Japanese-American Relations Japanese-American Re

Japanese-American Relations in the 1990s

In the fall of 1998, a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times called attention to Japan's failure to act seriously on promises to reform its financial system, reforms that would bring greater openness to the system. A time traveler from 1988 or from 1978 would hardly have been surprised to see an American newspaper article criticizing Japanese economic policy; such criticisms have long been a staple both of American news reportage about Japan and of American official statements. The time traveler might have been surprised only that the criticism involved Japan's banks rather than its industrial firms and export-import policy, and indeed might have jumped to the conclusion that Japan's banks were taking over the US financial sector, and that their encroachment was drawing the same futile protests as Japanese auto imports and drawn.

On closer examination, however, this time traveler would have encountered something far more startling. At one point in the article, the reporter observes that "many doubt Tokyo's willingness to clean house, a painful exercise in genuine reform that would lead to bankruptcies and layoffs" (Peterson, 1998). To the time traveler from 1988 or 1978, it was American economic pain -- American bankruptcies and layoffs -- that were at issue whenever Americans criticized Japanese economic policy and practices. As the time traveler continued to read, it would gradually da

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me complaint (Brock and Sakaiya, 1998, 140). Yet American lectures on that point must have been particularly irksome to the Japanese, and one suspects that even the American negotiators who delivered the lectures did so with some awkwardness. However justified the criticism might be in principle, the subtext was unavoidable: why should the Japanese make an active effort to open their doors to American products that -- at least as regards manufactured consumer goods -- were likely to be inferior to their own? Elements of the cultural anxiety and mind-set that pervaded Japanese-American relations in the 1980s have left some curious lingering relics. In his 1996 Reform Party bid for the Presidency, Ross Perot chose as his running mate author Pat Choate, who had made his name for books harshly critical of Japanese trade policy. In 1992, Choate might have been a shrewd choice (certainly far more so than the hapless Admiral Stockdale), but in the renewed prosperity of 1996, his message of alarm fell on deaf ears. Another cultural relic was a long-running advertisement that was being still being aired on CNN in 1998. The ad, by General Electric, called attention to the purchase of a GE power generator system by the Tokyo power

Category: History - J