Japan In the Mirror of Our Times

By David Warsh — Since the end of World War II, America's view of Japan has been made in Cambridge, Mass. First there was Henry Rosovsky, with his early reports on the Japanese industrial renaissance. Then Edwin Reischauer educated a generation of scholars and diplomats, then served for many years as ambassador. Ezra Vogel was the first to sight Japan as "Number One," and Roy Hofheinz wrote a less-noted book called "The East Asia Edge." It argued that Asian producers naturally would take over the world's high- tech markets, leaving America to serve as bread-basket and lumber-yard to the world. Harvard's Tom McCraw, George Lodge and Robert Reich have called attention to the rivalry. Lester Thurow, the MIT Sloan School dean has taken the quest for metaphor a st ep further when he asks whether the next step in American-Japanese relations is guerilla war -- or big bang?

In almost every case, the message is the same: Japan is on the verge of surpassing the United States as a superpower; America will go the way of Great Britain unless it suddenly takes stern measures, most of which involve (if the & truth be told) putting the Cambridge dons in charge of making industrial policy. It's not surprising that the governor from Brookline has made an unarticulated antagonism towards Japan a major strut of his campaign. Against this widely-shared and carefully-crafted picture of the world, with its powerful intellectual momentum, is arrayed an almost subterranean idea of America as an opposite pole of development to Japan, a fully differentiated alternative system capable of standing on an equal footing with the Asian nations, deriving its strengths from openness, diversity and competition instead of solidarity and planning. It, too, has been around since the Second World War, in the form of jokes about the Japanese propensity to follow orders or to copy Western designs, or in occasional critiques of Japanese industrial policy. But for the most part, the defense of American institutions has been been relegated to the realm of intuition.

Now, a new book has appeared that presents the argument with great force. "The Third Century: America's Resurgence in the Asian Era" by Joel Kotkin and Yoriko Kishimoto (Crown Publishers, $19.95) is by my reckoning far and away the most important book of the 1988 campaign. Certainly it's no accident that it was written in California. Forget the pile of books that dissect the failures of Reaganomics. If you are hungry for new ideas, this is the place. If you wonder what Michael Dukakis could have said and didn't, check it out. If you want to know where the future of liberalism lies, tune in here.

Chances are that it will be only slowly noticed, because of the sorrow and anger surrounding the failing Dukakis campaign. But it's a reasonable bet that Kotkin, 35, West Coast editor for Inc. Magazine, and Kishimoto, 31, a business consultant and Newton native, have produced a Democratic manifesto of about the same political weight as George Gilder's "Wealth and Poverty."

The argument goes something like this: after two centuries of identifying itself with Europe, the United States must begin to learn to identify itself with Asia. This "de-Europeanization" won't be easy, the authors acknowledge. "These changes threaten long-cherished ideas about the nation's racial identity, its traditional Atlantic ties and its ways of doing business. Identifying with the fate of Europe, some Americans see the ascendency of Asia as a harbinger of national decline.

"Yet the United States need not be imprisoned by its prior associations. Through the openness of its culture and its political system, its racial diversity and the entrepreneurial dynamism, America can assume a pivotal, indeed pre-eminent, position in the emerging post-European international order," they write.

The main American chance rests on its very openness, according to Kotkin and Kishimoto. From its earliest days, the nation has been a melting pot, they say, never a "motherland" like La France or Dai Nippon. In contrast to tradition-bound societies in Europe and Japan, the Unites States functions as an "open system," without technocratic elites or national bureaucracies to assure that transitions go "smoothly" along predetermined paths. The rough- and-tumble transitions that result can be less efficient than those of highly disciplined nations like Japan, but they sometimes can be the source of hidden strengths. Sokojikara, or reserve power, is the term that the Japanese routinely employ to analyze the American economy.

America's openness to immigration is another aspect of this strength. The scientific and technical elites of a dozen nations have flocked to the United States in the last 40 years; their determination to make a home here contributes to American economic muscle, while the Japanese -- with their preoccupation with racial exclusivity -- are "prisoners of homogeneity." Japanese ethnocentricity is all but unshakable, Kotkin and Kishimoto write, giving the United States a more or less permanent comparative advantage in certain form of economic competition.

Finally, the American penchant for the start-up, the spinoff, the breakaway, the fast-growing middle-size firm is a legitimate defense against the smoothly-administered Japanese behemoths that are the source of Japanese success, the authors say -- but only up to a point. Equally important is that large American corporations rediscover the sources of their historic strength, following the lead of successful corporate enterprises like IBM and eschewing the conglomerate fever typified by General Motors. Other American firms can learn to sell into world markets as successfully as Asians, they say -- but it will take a considerable rededication to the basics.

"In the end," they write, "the greatness of America depends not on its force of arms, or even on the opulence of its economy, but upon the power of its message for the world. Lacking a sense of mission, the nation will probably continue to flounder, unsure even of its national identity. Only by returning to its revolutionary charter, and applying it to the realities of a post-European world, can the United States in its third century enjoy a resurgence equal to the great vision of its fo unders and the uniqueness of its people."

These have the ring of truly powerful public ideas. Moreover, they sound for all the world like ideals that the Democratic Party could pick up and turn against the Republicans in the next election. They are broad, deep, open, affirmative, inclusive, optimistic. All that's necessary is for Democratic leaders to give up their, by now, nearly congenital apprehension that the economic future holds unknown terrors that must be guarded against, and learn to joust with the Republican leadership on equal terms. What the Democratic Party has to fear is fear itself, in other words. This book is the antidote.

This article originally appeared October 30, 1988; Page: A1; Section: BUSINESS