CHAPTER ONE

Japan

A Reinterpretation



By PATRICK SMITH



Alfred A. Knopf

Part I

Among Themselves

The Invisible Japanese

She's like a quiet mountain lake whose waters are rushing beneath the surface toward a waterfall. She's like the face on a Noh mask, wrapped in her own secrets.

-- Fumiko Enchi, Masks, 1958

Japan had opened to the West just thirty years before Wilde made this observation. Europe was awash in what the French call japonisme. Degas, Manet, Whistler, Pissarro -- they were all fascinated by the imagery of Japanese tradition. In 1887 van Gogh decorated Le Père Tanguy with prints of Mount Fuji and geisha in elaborate kimonos. Gauguin made gouaches on paper cut to the shape of Japanese fans. This infatuation permeated society. It was reflected on teapots and vases, in the fabric of women's dresses, and in the way people arranged flowers.

But what did japonisme have to do with Japan as it was? The Japan of the 1880s was erecting factories and assembling steamships, conscripting an army and preparing a parliament. There were universities, offices, department stores, banks. As Wilde elaborated, "The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them."

Wilde was ahead of his time. We now have a word, albeit a contentious one, for the phenomenon he touched upon, if incidentally, in "The Decay of Lying." It is called Orientalism. Orientalism meant "the eternal East." In his account of Japan Wilde left out only the quotation marks, for he was writing about the simple, serene, perfume-scented "Japan" of the Orientalist's imaginings.

Orientalism was made of received notions and images of the people, cultures, and societies that stretch from the eastern Mediterranean to the Pacific. There was no dynamism or movement in the Oriental society. The Orient was fixed in immutable patterns, discernible through the ages and eternally repeated, like the mosaics in Middle Eastern mosques. It did not, in a word, progress. Deprived of the Enlightenment, the East displayed no rational thought, no logic or science. The Oriental merely existed, a creature ruled by fate, timeless tradition, and an ever-present touch of sorrow. The Oriental was "exotic" rather than ordinary, "inscrutable" rather than comprehensible, dusky rather than light. The Orient was the "other" of the West, and the twain would never meet.

Japan, farthest east from the metropolitan capitals and least known among explorers, became the object of extreme Orientalist fantasies as soon as Europeans arrived, in 1542. The first Westerners to record their impressions were missionaries, who took Japan and the Japanese to be a place and a people "beyond imagining," as an Italian Jesuit put it, "a world the reverse of Europe." Europeans were tall, the Japanese were short. Churches were high, temples low. European women whitened their teeth, Japanese women blackened theirs. Japan was an antipodean universe, ever yielding, ever prostrate. "The people are incredibly resigned to their sufferings and hardships," the Jesuit wrote on another occasion, "yet they live quietly and contentedly in their misery and poverty." Francis Xavier, who arrived in 1549, asked why the Japanese did not write "in our way" -- from left to right, across. His Japanese guide replied with a question that would have done Francis some good had he troubled with its implications: Why did Europeans not write in the Japanese way, from right to left, down?

The observations of sixteenth-century Europeans were not pure invention. By tradition Japanese women did blacken their teeth. An air of resignation is as evident among the Japanese today as it must have been then. And Japanese locks -- a peculiar obsession among these first visitors, noted again and again -- are still opened by turning the key to the left, not (as in the West) to the right. But what makes these observations faintly ridiculous? Why did they produce the enduring idea of a place populated by mysterious gnomes? From our distant point of view it was a simple failure of perspective. The early travelers made no connections: That is, the Japanese were not permitted, if that is the word, their own history, a past by which their great and small differences could have been explained.

Orientalism grew from empire. One of its features was the position of the observer to the observed: The one was always superior to the other. As Edward Said stresses in Orientalism, intellectual conventions reflected relationships based on power and material benefit. So Orientalism came into full flower in Britain and France, the great empire builders of the nineteenth century. Japan was never formally a part of anyone's empire, but it was hardly free of the Orientalism associated with imperial possessions. Its relations with Europe were based on the same material interests and were marked by the same presumed superiority on the part of Europeans.

Today, of course, we call someone from India, Indonesia, Taiwan, or Japan an Asian rather than an Oriental. Our term is an attempt, at least, to acknowledge human complexity and diversity -- and equality. To call someone an Oriental would give at least mild offense, because it would recall relations that no longer exist -- at least not on maps. But this is not to say that the habits of Orientalism are not still with us, as any Asian can point out. Our Orientalism is remarkable only for its fidelity to the ideas of centuries past: Japanese society is "vertical," while in the West social relations are "horizontal"; Westerners like competition, the Japanese compromise. When an earthquake struck Kobe in 1995 an American correspondent described the city as "an antipodean New York with more sushi." Asians stoically accept natural calamities as part of the timeless order of things, he explained, so that "the Japanese of Kobe are ideal disaster victims."

There was one peculiar aspect of Wilde's idea of Orientalism. He observed that the image of Japan abroad in the last century was partly a concoction of the Japanese themselves. Wilde called the Japanese "the deliberate self-conscious creation" of artists such as Hokusai, whose woodblock prints were much the fashion at the height of Europe's japonisme. This was exceptionally astute. We could easily make the same assertion about many of Japan's leaders and thinkers throughout history. "Japan" has long been an act of the imagination among the Japanese, too, and to call some Japanese Orientalists is to stretch the term but slightly.

