COLUMN ONE : A Cultural Trade Imbalance : Japanese readers are snapping up American books, but it’s a one-sided relationship. Asian authors are a tough sell in the U.S., and translations are difficult to come by.

What do Sidney Sheldon, Francis Fukuyama and Sam Giancana have in common? Absolutely nothing--except that all three American authors are now on Japan’s bestseller list.

“Scarlett,” the “Gone With the Wind” sequel that commanded a record $1-million advance here, is expected to be an immediate hit, as is “Rising Sun,” Michael Crichton’s polemic novel of murder and manipulation by an evil Japanese corporation in Los Angeles.

Japan’s ascent to economic superpower status has not dulled its voracious appetite for the Western printed word, especially books that bash the Japanese. But this trans-Pacific literary romance remains unrequited: For every Japanese book translated into English, the Japanese publish 35 to 40 titles from the United States and Europe.

In 1990, for example, Japan published an estimated 4,000 titles in translation, more than 3,000 of them from English. But Americans published only 82 titles from Japan, according to Publishers Weekly magazine. That compares with 321 titles translated from French, 202 from German, 145 from Russian and 23 titles from Latin--a dead language.

Yet Japan is America’s main rival in the post-Cold War era, and the only nation that has economic “leverage” over the United States, said Chalmers Johnson, a UC San Diego professor and a leading Japan scholar. “It is a national scandal that so little is translated,” Johnson said.

Leslie Pockell, editorial director of Kodansha International, the largest publisher of Japanese books in English, observed that “Americans are culturally xenophobic” and said that Japan is not alone in being ignored. Pockell argued that America is almost as cool to books, movies and cultural artifacts from Europe and even the former Soviet Union, adding, “In general, we don’t give a damn.”

If American publishers do not seem disturbed by this massive intellectual trade imbalance, perhaps it is because they are one of the few U.S. industries making easy money by exporting to Japan.

Although Japanese spend less time reading than they used to and surveys show that books are losing ground to magazines and manga (comic books), Western books find a ready market in a nation with a 99% literacy rate.

At the center of the lucrative trade is Japanese super agent Takeshi (Tom) Mori, who controls roughly two-thirds of the market for foreign copyrights. His Tuttle-Mori Agency, with offices in New York, London, Taiwan, Seoul--and soon Bangkok and Beijing--claims to send American publishers $30 million in royalties each year.

His sales pitch has global appeal.

“It’s going to be hu-u-u-uge ,” he coos to a publisher in the slangy English he learned as a pupil at P.S. 90 in Queens, N.Y. “You’re gonna be a rich man, baby.”

The flamboyant agent is the antithesis of the buttoned-down Japanese businessman. Mori wears giant jade and diamond rings, a diamond-encrusted Rolex and lots of Obsession cologne. He eats well, likes to hug his clients and slaps friends on the back.

He tools around Tokyo in a white Bentley, a black Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud or one of three other luxury cars, all outfitted with cellular telephones, indispensable to the art of the international deal. (Parking them in Tokyo costs him about $22,000 a year.)

The book business has been good to him. Among other things, he owns memberships in 10 golf courses near Tokyo and part of the Embassy Suites Hotel in Century City.

Tuttle-Mori Agency handles serious literature from all over the world. But Mori makes most of his money from American potboilers and the “big books” by famous authors who command advances of $100,000 or more.

Among the most popular works in Japan--besides the ubiquitous Sidney Sheldon--are Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsythe and the British novelist Jeffrey Archer, whose 11 books have sold over 5 million copies here. Japanese love mysteries as much as the British do, and a new book by Dick Francis, Robert B. Parker or Jonathan Kellerman equals instant yen in the bank.

Ironically, the recent bestseller lists have featured both the serious (the philosophical treatise “The End of History and the Last Man” by Fukuyama, a Japanese-American) and the lower-brow, populist (Giancana’s “Double Cross: the Explosive Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America”).

But the best way to sell the Japanese a book is to attack them. And if the criticism has some merit, the book will do even better.

Take, for example, Pat Choate’s “Agents of Influence.” The expose of Japanese influence-peddling in Washington was a hot seller back in the Economic Evil Empire.

Chalk it up to mass masochism, to Japan’s hypersensitivity to its image in the West or simply to self-defense. Whatever the cause, books that predict a trade Armageddon are hot here--even if they flop back home.

The provocatively titled “The Coming War With Japan,” by George Friedman and Meredith LeBard, appeared in America to little fanfare in April last year. Critics dismissed its conclusion--that U.S.-Japanese economic antagonism will eventually lead to a shooting war--and the book sold only 40,000 copies in its first nine months. But the Japanese edition sold 60,000 copies in its first three weeks and became the talk of Tokyo.

Crichton’s “Rising Sun” was considered a similar prize. Neither the agent for the work, Nihon Uni Agency, Mori’s biggest competitor, nor the buyer, Hayakawa Shobo, which also published Choate, would reveal the size of the advance paid for it.

Hayakawa’s president also declined to be interviewed about the controversial book, though his secretary said a first edition of at least 30,000 copies will be out by July.

Books that are weird, trendy or merely goofy also seem to find a natural market in this land of Gucci, plastic sushi and techno-punk.

