Postwar Admiration of U.S. Fading in Japan : Jobless Americans Slow to Blame Tokyo

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Guzzling beers down at the Flat Iron Cafe--in the very shadow of the hulking, long-shuttered Youngstown Sheet & Tube steel mill--the men who tended the furnaces and poured molten metal still puzzle over the rapid demise of an industry that once epitomized American economic might.

“I’m not bitter at Japan,” said retired mill hand Red Windwood, when asked about the flood of cheap steel imports that has killed the once-thriving steel industry in the Mahoning Valley. “They are just doing what they’ve got to do. I’m bitter at our government for not stopping all this. And the companies, because they just didn’t put any money back into the mills.”

House Debate Scheduled

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is sure to get an earful about his country’s allegedly unfair trading practices when he meets with President Reagan in Washington this week. House leaders have scheduled debate on a tough new trade bill to coincide with his visit. Both the Democrat-controlled Congress and the Republican White House say they face an increasing clamor from the public to pry open Japanese markets and slash a persistent trade deficit with Japan that reached $58.6 billion last year.

Reluctant to Blame Japan

But if Nakasone were to venture outside the capital, he would be likely to find a people troubled by economic uncertainty but far less consumed by hostility and hysteria toward his country than the rhetoric of official Washington suggests. Even in Youngstown, where 20,000 steelworkers have lost their jobs in the last decade, residents are reluctant to make Japan the scapegoat for their financial troubles.

While they do not flatly absolve Japan, Americans in growing numbers appear to blame trade shortcomings on the past greed, inaction and lack of foresight of their own institutions--business, labor and government.

And, although trade-war talk has dominated the headlines in recent days, hostility toward Japan and Japanese products in the industrial Midwest and elsewhere has eased dramatically since the recession early in the decade, when auto workers demolished Datsuns to protest foreign imports.

These days, Japanese goods, ranging from cars to televisions to cameras, are so entrenched in the marketplace that even workers displaced by their presence have come to accept them.

Meanwhile, many domestic manufacturers have forged new partnerships with their Japanese counterparts through a widening array of joint ventures and other investments, often blurring the distinctions between U.S. and foreign-made goods and making many American jobs dependent on Japanese investment.

“We don’t have anything against the Japanese because 90% of our American companies are (working) with them,” said 41-year-old Ron Kelly, one of the army of Youngstown’s idled steelworkers. “And it was our steel companies that let all this cheaper stuff come over here and didn’t do anything about it.”

Agreed Ted Ferris, an attorney who once toiled on the production line at a nearby auto assembly plant: “It’s real easy to blame the Japanese, but people aren’t willing to sacrifice anymore to compete.”

If anything, public opinion surveys suggest that American respect for Japan is at a postwar high. In a nationwide poll of Americans released last month by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, only Canada, Britain and West Germany surpassed Japan on an index that measured “warm feelings” toward foreign nations. Japan outranked such close allies as Israel, France and Italy, which, in a similar 1982 survey, had been viewed more favorably.

The survey also found that Americans consider Japan to be a vital ally. Presented with a variety of hypothetical choices, a majority of those questioned said they would favor committing American troops to foreign combat only in two instances--Soviet invasions of Western Europe or Japan.

Another poll, conducted by Gallup last fall for the Japanese mass-circulation newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, showed that 60% of Americans surveyed considered the present state of relations between the United States and Japan to be “good” or “very good,” up 13% from a corresponding survey in 1982. And nearly half of those polled said they believed economic relations between the two countries would get better rather than worse.

“We were quite surprised by the results, given all the Japan-bashing in Congress,” said John Rielly, president of the Chicago group. “ . . . There’s a great deal of admiration for certain characteristics of the Japanese. You have many people here perceiving the old Protestant work ethic being practiced in Japan--hard work, teamwork, self-reliance.”

Still, the picture is not quite as rosy as the hues beaming from the screens of those Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba TVs that American consumers crave. Auto parts and computer chips lead a list of key industries in which executives complain that the Japanese play Americans for trading chumps, erecting phony barriers to bar U.S. exports from their markets while dumping Japanese products around the world at fire-sale prices to squeeze out the competition.

‘See Us as Soft People’

“They see us as a bunch of very soft people who have had it too good too long--weak sisters that can be beaten,” said Charles Clough, president of El Segundo-based Wyle Labs, a computer chip distributor.

“The word fair does not translate into the Japanese language,” insisted Sheila Sandow, spokeswoman for the Semiconductor Industries Assn., which pressed President Reagan to impose anti-dumping tariffs against some Japanese products this month.

But such complaints no longer ripple uniformly through the nation’s industrial sector, nor do they seem to be translating into a new upsurge in American hostility toward the Japanese.

Japanese nationals living in the Midwest, once a hotbed of anti-Asian activity, say that incidents of physical harassment and verbal abuse have virtually disappeared in recent years. The Japanese add that they have been made to feel welcome even in cities like Detroit, where five years ago a laid-off auto worker killed Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American, allegedly in the mistaken belief that he was of Japanese descent.

“I don’t think I’ve seen any problems since I’ve been here like they had in 1982,” said Katusuke Tamura, a Japanese executive who has lived in Detroit since 1985. “Most people we meet here are very accepting and very kind,” added Tamura, president of the Japan Society of Detroit, a cultural organization for the 5,000 Japanese nationals in the area.

Attorney Finds Improvement

“I don’t think there is any question that the situation is better in Detroit for Asian-Americans,” said James Shimoura, a Japanese-American attorney in Detroit who has been deeply involved in the Chin case, which has been closely monitored by the Asian-American community.

