself appeared at their door. “It seems,” he said, after abjectly apologizing, “there has been a mistake and you were overcharged. I am refunding your money, and of course you have my personal assurance that this will not happen again.” My American friend was impressed. Not only had their money been returned, but simply by withholding business they had let the chiseler know he had been found out--with no fuss, no row, no confrontation. Now that the dry cleaner had learned his lesson, they could begin the business relationship fresh. “No,” his wife replied, just as firmly as before. “He tried to cheat us. We will never use him again. Nothing can change that.”

But I see that I am falling into just the trap that I meant to avoid. I am making Japan sound like Mars.

Everyone falls into this trap, lured by a second national lie--really an international lie, promulgated within the country and perpetuated without: Japan is Different. Not different in the way that Mexico or Morocco is different, but in its values and culture a place apart, a place alien and vaguely lunar, a deep counterpoint to the West, a society standing slightly outside of and at an angle to the rest of the universe, a place where logic loses its traction and the conventional forces of economics do not apply and the social geometry is non-Euclidean, and so forth and so on. There is altogether too much of this.

I began to suspect that people were going overboard about Japan’s strangeness early on, when I made the inevitable Yankee pilgrimage to the baseball stadium to see the Yomiuri Giants play the Yakult Swallows. I had read about the fans’ doing everything in creepy collectivist unison, cheering together and singing together and holding up props together in a weird triumph of organization over fun. “Here was passion by remote control,” wrote the essayist Pico Iyer of his own Giants game pilgrimage. “And every time I saw 10,000 fans filling the air in unison with black and yellow bullhorns, I found myself shuddering a little at the militarism of the display--and at its beauty.” No: He has missed the point. The younger fans massed in the cheap seats (half the stadium for each team’s fans) do hold up umbrellas, for example, in organized waves, chant under the direction of cheerleaders with whistles, and sing songs and pound plastic noisemakers en masse. Yet a triumph of organization over fun it assuredly is not. The enjoyment was so evident that I longed to join in. And the scene had a haunting familiarity, which at last resolved itself into a memory: In the ‘70s, we kids used to go again and again to see “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and we brought our bag of tricks and rituals. On cue, everyone would flick cigarette lighters, throw rice, sway and sing together. The baseball fans were having just the same kind of party, but doing it bigger and going all the way.

There is a disturbing side of Japan: a traditional, pre-liberal side. The baseball teams often train their players to the point of pain and exhaustion on the grounds that this will build strength of spirit. In high school hazings, underclassmen are humiliated and bullied on the understanding that they will get their own turn at bullying when they become upperclassmen. In the ever-present Japanese seniority systems, the young suffer and pay their dues and learn to endure and accept and later inflict the same. The bully-worshiping portion of Japan is only one sector of the rich and diverse Japanese moral geography. Yet I was not in Japan a week before this sector had drawn my attention and seduced me with its vaguely fascist magnetism, much as the crocodiles and rattlesnakes charm children at the zoo. As it happened, I had been recently reading Plato, and when I saw the traditional Japanese values--strength through suffering, strength through hierarchy, strength through individual submersion in the group--I recognized what I beheld. “Athens versus Sparta,” I thought. “Is that not the metaphor?”

“My law,” says Plato (in the “Laws”), “will be made with a general view to the best interests of society at large . . . as I rightly hold the single person and his affairs of minor importance.” No finer statement of the Japanese collectivist ethic could be imagined. Plato speaks lovingly of the militarized society, of “the habit of never so much as thinking to do one single act apart from one’s fellows, of making life, to the very uttermost, an unbroken consort, society, and community of all with all.” Justice would be that state of affairs in which everyone does well what is appropriate to him--meaning a state in which everyone knows his place and does his duty, down through the generations. This is all, of course, redolent of feudalism, in which each takes his place in the Great Chain of Being. It is also redolent of Confucianism, with its emphasis on hierarchy and proper place. But the idea that these values are somehow outside the compass of Western thought is only to be laughed at. No one would have admired the traditional Japanese values more than Plato, who would have seen in them the gleaming Sparta of his dreams.

