Japanese trade - 10 January 1992

Here, in a little book that gave off a billow of dust when I took it down, is a sentence which today carries almost a morbid interest, quote "The cotton industry ranks second to silk reeling in importance and Japanese competition in cotton manufactures is causing acute alarm in Lancashire and other centres of the industry in Europe. Until quite recently much of the machinery in the Japanese mills was antiquated but increased commutation of small concerns and the introduction of the Toyota automatic loom have brought marked changes for the better." That sentence was written in 1933.

It was no revelation to me. It recalled in a bland sentence or two what an old Lancashire cotton man called a second misery of the cotton trade. The first was the untold misery of the cotton famine during the American Civil War, when the Union forces blockaded the shipment of raw cotton from the South to Lancashire. The second misery was the Depression of the early and mid-1920s. In America, that was the great age of the Coolidge Prosperity but in Lancashire it was a time when small, neat, oriental men bustled into the mill towns, buying at auction the machinery of the mills, dismantling it, packing it and taking it off home, where I remember unemployed mill workers saying they wouldn't know what to do with it. They knew.

That sort of incident has no part in the American national memory of the Japanese, I should guess that for most old Americans, except on the west coast, where the Japanese had settled, the first recognition of the Japanese as a nation is something they learned in a history class in school. And to Americans about as familiar as the charge of the Light Brigade is, or used to be, to Englishmen. The date is high summer, July 1853, when the people at that time a very unknown people who lived in Tokyo looked out across the bay and saw a covey or snort of huge sea dragons belching fire and smoke and headed towards them. The Japanese had never seen anything like it and we're always told, were petrified with fright. The sea dragons were ships of an American armed squadron, including a steam frigate under the command of one Commodore Matthew Perry. In all the school books, the American school books, this is known as "The Opening up of Japan to the Western World". But as the old waggish Mr Dooley said, "We didn't go in, they came out".

The story of Japan's deliberately chosen isolation from Europe and from all their explored and colonised lands is surely unique in the history of any modern power. What the Japanese shutting themselves off in their islands knew about us was that we had invaded native lands, enslaved their peoples, educated some of them, but mainly in the service of new empires. Old documents show that the Japanese in the 17th century were particularly sensitive to the way the Spaniards had conquered Central America and stamped out the native cultures and religions.

So, imagine for close on 250 years they expelled incoming Europeans, they made them give up the early trading posts. They told their own ship builders not to build anything big enough for overseas trade. They massacred the remaining Christians, native and foreign in the islands. They – they means always the ruling clan – forbad all foreign travel. They successfully excluded nine-tenths of the human race, until the middle of the 19th century when the British, the Americans and the Russians – yearning for the resources of the Pacific lands to which the Japanese had unique access – begged Japan to begin to trade abroad. No sir, was the answer.

Then Commodore Perry took the risk of steaming into Tokyo Bay, not knowing what he'd find. He was not invading or challenging, he told them he was there on a short visit which he hoped would lead to a trade mission later on. They exchanged gifts and the rich irony of the exchange is in what they gave each other and how they marvelled over it. The Americans received splendid brocades and lacquers, the Japanese we are told were ravished by the extraordinary examples of American mechanical genius, things they'd never dreamed of. Telegraph instruments, ingenious farming gadgets, a miniature locomotive – oh, ah.

I won't press the painful story stage by stage, suffice it to say that 50 years after they'd been petrified by the sight of a frigate the Japanese had thrashed the Russian Navy. Briefly for four years when they were our allies in the First World War they were, if not heroes, at least our brave little oriental brothers. But soon after that war they began to make noisy demands for a navy pretty much on a par with Britain's and America's. When the 1929 depression reached them and ruined their silk trade, the military came rough riding in, invaded all of Manchuria and detached it from China, and when the League of Nations condemned the action, Japan withdrew from the League. And from then on we the British, and the Americans more so, thought of Japan as at best a powerful nuisance a long way off. Then 50 years ago last month with Pearl Harbor, Japan became for Americans particularly the arch villain, finally after nearly four years, extinguished we believe as a world power by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It's often struck me as an extraordinary and unpredicted turn of history that at the moment when hatred of the Japanese and contempt for their military government was at its peak, the day of their surrender was also the moment when Japan would begin its swift climb as a supreme industrial power and the ladder to climb up was placed there by the American commander they surrendered to on that battleship in Tokyo Bay. General Douglas MacArthur was at that moment the reigning American hero. To many something just short of a god, to many others a flamboyant theatrical poseur but a fine soldier, and American Caesar.

Of course he was conservative, right wing, an American Tory if ever there was one, but it was MacArthur who wrote the constitution that the Japanese were to live by, and it's a remarkable document. One that I doubt any American politician let alone a viceroy could have had the liberal imagination to conceive. It respected what the Japanese revered in their feudal society, it accepted the peculiar tradition of business conducted between ancient families but it was a democratic blueprint, it created unions with rights of collective bargaining Americans had fought for for 50 years. It gave a degree of equality to women in the workplace that was then beyond what American women had. In all the recent retelling of Japan's moves onwards and upwards to her present economic pre-eminence, nobody I know has mentioned MacArthur as the founding father of modern Japan. All that was remarked in a television series on the ambivalence of the Japanese-American relationship today was that the movers and shakers of the present Japanese generation do not remember Pearl Harbor, and have forgotten if they ever heard of him General MacArthur.

Today, the United States is faced with what appears to be an insoluble Japanese trade problem. And although Japan's markets are fairly wide open to various American goods, especially in electronics, what we hear about most is the enormous discrepancy between the sales in the two countries of the other's automobiles. And that's because for 40, 50 years Detroit was the showplace of American know-how and the barometer of American prosperity. Now its three giants are collapsing, United States manages to sell 55,000 cars a year to Japan, the Japanese sell to this country one and three quarter millions and will make another half a million inside the United States. So, one of the many galling facts the American divisions of the Japanese car industry are vital to maintain American jobs. The recent brief visit of the President to Japan generated more telly talk, more punditry, more bad feeling, but most of all it seemed to me more writhing evasion of two simple truths which Americans on the street – if they were or were not employed in the motor car industry – are frank to confess.

First, the Japanese are going to go on selling their cars to one American in three because their cars are better and cheaper. The other truth which greatly pained the President and his team to hear, finally, is in all the years of losing the Japanese motor car trade, no American company has made a car specially for Japan that does not guzzle petrol. That is small enough for their roads, and that has the steering wheel on the right, since they drive on the left. Well the talks are over, only the President says they are, he says very doggedly, they were a success. The big tycoons who went along with him denounced them. The New York Times says the talks were a fiasco, the Democrats threaten a quick very high tariff war.

In the meantime, the bad blood between these old enemies, old allies, stirs again. The prospect for a real trade agreement seems to me to be remote, because the emotions that get in the way of it are so contradictory and complex. If we adored the Japanese, or hated them, it might be much simpler. But we admire them and resent them, we pretend to despise them but envy them. We can't bear the secret discovery that while we go on prating about the old traditional values, the Japanese practice them. Hard work, thrift, family loyalty. We blame them for the downfall of Detroit, but still harbour the sneaking suspicion that Detroit doomed itself.

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