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.But in the early  90s, after years of relentless pressure from both Wash-ington and a burgeoning global marketplace to open up Japan s marketsand change its practices, Tokyo s bureaucratic and business elite begantouting the concept of kyosei, or  symbiosis with Western economies.Japanese multinationals began setting up production abroad Þöin theUnited States to avoid trade sanctions on exports and in Asia to escapethe high-priced labor of their own maturing economy.The result wasthat Japan began losing its Inc.The interests of the nation and its giantcorporations started to diverge.The Mitsubishis, Toyotas, and Matsushi-tasÞöthe pride of Japan s postwar rebirthÞöbegan joining the great multi-national diaspora, and the international community.Japanese companies,to a startling degree, have become  us rather than  them. ConsiderJapanese auto exports, which made up the majority of the trade deficit:They plunged from 3.4 million units in 1986 to just one-third of that adecade later as automakers quickly moved manufacturing to the UnitedStates.Though the Japanese retained virtually the same market shareoverall, the shift in production had an enormously calming effect on U.S.100 At War with Ourselvespublic opinion.Indeed, in the late  90s and early  00s, when the U.S.steelindustryÞöone of the last holdouts to this trend of transnationalized pro-ductionÞöbegan agitating once again for tariffs to protect their workers,they found they had less company: The United Auto Workers union nolonger had an angry base of disenfranchised workers from which to createa protectionist movement.Even in Detroit, where in the 1980s one waslikely to find one s parked Toyota gouged by someone s keys, people aren truffled any longer by  foreign cars. I don t think people are motivatedby the nationality of the makers of the vehicles they buy, Ford s then-CEO, Alex Trotman, casually remarked to my Newsweek colleague DanMcGinn at one point in the late  90s.That was a striking confession com-ing after years of Ford-sponsored  Buy American campaigns.¹The impact of this shift has been enormous back in Japan as well.Today the biggest Japanese companies obey a new taskmaster: They arepaying less attention to Tokyo s fractured alliance of bureaucrats, busi-nessmen, and (often corrupt) politicians and far more attention to aglobal marketplace changed fundamentally by lowered barriers to capital,goods, and services, by ever more complex and expensive technologyrequiring cross-border strategic alliancesÞö witness the  multimediablending of Japanese electronics and American software Þö and by theneed to send production abroad to meet challengers in local markets.Inthe era of the outsourced global corporation, many keiretsu relationshipsat homeÞöthe traditional  convoy system whereby Japanese companiesand their supplier chain organize around a single large bank that suppliesthem with cheap capitalÞöare now less important than the multinational slinkups around the world.Japan s economy, to a remarkable degree, hasfollowed the pattern of U.S.industry.It has undergone a  hollowing out(known as kudoka in Japanese) that has left Japan increasingly  a head-quarters economy where the design and marketing is done, while themanufacturing is performed elsewhere Þömainly China, where wage lev-els are only 5 percent of Japan s.²After the Asian financial contagion of the late 1990sÞöa broad-basedcollapse of currencies and stock marketsÞöI talked with Tsunenari Toku-gawa, a shipping executive who also happens to be the Man Who WouldBe Shogun.An urbane man educated in the West, Tokugawa is the scionWhat Is the  International Community ? 101of the family of shoguns who ruled Japan for 250 years before the countrywas forcibly opened up by the appearance of U.S.gunships in Tokyo Har-bor.(You may remember his ancestor, Ieyasu Tokugawa, portrayed as thevictorious Toranaga in James Clavell s megaselling 1980s novel Shogun.)But the present-day Tokugawa, who is a deeply conservative nationalist,believes this new  threat from the WestÞöthe international communityÞöis more fundamental than the one faced by his great-great-grandfatherYoshinobu Tokugawa, the last shogun.In the late nineteenth century,after the Meiji Restoration that toppled the shogunate, Japan adoptedWestern technology and practices to ward off foreign invasion.Openingup to Western markets, however, is different, says Tokugawa.Financialmarkets, especially, are invasive, like a computer virus that can subvert awhole system.They demand openness throughout an economy, and alevel playing field.They require shareholder returnsÞönot in a generationbut in the next quarterÞöand, maybe, job cuts.And that strikes at theheart of Japan s still-protected economy and its promise of social har-mony, low crime, and relatively equal income distribution.Japan, a coun-try so isolated that it managed to keep out Christian missionaries entirelyÞöTokugawa s shogun ancestors used to crucify themÞönow finds itself ina pitched battle with these even more subversive forces. The world isbecoming so small, Tokugawa said. Communications and money move-ments are so rapid today.I don t think we can maintain our belovedJapanese form of capitalism. As of this writing, Japan, though severelyhit, was still holding on to its antiquated banking system and the price-it-high-at-home-and-dump-it-abroad system that was the heart of Japan,Inc.But this rump Japan, Inc., had fallen into a long period of slowgrowth and appeared to be fighting a losing war.One by one, even those who most combatively resisted the encroach-ment of the  West are giving up ground and accepting the reality of theinternational community, or at least of a globalized value system thatencroaches upon and compromises their indigenous sense of community.Before the Asian financial crisis, for example, the foremost champion of Asian values was Lee Kuan Yew, the autocratic and near-legendary sen-ior minister who almost single-handedly transformed Singapore from amosquito-ridden backwater into an economic paradigm.In a 1994 inter-102 At War with Ourselvesview in Foreign Affairs, he even lectured Americans on the relative failuresof their loose values and too-open society [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]