America did not much participate in Orientalism as a system of thought because it had no Eastern empire. It was a tag-along among the imperialists. In the nineteenth-century rush of flag planting it possessed only the Philippines, and only briefly. But what about America after 1945? In the postwar world "the American century" came into full flower, nowhere more than in the Pacific -- and nowhere in the Pacific more than in Japan. The occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952 was only nominally an allied exercise. Douglas MacArthur was called the supreme commander for the allied powers, S.C.A.P., but his general headquarters, G.H.Q., was an American outpost. Just as every Japanese alive today understands the old alphabet soup, so is it understood that it was the Americans who determined Japan's postwar course.

America developed its own version of Orientalism after the Second World War. We not only fixed Japan and the Japanese in our minds as a certain kind of country populated by a certain kind of people; we went on to create the country and the people we imagined. This was not accomplished alone, of course. America, without a trace of irony, enlisted the help of those who had led Japan into the war against American soldiers. The British used to call this indirect rule and applied it chiefly in their African possessions. It was a neat fit for the Americans in Japan, for Tokyo's prewar conservatives were practiced Orientalists themselves, and they did much to assist America in its reinvention of their country.

The version of Japan concocted after the war is still widely accepted. It is reflected in Washington's treatment of Tokyo, which resembles the way a colonial power treats a dependency; more prevalently, it is evident in the way ordinary Americans think of Japan and the Japanese. Our "Japan" has advanced somewhat beyond kimonos and conical straw hats, though not entirely. We are still stuck with the quotation marks. In the 1970s we took to calling our imagined Japan "Japan Inc." -- an entire nation cast as a corporation, and its people as employees rather than citizens. This conception of Japan is still taken as genuine throughout the West.

The novelist Kenzaburo Oe complains often about the two images of Japan the West now entertains. There is the old Japan of samurai and Zen gardens, and the new Japan of gadgets and efficiency. "Between the two," he once told me, "there is a blank, where the Japanese live." When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1994, Oe said to an American writer who interviewed him in Stockholm:

I am fascinated by Ralph Ellison's great book, Invisible Man, and it applies to us -- us Japanese. . . . You can see Japanese technology in Europe, you know all about Japanese economic power, you know all about the quaint tea ceremony; but these are all images, masks of Japanese modesty or technological strength. . . . Even today, more than a hundred and twenty-five years after our great modernization, . . . we are inscrutable in the eyes of Europeans and Americans. . . . There is not much of a desire to understand the people who make all those Hondas. I don't know why. Perhaps we only imitate the West or are just silent in the face of European peoples. america and japan have had a complex relationship over the past fifty years. They are as close as any two countries could be -- which, I believe, is too close, for neither nation has done well out of its ties to the other during the last half century. Yet after all the years of intimacy the Japanese are still considered inscrutable. Kenzaburo Oe is not alone in applying this tired term. It is true that the Japanese are a reserved people, ungiven to self-revelation even among themselves. It is also true, as it was a century ago, that Japan's image today is partly of its own making. But this does not explain the cloudy picture. The Japanese remain inscrutable because from the occupation onward -- indeed, for a long time before the war -- we have never looked directly at them with a desire to understand who they are.

Americans began their occupation of Japan with an ambitious plan to remake the Japanese -- to reinvent them in the American image -- and ended by restoring the very things and the very people they had arrived intending to uproot and destroy. The initial effort was made of New Deal goodwill and the latter of Cold War calculation. But one thing united these two extremes: At no point did Japan's occupiers try to see the Japanese as anything other than a reflection of themselves.

The occupation's initial orders arrived from Washington in the autumn of 1945. They were remarkable for their sweep and idealism. MacArthur's G.H.Q. was to do nothing less than liberate the Japanese from the agony of their past and the absolutists who had used the vestiges of feudalism to lead Japan into tragedy. Politically, the occupation was to "democratize." Economically, it was to structure "a wide distribution of income and ownership of the means of production and trade." This was hardly the sort of language one would expect of Washington, but the era of Rooseveltian social crusades had carried over into the war years, and its vocabulary suited the evangelists who staffed the G.H.Q. They wanted to change everything about the Japanese -- their hearts, minds, and souls. Unofficially this extended to the introduction of pocket billiards, square dancing, bowling, big-band jazz. It would all make the Japanese better, happier people. "One trembles," an occupation memoirist noted, "at American presumption."

It is well known that the first soldiers to arrive in Japan after August 15, 1945, were shocked by their reception. People apparently prepared to die for the emperor a few days earlier greeted their conquerors with a relief approaching joy. Why was this? Because the Japanese have no morals, or honesty, or convictions? Or because, as a Japanese friend once told me, "Our only principle is that we have no principles"?

It would be hard to exaggerate the enthusiasm of ordinary Japanese for the occupation's original agenda. People old enough to recall the first postsurrender years are still deeply nostalgic about them, desperate as those years were. But no Japanese knew what was in store right after the surrender. No gift resembling democracy had yet been presented. A gift so large is always a problem, anyway. In the end, of course, no one can either give it or receive it, as the Japanese soon learned. So it is fair to ask what precisely it was the Japanese appreciated as the Americans arrived. All they knew was that the war was over, that they would not be dying for the emperor, and that the victors had no intention of slaughtering them: three surprises.

