PLATFORM : Our Crippling Disability in Dealing With Japan

Japan is the most important foreign nation from the point of view of the United States in the post-Cold War period. It is the only nation that has rather considerable leverage over this nation, leverage not just financial and industrial, but also militarily, in the sense that it supplies a great many of our defense needs today.

We are almost blind in dealing with Japan. We have very few people who are able to monitor Japan in the Japanese language. Americans responsible for dealing with Japan do not understand what a crippling disability that is--not to engage in active verbal communication or to read what they are saying to each other. Such Americans tend to project onto Japan what they derive from the material culture and interpret it as if it were America--which is invariably a source of error.

You’ve got to have a lot more people in this country who can read Japanese. People who can’t learn Japanese nonetheless need reliable translations of a broad range of materials on their desk every morning. The great problem in doing it with Japan is that there you’re translating copyrighted material.

Given the asymmetries, given the fact that the Japanese study us so closely and we don’t study them, if Japan and America want to remain allies, they probably should suspend their copyright laws and let us translate anything we want, except perhaps for drama and things like that.