Rant of Japan’s Tabloids: Hysterical Anti-Semitism : Public opinion: The papers incessantly portray Clinton’s victory as a Jewish conspiracy, and the man-on-the-street seems too quick to believe.

Americans and Japanese have not learned to hate each other since the mid-1980s, but it has not been for lack of trying. U.S.-Japan relations have lurched from one spasm of mutual irritation to another because policy-makers and opinion leaders on both sides of the Pacific have refused to think through the fundamental interests and needs of the world’s two largest economies.

There has been a surrender to cant and coarseness in both nations. The doubtful joke that the only Japanese who regrets George Bush’s defeat is Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s dry cleaner captures the new chauvinist silliness.

Malevolence lies in the shadows of such silliness. “In many ways the Japanese are wonderful people. They’re hard-working, intelligent and humorous. They have real integrity. But they are also the most racist people on the planet.” Thus speaks the only Japan hand in Michael Crichton’s best-selling novel “Rising Sun.” The compliments merely gift-wrap the nasty conclusion.

To this tawdry scene, Japan’s sensation-mongering tabloids would add fresh poison: hysterical anti-Semitism.

Since the Democratic Party convention last summer, hardly a week has passed when one or more of Japan’s tabloid weeklies have not carried an article attacking Bill Clinton. Before the November election, this reflected a preference for the “devil one knows” ( Bush) rather than Japan-bashing Democrats.

Now, a select group of Japanese editors and commentators charges that Clinton’s road to the White House has been paved by a conspiracy of American Jewish political interests, world Jewish capital and Zionist opinion leaders orchestrated from Tel Aviv.

A December issue of Shukan Gendai (Contemporary Weekly) carried the cover story “President-elect Clinton’s ‘Jewish Strategy towards Japan.’ ” The six-page article declared that this is “the truth about America that Japan’s quality newspapers will not report.”

Across two pages, the article’s headline shouts, “Jewish capital that pulls the strings in the Clinton Administration and its frightening plans for Japan.” The article asserts that “Jewish capital has powerfully penetrated the new Administration. It has placed many of its people in high places. . . . To mince no words, their goal is to disguise America’s troubles by attacking Japan, to exploit the U.S.-Japan security pact to fetter this country, and, on the domestic front, to shift blame for America’s economic failure onto a Japanese shoulders.”

The unnamed Japanese author quotes the former head of the America-Israel Political Action Committee, who was apparently insisting even before the election that his group “was negotiating with Mr. Clinton over who was to be named as the new secretary of state and national-security adviser to the President.”

According to Masatake Takahashi, one of Japan’s legion of self-proclaimed foreign-policy experts, the final ambition of the “Zionists” is “to throw Japanese society into disorder.” The article claims that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the North American Free Trade Agreement and Congress’ anti-Japanese trade measures are all weapons in the war. It even hints that Super 301 legislation, which permits Washington to impose tariffs of up to 100% on imports from countries with closed markets, may be applied by the Clinton Administration against China to prevent Japanese investors from capturing too much of this huge market while America and China quarrel over human rights.

For most readers, the flood tide of anti-Jewish writings that has poured forth from Japanese publishing houses since the mid-1980s is surely just yomi-mono (chewing gum for the eyes). Is this not the same taste for chilling conspiracies that encourages Americans to read “Rising Sun” or “The Enigma of Japanese Power”?

But such hopeful skepticism understates the degree to which anti-Semitism, first lighted by the high-yen recession of the mid-1980s and now reignited by Japan’s post-bubble business downturn, is becoming a whole climate of opinion. What else is one to conclude when a tabloid sports newspaper warns that a popular Japanese pro wrestler is “the target of Jewish capital” or a serious news magazine asserts that the plot of a Woody Allen comedy turns on Jewish domination of American radio broadcasting?

Japan-U.S. relations will not prosper while thousands of Japanese readers snatch up books such as Ryu Ohta’s “The Global Strategy of the Seven Great Jewish Zaibatsu” or Go Akama’s “The Jewish-Christian Conspiracy” or Masami Uno’s “Understand the Jews and You’ll Understand Japan.”

Uno’s best seller appeared during the high-yen recession with the subtitle, “As the time approaches when a hollowed out Japan will be at the mercy of the Jews.” Uno charges that the 1985 Plaza Accord aimed not to correct America’s trade balance with Japan but to gut Japanese manufacturing.

But where Americans and Europeans rejoice in the curbing of prejudice in the Western mass media since 1945, some Japanese see an attempt to prevent their media from defending their economy against Jewish manipulation.

On this issue, the gap between American and Japanese perceptions could not be wider. The fact that Japan is not an heir to the humanizing influence of the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment may explain why Japanese critics of anti-Semitism are so few.

True, this terrible gap in perception has not prevented the Japanese government from recently urging Arab states to ease their boycott of Israel. Indeed, official relations between Israel and the Japanese Establishment have never been warmer.

But it is the opinion of the man-in-the-street that is the worry. When Japan’s anti-boycott call appeared, the manager of the local Korean restaurant in my Tokyo suburb felt he knew me well enough to ask if it were true that Clinton was the pawn of Jewish interests.

Americans, however, will never command the moral high ground on this question as long as we continue to buy, quote and celebrate conspiratorial books that tremble on the edge of racial defamation. Chauvinism already tempts too many of our most influential commentators on Japan.

In 1928, the French writer Julien Benda, one of the most humane voices of our century, concluded that “our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of mankind.” A blood-drenched nightmare stands between us and Benda’s grim prophecy. Have Japan and America learned nothing from it?