America's greatest gift, the one the Japanese still bittersweetly remember, was a smaller one. It was the prospect that they would have a chance to begin again, to find a new path forward. This gift lay in the extent, limited though it was, to which the occupation gave the Japanese the room to make their own choices -- to form political parties and labor unions, for instance, and to choose leaders by a method of their own making. It allowed the Japanese to question the norms and customs by which they had previously lived. Most of all, they were encouraged to think and make decisions as individuals for the first time in their long history. In all of this the Americans appeared to be something like gods. Accounts of the era often dwell with wonder upon the sheer physicality of the arriving G.I.'s, who impressed the population not only with their size, their smiles, and their generosity, but because in their very gestures they expressed a freedom, an autonomy, and a natural at-homeness with themselves that the Japanese instantly recognized as absent in their own character.

Unfortunately, the Americans' generous gift -- the gift of standing aside, one might say -- was always attenuated and was quickly withdrawn altogether. In the autumn of 1946 American voters did to Harry Truman what they would do again, to Bill Clinton, in 1994 and 1996: They gave a Democratic president Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. America was never of one mind as to how Japan should be remade. There had long been a constituency for the idea that Japan was a "yellow peril" that, if it was not entertaining partnerships with European fascists, might as easily turn leftward toward communism. The 1946 elections tipped the scales -- first in America, then in Tokyo. The Japanese refer to the events that followed as "the reverse course." As the shorthand implies, the change in American priorities was fundamental.

The reverse course began in 1947, when the New Dealers at G.H.Q. were purged in favor of anticommunist ideologues and fiscal conservatives. A year later it arrived as policy in the form of a National Security Council directive written by George Kennan, the noted architect of communist containment. Modest in title but vast in import, N.S.C. 13/2 brought the Cold War to Japan. The following year Mao took Beijing, and the year after that the Korean war began. These events sealed the fate of the original postwar reforms -- and for the next forty years, the fate of the Japanese.

N.S.C. 13/2 abandoned reform in favor of economic recovery and -- grail of the Cold War era -- stability. It called for "high exports through hard work," but the directive's language does not convey how profoundly it changed the work-in-progress called postwar Japan. Everything was to be sacrificed to containment. Purges of right-wing nationalists stopped and purges of those judged inimical to American interests began. Efforts to disband the zaibatsu, family-led combines that had stood behind Japan's expansion on the Asian mainland and later supplied the war effort, were halted. Before 1948 was out the prewar industrialists were back in their offices and the old political elite was again running Japan.

Certain of the reforms lasted. No one can deny the importance of the civil rights Americans wrote into the postwar constitution (though these have often been abused). Land for landless farmers ended an old iniquity and remains a tribute to the early occupation (though land reform eventually produced new political inequalities). But most of the initial reforms were severely compromised -- some fatally.

Consider the purge of the prewar order. It was extensive in the military, wiping out most of the nationalist fanatics America fought the war to defeat. G.H.Q. did not need the Japanese army -- not until the early 1950s, anyway. Eighty percent of those eventually purged were militarists. But what about other areas: politics, the economy, and the powerful bureaucracy? Here the purge was sketchy at best. The restructured successors of the zaibatsu are still with us. Eight hundred and thirty bureaucrats -- fewer than 2 percent of those screened -- were purged. MacArthur used the prewar bureaucracy to run the country; the bureaucrats even ran the purge program. Politicians accounted for one in six of those barred from public life. A little more than a decade after the war, Japan had an accused war criminal as prime minister.

Japanese attitudes toward America have never recovered from the reverse course. Today the early period is recalled as a kind of Tokyo spring -- a sentimental memory enhanced by the brevity of the season. Democracy came and went so quickly that the Japanese were soon debating whether they had ever had it. As early as 1950 the scholar Masao Maruyama declared Japanese democracy a fiction not worth defending. After the reverse course those who had looked up to Americans suddenly felt betrayed and distanced, while those who had so recently detested the victors found in them an ally in their quest to regain power. There are now few Japanese whose feelings about America are untinged with the ambivalence borne of this period: admiration and dislike, respect and mistrust.

America spins many myths about its postwar performance in Japan. "Considering what it might have been," an American analyst observed, "the American occupation proved to be, on balance, a surprisingly positive experience for both the victor and the vanquished." This was written in 1987; it is entirely typical of the American accounting of things since the occupation ended. But to consider "what it might have been" is a treacherous invitation. It is precisely when we accept it that our occupation of Japan is devalued, for it could have been so much more than what it turned out to be. And what did it turn out to be? This question is easily answered, for the Japan before us today is the same one America created after the war: extravagantly corrupt, obsessed with market dominance, ecologically reckless, stifling of the individual, politically dysfunctional, leaderless, incapable of decisions.

How is it that Japan has remained frozen in such a state for five decades? The answer lies in two documents. One is the constitution written under General MacArthur and made law in 1947. Its most famous clause, Article 9, gives it the name by which it is commonly known -- the peace constitution -- because it barred Japan from raising an army and limited military activity to the defense of its natural borders. The other is the security treaty signed in 1951 and implemented the following year. It placed Japan under American military protection. Americans were responsible for both documents, and it is remarkable that they exist side by side, for together they are a tour de force in political and diplomatic schizophrenia, the disease from which Japan still suffers.

