Who Lost Japan Studies?

WHO LOST JAPAN STUDIES? Michael Green The Cold War opened with a bitter and self-destructive debate among Asian scholars over who "lost" China. Men who had been too closely associated with the Chinese Communist forces or had not sufficiently supported Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist regime during the Second World War were discredited as unpatriotic Reds. Traditional academic associations such as the Institute of Pacific Relations were attacked as subversive, lost their funding, andwere replacedwith neworganizations suchas the Asia Society. Policy analysis was skewed, careers ruined, and a promising generation of young China scholars were forced to dilute the findings of their doctoral research for fear of becoming victims of ad hominem partisan attacks. It is probable that this stifling of intellectual activity contributed directly to policymakers' misreading of the causes of the Vietnam War and the SinoSoviet split—the two greatest analytical failures ofthe Cold War, short of our inability to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. At the end of the Cold War a strikingly similar debate has ravaged Japan studies. As the U.S. trade deficit grew, the dollar weakened, and hitechbrawlsbroke -outwithJapanoverFSX, semiconductors, andsupercomputers . In the second halfofthe 1980's, a group ofself-styled "revisionists" began an assaulton the old guard ofJapanexperts in academia and government . The revisionists argued that for decades, Japan's political and economic structures were protected from scrutiny either by the foreign policy Michael Green is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at SAIS, where he is receiving his doctorate. 87 88 SAIS REVffiW elite's desire to maintain smooth bilateral security relations in the face of a common Soviet threat, or worse, because of the nefarious influence of Japanese funding of American research on Japan. Once again, personal attacks proliferated and new untainted research institutions sprouted to explain the supposedly true threat facing America in Asia. This new version ofthe "who lost China" debate threatens to undermine thedevelopmentofafull U.S.-Japanglobalpartnershipofthesortdescribed by Desaix Anderson in this issue of the Review. In his essay, Anderson asks, "how could a nation upon whom our national economy's well-being isdependent and between whom the future oftheworld'sprosperitydepends be seen as a threat?" The answer, unfortunately, is not just the parochial nature of American political institutions, the unwillingness of critics to recognize change in Japan, or the waning ofAmerican confidence. For the cynicism about Japanese motives in the international community runs deepwithin academia as well. The revisionists havecaughtthe imagination ofCongressmen, novelists, and even Hollywood: Michael Crichton's Rising Sun, a fictional homage to the revisionists, emerged as a much-touted movie. This can be dismissed as superficial know-nothingism. But when serious scholars of international affairs suggest that Japanese economic strategies represent a potential threat to the American dominated postwar order, it is time to sit-up and take notice. The Bogey According to BRIE Consider, for example, the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. Scholars associated with this program have produced a series of books and monographs in which they identify aJapanese "techno-economic paradigm" that turns Western concepts ofsecurity and economics on their head. According to BRIE, the Japanese government has been able to create comparative advantage by intervening in key industrial sectors in a way that makes production indigenous and leads to domination in successive generations of technological development. While such intervention may be market-distorting in the short-run, the Japanese are said to establish successfully longer-term "technology trajectories" that lead to economic growth. This approach in turn contributes to a broad, economic-based national security conceptinJapanwhich, BRIE scholars argue, make unrealistic the expection of converging U.S. and Japanese policies in a postCold War world. If anything, Japan is presented as more of a potential threat than partner. Mostofthe BRJE political scientistsandeconomists have a background in researching the command and mixed economies ofEastern Europe and France and are relative newcomers to Japan. Yet non-Japan experts at places like BRJE appear to be conducting some ofthe most innovative and WHO LOST JAPAN STUDIES? 89 dynamic explorations of the Japanese political economy at the end of the Cold War. Unencumbered by years oflearning Chinese characters and the names of Meiji-era politicians, they are toppling...