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When Dispassion Deceives
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19047 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
3,666 Words |
| Author
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Robert C. Christopher
Robert C. Christopher, the author of the Japanese Mind: The
Goliath Explained; Second to None: American Companies in
Japan; and Crashing the Gates: The De-Wasping of America's
Power Elite, is administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes and
adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism,
Columbia University. |
THE JAPANESE POWER GAME
What It Means to America
William J. Holstein
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990
339 pp., $22.95
Like most Americans old enough to remember the primordial days before television, I spent much of my free time as a youngster competing with other neighborhood kids in games ranging from kick-the-can to sandlot football. One of the things I most vividly recall about those long-ago contests is that they were perpetually interrupted by shouts of "no fair, no fair!" Sometimes those complaints were justified; sometimes they weren't. But there was one thing that was invariably true of them: The people who cried no fair were always the people who were losing the game--and who knew in their hearts that they lacked either the skill or the will to win it simply by buckling down and playing harder.
This is a memory that has increasingly come back to haunt me as I have dutifully made my way through the "revisionist" books on Japanese-American economic relations that American publishers now seem to believe are the only works about that subject that can successfully be sold to the U.S. reading public. Stripped to their essentials, the works of such writers as Karel van Wolferen, Clyde Prestowitz, James Fallows, and Pat Choate all boil down to one prolonged shout of "no fair"--and that shout, I fear, conveys the same implicit message in the economic competition between nations as it did in kick-the-can.
Sadly, too, like most people who claim that the game has been rigged against them, the revisionist writers on Japanese-American economic tensions are not content to dismiss those who disagree with them as simply misguided. Any opposition to their views they regard as almost prima facie evidence of ignoble motivation. Understandably, the revisionists bitterly resent the indiscriminate manner in which the label "Japan basher" has sometimes been applied to anyone voicing strong criticism of Japanese economic behavior. But the revisionists themselves have lowered the level of debate still further with the even more indiscriminate charge that virtually any American who questions Japan's unique economic culpability must be considered a member of "the chrysanthemum club"--a nebulous but clearly sinister organization allegedly composed of people who, directly or indirectly, pursue personal advantage by serving Japanese interests.
In The Japanese
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