Jim Garrison’s “On the Trail of the Assassins” has sold half a million copies and is still moving briskly. So are four other JFK conspiracy tracts. Three books about “Twin Peaks,” the quirky television series, have been on the bestseller list this year. Even former White House astrologer Joan Quigley has been translated.

Little surprise that Japanese readers display a startling familiarity with American minutiae. They are not unaware that such knowledge is useful.

“Don’t just be happy when you sell American stuff to Japanese--because Japan gets smarter,” Mori confided after downing half a dozen mizuwari , a popular scotch-and-water mix. “It’s a tradition since 1868,” when Japan’s feudal government fell and the isolated nation began scrambling to catch up with the West.

“Japanese are still eager to learn from America,” Mori added. “I wish Americans would have the same attitude in the future. The world is now too small to be a Caucasian world alone.”

A few days later, Mori was busy peddling the rights to former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s autobiography on behalf of the German publisher Bertelsmann. The Japanese publishing giant Shinchosha clinched the deal for it by agreeing to a $600,000 advance. Mori gets 10%.

“Six hundred thousand dollars!” he bellowed with gusto. “Call Munich!”

Such steep advances are risky for publishers, even with a Nobel Prize-winning author. Profit margins on translations are rice-paper thin.

Typically, the original publisher demands a royalty of 7% to 10%. The Japanese publisher must then pay an additional 8% royalty to the translator, whose fame and skill can sell a book--or destroy it.

In an unusual move, Crichton is having an independent expert double-check his publisher’s translation of “Rising Sun,” according to Johnson. Many Japanese translations are disastrous, the scholar said, though occasionally a translator will improve a book enormously.

“The translator has to be as good a writer as a Japanese novelist to sell a book,” said Miyoko Kai, an agent at Tuttle-Mori. Sometimes, the translator “improves” the original a little too much. The Japanese call this choyaku , or “transcendent translation”--in short, altering the original to make the translation less cumbersome. In rare cases, critics have charged translators with even doctoring the plots.

But if getting a good translation is difficult, persuading an American publisher to gamble on a Japanese book is even harder.

To begin with, American editors don’t know which Japanese books are worth publishing, because they don’t read Japanese. “It’s not just the cost of translation, it’s the cost of evaluation” that is a barrier, said Robert Asahina, vice president and senior editor at Simon & Schuster in New York.

Frank B. Gibney, president of the Pacific Basin Institute in Santa Barbara, complained: “There’s so many interesting nonfiction books published in Japan that no one will look at. It’s ‘Give us 10 or 12 chapters, you translate, and we’ll see.’ ”

It is more expensive to translate a book from Japanese than from a Romance language, and fewer people are qualified for the job. Most Japanese-to-English translators tend to be academics who are more interested in scholarly books than commercial titles, Kodansha’s Pockell said. “In most cases, we’re very much under the influence of the translator, and what the translator thinks should be published,” he said.

Many Japanese books also are written for a nation of insiders and lack the context required to attract international readers. And, with few exceptions, they don’t grab American readers.

But the book that has sold best in America lately was first translated and made infamous by the Pentagon, which did its own bootleg translation of “The Japan That Can Say No” by Shintaro Ishihara, a lawmaker turned author who is now a leading spokesman for Japanese nationalists.

Ishihara objected to the Pentagon translation, then commissioned his own. His book was sold to Simon & Schuster for a $275,000 advance, the largest ever paid for a Japanese title, Mori said.

Akiko Kurita, the only Japanese literary agent who specializes in exporting Japanese books, said Korea is snapping up Japanese books. But Kurita sold only about 40 titles to America last year; most were either technical treatises on subjects like quality control or children’s picture books that require almost no translation.

“I started the business because I wanted to export the Japanese heart,” Kurita explained. “I think a lot of readers would be interested. . . . But there have been so many mergers and acquisitions in American publishing, everyone thinks they must eat or be eaten.”

Kurita does have high hopes for “Kitchen,” a quirky, conversational novel written at age 23 by a young woman with the catchy nom de plume Banana Yoshimoto. The first novel sold more than 1 million copies in Japan and is due out from Grove Weidenfeld Press this year.

Another belated success story is “The Spirit of Japanese Capitalism” by the late Shichihei Yamamoto, one of Japan’s premier essayists.

Gibney tried for years to interest New York publishers in the book. Despite the torrent of books by Americans who promised to unravel the mysteries of Japanese management, the book was rejected, Gibney said, because it was deemed “too hard to explain.” Finally, with financial backing from two foundations, University Press of America in Washington, D.C., is publishing Yamamoto and four other important Japanese authors.

But it is still virtually impossible to find English translations of articles that appear in Japanese magazines, where most of the country’s public policy debate takes place.

Johnson argues that U.S. intelligence agencies should translate more from Japan and distribute their reports more widely. He also calls on the Japanese government to do more to promote and subsidize translation of important books.

Meanwhile, he warns of the persistent gap between what the Japanese write at home and what the world reads abroad.

“Anybody who expects to live into the 21st Century should try to monitor the Japanese in every way they can,” Johnson said. But at the moment, he said, “Americans who are dependent on English to understand Japan are hopelessly lost.”