The man who passed this affliction on to his countrymen was named Shigeru Yoshida. It was Yoshida who, with American support, brought the prewar politicians back to power in 1948. The son of a Meiji-era liberal, Yoshida was a practiced diplomat before the war, an English-speaking bureaucrat who moved in peerage circles close to the throne. He was a nationalist but no militarist, and over several years of dexterous politicking, he and MacArthur cobbled together what can neatly be termed "the Yoshida deal."

The blunt but witty Yoshida famously held that Japan could win by peaceful means what it had lost in military adventure. It was Yoshida who placed Japan under the American security umbrella and turned the imperial army's lost crusade into the grinding war of attrition we track today with trade statistics. The Yoshida deal brought abundant benefits, but it found shrill critics all around. Neither pacifists nor nationalists have ever quite digested one or another of its particulars. Coerced by John Foster Dulles, America's premier cold warrior, Yoshida oversaw Japan's undeclared rearmament: Japan today is the world's sixth most expensively armed country. He also let American military bases remain after the occupation ended -- which, four decades on, look like a permanent garrison. The price of this arrangement was nothing less than sovereignty, but Japan wasted no time proving Yoshida's point about making economic victory of military defeat.

Among the remarkable things about the Yoshida deal is that it was struck after Japan had already spent four years under the peace constitution, a document that also had its enemies. Rightists who favored rearmament detested it; the new Cold War establishment in Washington considered it a mistake as soon as it was written. Even pacifists balked before backing it, since they disliked the idea of American domination. MacArthur never stopped defending the basic law he gave Japan, but that was simply MacArthur being MacArthur: He wanted a memorial to his administration modeled on the constitution he wrote for the Philippines in 1935.

There was a gaping contradiction between the peace constitution and Japan's Cold War assignment. But logically enough, MacArthur and Yoshida found the only way around it: They ignored it, so beginning Japan's postwar schizophrenia. Japan was pacifist by law, but by treaty (and in practice) a spear carrier in the anticommunist crusade. Once the Japanese were drawn into the Cold War, the political center hollowed out. Voters supported the constitution America gave them, which meant opposing America; or they supported the corruption of the constitution, so pleasing the nation that provided it. The Japanese call the political equation that fixed these polarities the "1955 system." In the autumn of that year the Socialists* reunited after several years of infighting. In response the two leading conservative parties joined to become the Liberal Democrats, who kept the rule of the old elite intact for the next thirty-eight years.

Through the 1955 system America exercised immense power over Japan after the occupation ended, as it does today. Tokyo has articulated few foreign policy decisions without Washington's approval -- none until the 1970s -- and it usually supports American aims even when they run counter to Japanese interests. We pretend Japan is an independent country, but fundamentally it is a military protectorate, as the Japanese, along with most people other than Americans, understand. America's power has also extended within. For roughly twenty years after the occupation, Washington did in Japan what it did in many Third World countries during the Cold War: It covertly but actively supported the political elite it had restored in 1948. Then it invited the rest of the world to pretend along with Americans that Japan was a working democracy.

And how did a small group of conservative politicians, closet xenophobes obsequious toward America but commanding no great enthusiasm among voters, hold power without serious challenge until 1993? This question has been asked often from the 1950s onward. And because Japan possesses the machinery of a democracy, the answer has not been simple. That there has been no credible alternative to the Liberal Democrats is true, but why? Because of corruption? Yes, but whose corruption? Why is Japan run by a system of patronage presided over by a succession of inept village headmen cast incongruously onto the world stage?

The answer lies in the nature of the reinstalled leaders from before the war. Rechristened Liberal Democrats, they prolonged traditional political customs -- deference to authority, village identity, political clans, vote purchasing -- long after such practices ought to have died natural deaths. In short, the conservative elite self-perpetuated by discouraging democratic habits. And to what extent did the Americans assist in this endeavor? This is not altogether clear. But it has been a little clearer since 1994, when the New York Times revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly passing funds to the governing party until well into the 1970s. With them America manipulated elections, backed favorite premiers, and debilitated the political opposition. These funds numbered at least in the tens of millions of dollars, perhaps in the hundreds of millions. We do not know: The C.I.A. will not tell us.

America's concern was that of a Cold War commander. It feared for the loyalty of its troops. Specifically, Washington worried that a politically independent Japan would take the Switzerland-in-Asia route -- that is, choose neutrality between East and West and opt out of the Cold War crusade. This was a possibility; we referred to it as a "danger." But it is reasonable, nonetheless, to take these secret events, along with the reverse course, as a measure of the importance America placed on a working democracy in Japan, and the regard it had for the Japanese people. The logic was the same as during the Vietnam war, when we burned villages to save them: We subverted democracy to save it.

Americans do not think of themselves as subverters of the democratic process in other countries. Destroying the choices of other people was what the Soviets were doing in Eastern Europe. This is an image of ourselves we choose to obfuscate, though most other nations, even our friends, have always been more polite about it than they have been fooled. It will be difficult for us to face this aspect of our recent past, but with the Cold War over, sooner or later we will have to.