A federal court in Cincinnati last week began a retrial of the case after an appeals court threw out the 1984 guilty verdict against former Chrysler Corp. assembly line supervisor Ronald Ebens, who was charged with violating Chin’s civil rights.

However, prejudice against Asian-Americans has not disappeared. Those of Japanese descent--most of whom have roots in America reaching back two, three and even four generations--say they have always been treated as outsiders in American society, a distinction that existed even before Washington ordered thousands of Japanese-Americans herded into internment camps after Pearl Harbor.

Even today, Japanese-Americans complain that many whites and blacks automatically presume they are foreign-born or make little effort to distinguish them from Vietnamese, Koreans, Filipinos and other more recently arrived Asian groups.

Taken for Foreign-Born

Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento), who sponsored a House resolution last month urging Reagan to impose retaliatory sanctions against Japan, was born in an internment camp, does not know how to speak Japanese and never touched a set of chopsticks until he was 19. Yet, he says, “People always come up to me and ask, ‘Aren’t the cherry blossoms beautiful in Japan this time of year?’ ”

Ron Wakabayashi, executive director of the San Francisco-based Japanese-American Citizens League, said he frequently is complimented on his good English or the great cars that “his people” make. Not long ago, Wakabayashi said, he called the headquarters of a black organization and was scolded by someone on the phone for remarks made by Nakasone that disparaged the abilities of American minorities.

Such slights are not inconsequential, but a 1986 study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that it was impossible to determine whether anti-Asian incidents, either casual or violent, were on the rise. And, the report concluded, the marked influx of Asian immigrants in recent years had led to at least some of the problems, although precise causes were difficult to pinpoint.

“Trade is only one of several factors involved, and the increase in Asian immigration may be more important,” observed William Yoshino, the Midwest director of the Japanese-American Citizens League.

Unfamiliar Customs

Whatever the reason, it is true that pluralistic mainstream America, rooted in its European-inspired traditions and values, has always had a hard time relating to the customs and mores of Asian societies, especially a homogenous one like that of Japan. “In Japan, you have a society that is almost incomprehensible to Americans,” explained David McEachron, president of the Japan Society, which is based in New York. “ . . . Few Americans have Japanese friends, we don’t grow up learning about the Japanese except for the war, it’s a hell of a lot farther away (than Europe) and expensive to get there (and) their language has no remote relevance to English.”

That cultural and physical distance in the past has led to dramatic American mood swings about the Japanese. Harry Kitano, a UCLA sociology professor who has studied the phenomenon, said that, before World War II, Americans tended to dismiss the Japanese as comical myopics adept only at copying the work of others. Pearl Harbor turned them into superhuman villains, Kitano said, as wartime frenzy and fear created a new stereotype.

Hiroshima deflated their prominence in the eyes of Americans, but the industrial miracle epitomized by affluent and dynamic “Japan Inc.” has in recent years elevated the Japanese to the stature of economic superstars.

“We are making the Japanese into something bigger than life,” fretted Bill Tanaka, a Washington lobbyist who is Japanese-American. Tanaka, who represents Japanese trade associations, said one of his biggest frustrations on the job is trying to counteract American and Japanese misperceptions of each other.

Disputes Monolithic View

One chronic misperception, contended Hidetoshi Ukawa, the Japanese consul general in New York, is the apparent view held by many Americans that Japanese society and business are part of a monolithic structure.

“There is a suspicion (in the United States) that everything (in Japan) is being planned and controlled to the minutest detail by the Japanese government,” Ukawa said. “Being an insider, I know this is not true. . . . Perhaps both of us have seen too many Westerns where it’s all good guys or bad guys.”

Still, as Japanese investment in the United States accelerates and the economies of the two nations become more interdependent, attitudes toward Japan are finally becoming less simplistic as more and more American households have a stake in U.S.-Japan trade.

For example, Japanese companies have opened manufacturing plants in many Midwestern and Southern communities in recent years, bringing residents into contact with Japanese for the first time. Meanwhile, a steady stream of blue-collar workers from those factories are being sent to Japan for training.

‘Honest, Straightforward’

The arrangements have led to some misunderstandings and problems, but many workers, bitter at American firms that closed up shop when times and foreign competition got tough, welcome the commitment shown by the Japanese.

“The Japanese offer security,” said Randy Hodges, president of a United Auto Workers local at a once-shuttered refrigerator plant in Richmond, Ind., that has been revived by Sanyo Corp. “They do everything in their power to make it a success. That’s missing in the American business community. If they (American firms) can’t make a profit quickly, they pack it in. The Japanese aren’t quitters. They seem to be honest, straightforward and easy to deal with.”

Another symbol of the change: At UAW headquarters in Detroit, once the blue-collar nerve center for anti-import activity, a sign in the parking lot barring entry to foreign-made vehicles has come down. Union officials said the placard, suggesting that drivers of imports should “Park it in Tokyo,” was removed because it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate between foreign and domestic as Japanese and American firms forge new investment and supply links.

In Lafayette, Ind., home to a nearly completed auto assembly plant financed jointly by Subaru and Isuzu, Mayor James Riehle noted that excitement over the prospect of 1,700 new jobs has overwhelmed any latent anti-Japanese sentiment in the community.

“I was at the VFW post one night, and a lady stood up making some resentful remarks,” said Riehle. “But then a veteran of the Pacific war got up and said ‘Hey, these guys didn’t fight in the war. They are here to make an investment.’ Overall, I’d say that there is an appreciation here in town that they have selected us.”