Jet's

    According to Japanese legend, the first Japanese Emperor , Jimmu, was crowned on the 11th of February, 660 B.C. at his palace in the Yamato region of Japan. This gives the Japanese civilization a lifetime of some 2659 years so far, and it's still going strong. According to these stories, the essential nature of Japan never changed, with benevolent Emperors peacefully exchanging power through the centuries, and everyone else supporting th Emperor fully.

    Modern historians have a very different view on the rise of Japanese civilization. However, they do not even agree with each other very well. Some assert that the Japanese were squabbling barbarian peasants up until the time the American Commodore Perry took his "Black Ships" into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and forced the Japanese government into a trading agreement. Some argue that the Japanese were a very powerful and united people who simply were not interested in external affairs. But the real problem with all these historians is not their disagreement. It is the fact that they forget that the history of a people should be judged by the standards of those people.

    Viewed by the standards of the people of Japan, their past internal wars and isolation have given them a unified culture, uniquely different from any other in the world. They eat different foods, have different habits, even think differently than other people. They know they are different, and they revel in it.

   Few would argue that now Japan is one of the most powerful nations in the world. The United States and Japan, beginning shortly after that unsubtle beginning in 1853, and interrupted briefly by several world wars, have gradually built up the largest volume of trade between any two nations that the world has ever seen. It is astonishing that the people of two nations that trade so well can misunderstand each other so badly.

    Perhaps, as eminent Japanese Affairs writer Jack Seward has noted, it would help if American Department of State Foreign Service personnel had actual experience or realistic training in appreciating the differences in culture. Too often, even when they are trained, the State Department rotates people to places where their language and cultural experience becomes useless or worse.

   An additional problem is within our own trade unions. Instead of working on ways to improve productivity and product quality in order to decrease the U.S. - Japan trade imbalance, these people find it easier to blame a scapegoat: Japanese workers. They make unsupported statements that the Japanese are robot slaves in factories trying to destroy the U.S. financially, and that the Japanese already own everything in the U.S.

    Actually, according to a recent study, Canada was the highest on the list of foreign investors to U.S. concerns. Shall we stop those evil Canadians?

   The Japanese factories so much the concern of U.S. trade unions are using a form of worker input tools variously known in this country as Quality Circles, Employee Involvement, etc. Just recently, U.S. companies became interested in these methods, but are still not implementing them wholeheartedly because of the traditional Company vs. Employee mind set so prevalent in U.S. companies.

   After World War II, the inventor of these tools, an American, found zero interest in them in the U.S., so he went to Japan, where he found avid listeners. The Japanese were trying to recover from the devastating effects of World War II, and were willing to try anything that looked good. For them, these methods work well.

J.E.Todd July 20, 1999

Check in next week for a new article on the history and culture of Japan!