America's habit of dissembling reflected the essential Cold War bind: the chasm between the ideal and the real, the pretense and the actual. The space between the two is familiar to the Japanese: The Cold War produced only one more version of the gap between "Japan" and Japan, a distinction the Japanese had long lived with. Along with the millions in covert funds, this conditioned accommodation is why the Cold War, after some initial choking, seemed to go down smoothly despite its bitter taste. The Japanese have a phrase by which they learned long ago to live with their disappointments: "Shiyo ga nai," they say, it can't be helped. It is true far less frequently than the Japanese believe, but it expresses an emotion I place among their most basic: desire without hope. And it was desire without hope that the Japanese felt as they watched America destroy their postwar experiment.

It was not enough, though, that Japan was America's forward outpost in the Pacific, as George Kennan described it in N.S.C. 13/2 -- an "unsinkable aircraft carrier," as a Japanese leader would later put it. Japan had to have a certain appearance, too. It had to choose the West. No other choice was acceptable, of course; Japan's entry into the Cold War was nothing more or less than a forced march. But Japan had to appear pristinely democratic in its decision to follow America. And -- no small thing -- the Japanese had to be calm and happy with their lot. These matters were of supreme importance, for Japan would be a model in a region Washington viewed as one of teetering dominoes.

John Foster Dulles, as President Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state, took an early and active interest in cultivating the proper image of Japan. During the decade after the war this concern grew in Washington and led American scholars to conceive a new picture of the country America had recently defeated at great cost. This picture gradually advanced into the mainstream of American thought -- first in scholarly papers and texts, then in popular books, and finally in films, newspapers, and advertising. It became, in short, the new paradigm. It became part of what we can now call our "victory culture," that postwar set of beliefs about ourselves and others that amounts to an updated, American version of the old Orientalism.

The manipulation of history was of fundamental importance in this exercise, for the paradigm rested largely on an image -- not of Japan after the war, and still less of the war itself, but of what came before the war. It was by recasting Japan's past that America's winning portrait of its Asian ally emerged. One could not pretend to alter the facts, Stalin-like. But they could be made to serve the emerging ideology nonetheless. History could be tailored with nips and tucks -- by glossing over its unattractive parts and making much of minor matters. And with the past reshaped, the present would appear other than what it was.

Japan made itself modern, at least economically, with extraordinary speed after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. But its people paid heavily for the course their leaders chose. There was no political freedom and much exploitation; feudal customs were preserved to prevent the development of democracy and modern social arrangements. The leadership suffused the nation with xenophobia and militarism to further its imperial ambitions. Above all, there was much conflict and dissent -- and as much violence in its suppression. Until America took an interest in how Japan appeared to others, these were the ordinary facts of history. They were what the allies fought the war about. They had been established by a generation of scholars dedicated to understanding the complex, troubled path Japan followed as it modernized.

Then these facts were pushed to the margins, so that America could justify its "Japan" -- Japan as it had been reassembled from the past to suit new purposes. What had been so recently understood as burdensome feudal practices became "tradition." Tradition was embodied in the emperor, a good man who had opposed the war. Tradition explained the enviable work ethic of the Japanese, their patience with poor living conditions, their easy acquiescence to authority. Harmony and consensus prevailed, and strife was a foreign thing, for the Japanese were a modest people given to compromise in all matters. Nagatacho, Tokyo's political quarter, was not a hive of corrupt ultranationalists resurrected from wartime cliques; it was the home of East Asia's first up-and-running parliamentary democracy.

The new paradigm produced two essential conclusions, and whether we are aware of them or not, they are the basis of what we assume to be true about Japan. The first was that the country's fifteen years of aggression were an aberration, a blip in an otherwise unbroken line. There was nothing really wrong with the Japanese system: It had swerved off course, but only briefly, and the occupation fixed that. One need not come to terms with the Pacific war, because it stood outside of Japan's progress toward liberal democracy. The second conclusion followed easily: Not much was required by way of postwar reform. In one of the best-known books to argue this point, Edwin O. Reischauer asserted that "a slight readjustment of the rules" was all Japan needed to reverse the history of the 1930s and resume its westward stride.

This, in bare-bones outline, is the paradigm. Japan was responsible for one of the century's great tragedies, and its people subjected to many forms of degradation, but overnight these stark realities all but vanished. The Japanese were our allies -- our hard-working, uncomplicated, compliant friends. Trade spats and bickering over security matters have frayed the basic conceit in recent years, but this remains the image of Japan that we take to be true today. And establishing it so firmly was no small accomplishment. But those who created it often had the support of government agencies and private foundations -- a point worth noting, for there can be few other occasions, if any, when American scholarship was so thoroughly in the service of official ideology.

A number of the scholars who projected the new image taught at Harvard University. Prominent among them was Reischauer, a missionary's son who was born in Japan and whose life and career -- scholar, Washington advisor, diplomat -- remained intimately tied to the Japanese the whole of his life. Reischauer minced many words during his career, but not all of them. Within a few years of the surrender he was urging Washington to recognize that scholarship could be useful as "propaganda work," as he put it, and that history rescripted could have "very profound practical results." Reischauer was hardly alone in these odd notions of the professor's task, but he was singularly keen on what we might call applied knowledge.