One day I met an American woman who taught English composition at a Japanese women’s college. After assigning some readings on discrimination, she asked her students to write essays about it. A number of them replied that this was impossible for them, since they had never experienced discrimination and so could not understand how it felt. Imagine her amazement: In Japan, less than in even the very recent past but considerably more than in America, women are second-class citizens. Many of them now work, but that means they have two jobs--the one at the office and the one at home--for whatever else she may be, a woman is a housewife no matter what. In Japan, a few women work in the elite, but most still work for it, many of them as office ladies, O.L.s, the ubiquitous, chirpy-cute tea servers. On TV commercials and in service jobs, the Japanese woman is Helium Voice: a baby-talking child/mother who speaks in a piping squeak that one would have thought unattainable without a surgeon’s help. No wonder, then, that my American acquaintance was astonished. How could her students be so blind as to believe they had never experienced discrimination? Americans are provincial that way. They do not understand that for the more traditional majority of Japanese women--as, indeed, for the most conservative of American women--there was no discrimination to see. Hierarchic values perceive unfairness when someone is doing what is not appropriate for a person of his type and station. The American teacher’s puzzled students would not expect a woman to do what a man would do, any more than they would expect a lamb to do what a lion would do. (Is it “unfair” that lions eat zebras but lambs do not?) Sometimes people say that the traditional Japanese values entail no notion of fairness, but this is wrong. They simply do not entail the liberal notion of fairness, in which particular persons are interchangeable. What is fair depends on who you are and where you are positioned.

Today, however, the traditional values are merely tiles in the Japanese mosaic, and no longer the dominant hue. Over time, as people got used to going through the motions of liberalism and as attitudes followed practice (they always do), Japanese society was liberalized. Although the traditional values have not disappeared, layer upon layer of liberal sentiment has been dropped on them. I came to Japan wanting to know how I ought to feel about the place. I left knowing only how not to feel. Frightened: that is how not to feel.

In the end, I am inclined to say that Japan is different, yes, but not especially different. Mexico is different. Israel is different. Arkansas is different. Japan is different. And that’s the whole story. Japan is, alas and thank God, just another ordinary different place, peopled with all the familiar types. And if you say that Japan is unique and always harp on how utterly unlike America it is, I will want to fight the point: not because you may be misunderstanding Japan, but because you will be failing to look our own country in the eye.

From Japan, the Americans look more and more like a bunch of lazy whiners, no longer willing to try their hardest and sacrifice in order to be the best. Within the mantle of exaggeration is, I now think, a molten core of truth. Americans on average still try hard and care about their country. Yet too many people are more interested in scavenging for carrion or gaming the system than in building a better country the old-fashioned way, with sweat. Saving is low, investment is low. High school students do in a week about as much homework as their Japanese counterparts do in a day, yet no one seems to expect much better of them. Racially and ethnically organized political groups are busy listing all the perks and positions they are entitled to by dint of being oppressed. Labor unions call for protection from foreigners who work too hard for too little. Executives overpay themselves shamelessly. Fathers walk away and families fall apart.

I do not mean to exaggerate. The United States is blessed with what are probably the most adaptable and responsive social institutions in the world. In particular, America is blessed with a political system that was capable of removing a malfeasant President from office peacefully and a scientific system that still beats the competition hollow. Yet I worry, because America’s problems are moral rather than institutional, and moral problems are the hardest kind to fix. Japan’s problems are the other way around. I believe I can tell you ways to make the Japanese political system work better; but if you ask me how to make American teen-agers care more about studying and less about showing off their Corvettes, I can only shake my head dumbly. I wish you could take the Japanese public, with its willingness to work hard to improve whatever can be improved, and combine it with American social and political institutions, with their flexibility and openness and decency. Then what a country you’d have!

I do wish for that, but it cannot be. We will all have to make do with a poor second-best: We will have to continue to hope that the two countries, by competing and exchanging criticism, will drag each other bumpily in the right direction.

True, the Japanese, like everybody else, hate to be criticized. In fact, they hate it more than most, because they tend to view criticism as a sign of enmity. But the truth is that, for all their protests about Japan “bashing,” criticism from abroad is of tremendous benefit to them. Eventually they will learn, and we will remember, that criticism is not the same as violence. Then the pernicious talk that equates criticism with “bashing” will simmer down.

And as for the Americans, what is our own best hope? The only pressure that works on so stubborn and strong a people is steadfast economic competition. We will have it from Japan, and it will improve us. We resent Japan because it is what we need. To Americans, Japan has at last become what America has always been to the Japanese: the unavoidable other, the reality that must be faced, the outnation.