Trade deficit with Japan

I'm sitting in a large living-room at a kneehole desk whose drawer fronts are lacquered with representations of little pagodas, diving birds and floating clouds. Over my shoulder on the far wall is a, I should guess, 16-foot mural painted on six adjoining panels and, from this distance, it looks at first like an abstract with great inky splotches on a field of gold. Then you see that the gold parts are immense clouds drifting across what must be an ocean inlet. There's a bridge across it and on the bridge there is the bloodiest and the most colourful battle going on between squads of warriors in brilliant uniforms of every conceivable colour.

Between two windows is a large sofa, flanked by square Chinese tables and on them immense decorative Chinese vases serving as the bases of lamps. Against another window that looks out on a hill is a teak chest and on it, atop a black plinth, is a splendid head of the Buddha who, most of the time, appears to be peacefully asleep, except when the late sun catches him and he breaks into a mild, slow smile. Where am I?

Not in any house decorated by a designer with a whimsical taste for the Orient. I'm in a hotel room in San Francisco. This room, like all the others in the hotel, was designed and furnished by the daughter of the man who built it – a man, by the way, with a passion for English eighteenth-century and Spanish furniture. When he died, the daughter took over and unloaded her father's furniture in many of the rooms and in others, with rare taste, expressed her knowledge of, and liking for, Chinese decoration. And this too was not an eccentric specialty. She was a born Californian and most northern Californians with a taste for such things were steeped from childhood in the various arts of China. This room is, itself, a reminder of the Chinese connection with San Francisco, the earliest port of entry, first for the coolies who came to work on the railroad going east, later for merchants and, ever since, for rare pieces of Chinese pottery, jade, sculpture, screens and the like, with which the third, the cultivated, generation of the original Gold Rushers have been used to decorate their houses.

As a cruder reminder to the tourist, there is nearby a half-dozen blocks or so constituting a garish Chinatown, but there are Chinatowns in London and New York which do not noticeably affect the taste or the furnishing of New Yorkers' or Londoners' homes. And, lately, San Francisco's Chinatown and some discount houses have been shipping in all sorts of pretty and elegant and cheap things like sandals and slippers and purses and handbags and such, not made here, but manufactured by cheap labour in the so-called People's Republic.

But mostly the Chinese here are a stable, depressed part of the population doing the humblest jobs. The bright ones rising to be clerks, bank messengers, some lawyers and doctors, a few university teachers. They are never much in the news except by way of an exhibition of prints or the annual parade at the Chinese New Year. They are no threat, but there's another oriental connection over which people, all kinds of businessmen especially, are arguing more furiously today than the students at Berkeley, across the bay, are arguing and parading against the American business involvement in South Africa.

This other crackling oriental issue is with the Japanese. Now there's been, since before the Second War, three generations of Japanese who, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, along with all the Japanese of California, were removed from their coastal homes and herded together for the duration in camps – relocation centres, they were called – in the empty valleys to the east, beyond the High Sierra. These enforced exiles included one generation, at least, of American citizens and I ought to say that their forcible removal, which was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States, is now looked back on as a shameful, if not an unconstitutional, act.

However, they were quickly repatriated, so to speak, to their homes and their acres and, being industrious and not self-pitying, they more than accommodated themselves. They prospered and, in the past dozen years or so, Los Angeles to the south and San Francisco here in the north have been flooded not by new immigrants, but by Japanese trade representatives, technicians and managers, bankers, importers. They are here as the agents, the receivers, the shippers and the trans-shippers of the tidal wave of manufactureds that has flooded this coast in the past 15 years or so.

Well, we all know now about the ups and downs – mostly the downs – of the past few years and the life and the livelihood of Detroit, for so long the motor-car capital of the world, but we were slower to recognise that the Japanese were not the sort of people to make one killing in one specialty. They came here, they saw, they went home and conquered in the fields of electronics, telecommunications, pharmaceutical products and agriculture.

Japan has long been California's top trading partner, the total for two-way trade is $28 billion a year, $8 billion more than the trade with the next four partners, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore combined. But the news that hurts is the latest collection of figures on the imbalance of trade for, while California exports over $7 billion worth of goods a year to Japan, it imports from Japan over $20 billion worth. The anxiety about this imbalance, which amounts to panic in California, is nationwide.

For the whole United States, the trade deficit with Japan, which was at a record $38 billion in 1984 is already this year running at an annual rate of $45 billions.

Well, the reasons for this unstemmable flood are, you can guess, being disputed here with much heat, logic-chopping and hurt pride. The main American complaints are against Japan's unquestionably tough high tariffs and quotas on the importing of all agricultural and forest products, this state's fruits, vegetables, beef and timber. Also, there's the Japanese national 'Buy Japanese' campaign and the severe technical tests which the Japanese impose on all imported electronic and telecommunications products.

So not only do the Japanese say, in effect, we make better, safer cars than you do at competitive prices, they appear to say, we make more sophisticated and dependable computers, television sets, videotape recorders, communications machinery, scientific instruments and, until you do as well or better, we understandably want to keep your stuff out. The Japanese, of course, don't talk tough like that. They shake a head, they sigh, they let the truth sink, regretfully, in. What a shame, they seem to say, that our average citizen spends $64 a year on your splendid goods, but your estimable average citizen spends $810 on our unworthy products.

If there is a fact that is uncomfortable but undeniable – it is that the strong American dollar hurts America's ability to export and, whether we like it or not, the strong American economy has made American consumers want to buy more and more Japanese products. Ringing appeals in Congress to 'Buy American' fall on patriotic ears, for the time being deaf.

But the desperate appeals to Congress come from the heads of badly sagging industries. The president out here of an American technical corporation, part of California's key electronics industry, said the other day, 'If we don't do something, all the American electronics industry will be wiped out.' Very sad, the Japanese sigh, and promise to urge their people to buy American, but nothing changes.

The obvious danger is that of abrupt action against Japan's high tariffs and that way lies a protection war which could spread far beyond the United States and Asia. The United States' Senate has now passed a unanimous resolution that calls for retaliation against Japan's closed market. Next there will be Senate hearings and then, presumably, legislation.

There is, though, a good piece of news from Japan via the unlikely channels of the World Health Organisation of the United Nations and the distinguished New England Journal of Medicine, and the good news will cost you nothing.

The World Health Organisation has just put out comparative figures for many nations on the proportion of their populations that die from heart troubles, especially cardiovascular disease. The culprits in this study are the nations that like to eat fatty meats, dairy products, cholesterol and sugar and fry their food and the two villains are West Germany with 585 deaths per hundred thousand of the population and Britain with 573.

Way at the bottom of the list is Japan with 249 and this is put down to their preference for low-fat foods and for fish. The Japanese, incidentally, have the longest life span – expectation of life at birth – of any nation in the world: 80 for women, 74.2 years for men.

The New England journal, in three studies, two American and one Dutch, that's been going on for over 20 years, has discovered that the more fish you eat in place of meat and the fatty things, the more dramatically do you lower your chances of heart attacks. Fish of the sea, that is. And, surprisingly, it's true of oily fish like salmon and tuna. The journal notes that the most inveterate fish eaters are the Eskimos and the Japanese who seldom have heart attacks.

So, forego the Japanese camera, forego the bangers and bacon and the frying of anything! Catch the good fish of the sea and bake it and stay well!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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