When the occupation ended Reischauer quickly pronounced it an unqualified success. The purges of wartime politicians and zaibatsu executives were completed, he declared. By his account there was no reverse course: There had been a "retrenchment," but only because the reforms were a thoroughgoing triumph. "What was now needed was for the Japanese themselves to adjust the new rules to Japanese realities," Reischauer wrote in 1953, "and to gain experience in living and governing themselves according to democratic processes." Consider the implications of this statement. Who would teach the Japanese these things? Who would show them how democracy worked? Reinstalled officials from the 1930s dictatorship, the people who invented the thought police? This is what Reischauer must have meant, for they were back in charge.

These passages are from a single page in Reischauer's book The Japanese Today:

On the surface Japan gives all the appearances of a happy society and probably deserves this evaluation as much as any other country.

Cultural schizophrenia, which may seem obvious to the untutored Western eye, simply does not exist for the Japanese, except possibly for some self-conscious intellectuals.

The Japanese are clearly well satisfied with themselves both as individuals and nationally. Until only a few decades ago they tended to be painfully unsure of themselves, fearing that Westerners might be looking down on them, but in recent years such self-doubts have melted fast in the warmth of affluence and international acclaim.

First published in 1977 (as The Japanese) and brought up to date in 1988, The Japanese Today, Reischauer's most influential book, is packed with untruths, passages that bear no relation to Japanese reality, passages that can fairly be called propaganda passed off as history. The author's most remarkable assertion occurs in the 1977 edition (and is little altered in later printings). "Political corruption is not widespread in Japan," he notes in passing. Reischauer then observes that one does hear constant "cries of corruption" from the Japanese public. But he explains away such cries with the observation that foreigners do not understand what they really mean.

Reischauer cast a spell. So did others with the same perspective. Among the best-known books of this genre was Ezra Vogel's Japan As Number One, published in 1979. This was one long invitation to Americans to learn their lessons from the Japanese -- lessons about consensus, the "higher interests" of politics, the excellence of Japanese schools, and the cooperative atmosphere in Japanese factories. Any wage earner in a Western country who sings a company anthem, who belongs to a quality circle, or who accepts membership in a company union has been influenced by Reischauer, Vogel, and the scholars with whom they worked. So has anyone who believes Japan to be a country of adjusted, conflict-free followers. Or who criticizes Japan's habits in international trade and security without troubling to understand the extent to which America is responsible for those habits.

The Japanese Today and its many companion volumes describe another "Japan" -- the Orientalist "Japan" Americans conceived after the war. It is the "Japan" we still read about in our newspapers. But it is not Japan. the reischauer circle became known as the Chrysanthemum Club, so named for the seal of the Japanese imperial house. The term was never meant to flatter. Chrysanthemem Club members were called geisha. They were considered uncritical apologists for Japan, a role they fulfilled on many occasions. Theirs was the perspective of results. That is, they left out or glossed over the unattractive things about Japan so that "success" appeared to be the sanitary consequence of altogether agreeable arrangements. In The Japanese Today everything is winning, with the exception of intellectuals, with whom the reader must not trouble himself. The appearance of "cultural schizophrenia" and corruption are put down to "the untutored Western eye."

In so simple a universe it is no wonder Americans set off in the 1970s in search of the "secrets" behind Japan's economic "miracle." We found these just where we were supposed to, in Japan's synthetic "traditions": in its respect for hierarchy and order, its sense of common purpose, its habit of company loyalty. A myth to match the American cowboy emerged, the myth of the "corporate warrior," known in Japan as the ordinary sarariman, the salaryman, the employee tied to a major corporation for his entire career.

We are all familiar with the samurai who carries a briefcase. The Japanese worker, whether he is on the shop floor in a clean white jumpsuit or behind a desk piled high with papers, is the key figure in the postwar economy. And he is so "satisfied with the way things are going" (Reischauer, The Japanese Today) that he has no interest in labor unions. Strikes are unwanted inconveniences; he prefers a consensus between labor and management. If he belongs to a union at all, it is one organized by his employers -- a company union, otherwise known as a house, or "enterprise," union.

Let us consider briefly the history of Japanese labor. In it we find a fundamental lesson.

Even before the turn of our century, the rush to modernize prompted widespread strife in the nation's new factories. Conditions were horrendous and absenteeism chronic; job turnover was often more than 100 percent a year. Labor agents enticed farm girls into textile mills with false promises. Those who "escaped" from factories were hunted down by private policemen. Wildcat strikes were more or less constant. Nobody could organize the first generation of industrial workers in Japanese history -- not the new managers and not the first would-be unionists.

In 1912 a Christian activist named Bunji Suzuki founded a union called Yuaikai, the Friendly Society. Yuaikai had an interesting platform. It preached social reform and moderate unionism -- it did not advocate strikes, for instance -- but it encouraged members to assert themselves as individuals, a notion Suzuki called "self-revolution." Later unionists likened Yuaikai's founding document to "the pledge of a Sunday school club." The criticism is fair. But the society became Japan's first national union. In 1919 it changed both its name (to the Greater Japan Federation of Labor) and its political stance; it then became an important voice in a newly assertive labor movement.

The 1920s sound a dissonant chord in the land of the dedicated corporate warrior. No year saw fewer than 250 major strikes. Violence was rife. During this decade employers began the first enterprise unions, structured not according to a trade or skill but by company affiliation. This arrangement led to a practice familiar today: the involvement of employers in all aspects of their employees' lives in the name of shared interests. What was public and what was private were thoroughly muddled. Over time a powerful group identity was imposed. House unions multiplied, but they had nothing to do with harmonious sentiment. The cooperation of most employees was forced.

In 1938 the military dictatorship made all unions dissolve into the Industrial Patriotic Society, abbreviated in Japanese as Sanpo. Sanpo's name speaks for itself. Its aims were coerced calm in the workplace and, as the war escalated, higher production levels. Everyone from presidents to tea ladies had to belong. We can gauge Sanpo's popularity by what happened in 1945. Within four months of the surrender twelve hundred independent unions had nine hundred thousand members. At the end of the 1940s membership was 6.7 million -- 56 percent of the workforce.

The occupation was generous with the rights of workers. Union membership, strikes, and collective bargaining were all protected. Large labor federations formed. But freely organized labor was an early casualty of the reverse course. Displeased with the ties unions formed with political parties, the G.H.Q.'s cold warriors quickly opened the way to attacks on labor from the restored political and business elites, and it was the 1920s all over again. Seven hundred thousand workers were fired between 1949 and 1950; twelve thousand were labeled communists or communist sympathizers. House unions were rebuilt, often upon the remnants of Sanpo.

Gutted but standing, the independent unions of the postsurrender period hobbled on. Since 1955, labor's main event each year has been the shunto, or spring offensive, in which unions bargain for a nationwide wage settlement. The shunto has been more or less effective over the years, but that depends on economic conditions and what industry decides it is willing to give. It is less a negotiation than a ritual. It is as if employees are permitted to unite once a year to announce, "We are independent, and we are autonomous participants in the economy," though of course they are neither.

It is true now, as any Chrysanthemum Club scholar would assert, that the average employee does not care much about unions. Today less than a quarter of Japan's fifty million employees belong even to house unions. But this is so not because life is perfectly satisfying as it is; it is because unions have been rendered more or less useless. They are among Japan's many grand illusions -- still there on the scene, still floating in and out of newspaper stories and so on, but entirely empty of purpose. If one could imagine such a thing, they are "virtual" unions.

What is at issue here? The above account touches on many contentious questions. There is acrimonious debate among scholars, writers, and journalists as to the prewar history of labor, the occupation, the reverse course, and the nature of the purges of the late 1940s. We should not be distracted by these matters. It is not important -- not here -- whether one favors unions, whether one believes that unions were subverted by "reds," or whether one accepts that ends justified means during the Cold War. The issue is omission.

The standard presentation of relations between labor and management gives us a placid image without accounting for how the placidity came to be. It leaves out the discord -- indeed, the violence -- that produced the apparent harmony we see today. It leaves out the possibility that the workplace consensus we are encouraged to admire has not been achieved happily or does not actually exist beneath the surface of things. In short, it leaves out history and human complexity, by which we could have learned something about the Japanese.

Most of all, standard accounts of Japan leave out evidence of the enduring desire of ordinary Japanese for individual autonomy, that is, for an existence free of the humiliating paternalism that persists as a pervasive feature of Japanese society. It is a glaring omission, for this desire and the suppression of it have been near the center of Japanese life from the beginning of the nation's modern era. the chrysanthemum club was high among the Cold War establishment's intellectual appendages, a major producer of the victory culture that animated the American century. In the age of witch-hunts its perspective prevailed without serious challenge, so eclipsing the worthy work of entire generations. After a time it became dangerous to question the new orthodoxy. Scholars were inhibited from pursuing any analysis that conflicted with the paradigm, for to dwell upon Japan's complexities, or the paradigm's inconsistencies, was to face that dreaded condemnation of the Cold War years: It was to be "political." The intellectual chicanery of the era has thus discolored an entire country's understanding of Japan, for many were those who, braving the prevailing wind, found themselves forced from jobs, institutions, and communities.

The most tragic case concerned the Canadian writer and diplomat E. H. Norman, surely the seminal Japan scholar of his generation. Norman, more than anyone else, was responsible for the understanding of Japan the Chrysanthemum Club was dedicated to erasing -- a complex, altogether human Japan with no stock characters or easy notions of "tradition," a Japan with many serious problems, in need of the drastic change of course the Japanese wanted after the defeat. Norman's analysis rested on history; indeed, it was in Norman's work before the war that much of Japan's authentic modern history was recovered. Norman was respected on both sides of the Pacific. Then his work was labeled, summarily and unfairly, "Marxist." In 1951 he was denounced in Senate hearings as a communist. And as Reischauer and other scholars stood silently by, Norman was driven to suicide six years later.

There were always scholars, a beleaguered few, who wrote against the paradigm. Yet the single serious threat to it, at least until the Cold War ended, came not from Western professors but from ordinary Japanese. It occurred in the summer of 1960, when the treaty binding Japan to the American security system was to be renewed. The treaty is abbreviated in Japanese as AMPO. The events surrounding the renewal of AMPO are worth recalling, for it was the anti-AMPO movement, which was immense, that implicitly challenged the paradigm in the simplest of ways: It showed how little the new imagery had to do with the Japanese as they really were.

The man at the center of the AMPO crisis was named Nobusuke Kishi. Elected premier in 1957, Kishi seems to have been a prime recipient of the C.I.A.'s political funds. Who, precisely, was Kishi? The question is interesting because America's dealings with him were an insult not only to the Japanese, but to every American who fought in the Pacific war or sacrificed for it at home. If Washington had purposely sought out an emblem of all that was repulsive in imperial Japan, it could not have made a better choice.

To put the matter simply, Kishi was a war criminal and a thug. During the 1930s, when Japan occupied Manchuria, Kishi was the second-ranked civilian in the colonial administration. In Hideki Tojo's wartime cabinet he held the industry portfolio and served, in addition, as vice-minister for munitions. He was, nonetheless, described by Joseph Grew, Washington's prewar ambassador and a prominent figure in the Tokyo lobby at the war's end, as "one of my highly valued friends in Japan." Kishi, it seems, let Grew out of prison to play golf in 1942, before Washington and Tokyo exchanged diplomats.

As an "A" list war criminal according to the international postwar classification, Kishi was held in Sugamo prison after the defeat, but the occupation released him (along with a number of others) at the end of 1948. No public explanation for this move was ever offered, though its place in the reverse course can hardly be disputed. Kishi then began a steady march toward the premiership, backed by postwar Japan's least-savory collection of unreconstructed fascists, Sugamo alumni, and yakuza crime bosses. Kishi brought many of his cronies into national politics with him. His administration, indeed, marked the consolidation of the prewar nationalists' future in Japanese politics. Kishi himself remained an influential figure in Nagatacho until his death in 1987.

In June of 1957, the just-elected Kishi visited the United States. He golfed with President Eisenhower and addressed both houses of Congress. He traveled to New York, met with senior Wall Street financiers, and tossed out a ball at a Yankee game. It was shortly after this visit, the scholar Michael Schaller wrote recently, that the C.I.A. appears to have begun sending Kishi covert funds. Three years later it was Kishi, more than any other Japanese, who made sure the AMPO treaty was renewed.

All of Japan knew the AMPO question was a crossroads. The country could either go on as it had since the war, under strict American tutelage, or it could declare the postwar era over and find its own way. In the Diet and among voters there was widespread opposition to the AMPO treaty. The pacifism of the postwar constitution had sunk deep roots. People did not want Japan to continue as America's Cold War partner; neither did they care to sacrifice sovereignty any longer to a victor that had brought back the prewar regime while pretending to purge it. Nonetheless, Kishi signed a new version of the treaty at the White House in January of 1960, Eisenhower looking happily on. By the following May, when the Diet was due to ratify the pact, the entire nation was absorbed by the AMPO issue -- much of it mobilized against the treaty's extension.

Kishi brought the Diet to the brink of rioting, for he had a self-imposed deadline. He wanted the treaty signed into law before Eisenhower visited Japan in June. Impatient with lengthy debates, Kishi eventually ordered police to carry opposing politicians out of the legislative chamber. Then he railroaded through a renewal vote in his adversaries' absence. It was a messy, undignified scene all around. Kishi's forced vote was legal, but it sat badly with a population that knew him as a wartime bureaucrat imprisoned after the surrender. It also looked as if the Liberal Democrats were more concerned with pleasing Washington than with honoring the wishes of the electorate.

Kishi's vote prompted protests all over the country. Several hundred thousand people ringed the Diet building in Tokyo. Eleven days before Eisenhower was to arrive a military helicopter had to rescue his press secretary from demonstrators who surrounded his car as it made its way in from the airport. Soon after, amid violent clashes between demonstrators and rightists recruited by the government, Tokyo canceled Eisenhower's visit. It would have been an embarrassment for America, anyway: By then Kishi had organized security that would have made the president's visit look like a military maneuver. There were command posts, first-aid squads, aircraft units, eighteen thousand policemen, and twice that number of ultranationalists and yakuza goons.

How many Americans today are even slightly familiar with these momentous events? And how should we understand them? What had begun as a fight over Japan's place in the Cold War order was changed by the forced vote. After Kishi rammed through the treaty, AMPO also became a struggle over the failure of democracy in Japan -- the democracy Americans still congratulate themselves for giving the Japanese. The scholar Chalmers Johnson likens the anti-AMPO revolt to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, minus the tanks and troops. It is a provocative comparison. An American president was unable to visit the happy capital of its closest ally in the Pacific: Wasn't that, indeed, a scene from the Soviet satellites? Didn't the Liberal Democrats, in ignoring the will of their own people, behave just as the pro-Moscow communists in Budapest who crushed the uprising of ordinary Hungarians? Without meaning to, Johnson raises an even more compelling question. Why is it that Americans must resort to the history of Soviet misdeeds in Eastern Europe to understand their own postwar conduct elsewhere on the globe? If we reflect upon this even briefly, the answer does not seem so elusive as one might think. Doesn't it reveal the extent to which Americans have been mesmerized by the myths of their victory culture?

Nineteen sixty was a watershed not only for Japan, but also for our idea of Japan. We can consider it today as the year America's "Japan" was formally launched. A few days after the AMPO treaty became law Premier Kishi was replaced by Hayato Ikeda, another leftover from the wartime bureaucracy, whose mission it was to take people's minds off the troublesome matters of democracy, sovereignty, and world politics. Ikeda promptly instituted another program every Japanese, alive at the time or not, recognizes as a postwar turning point. It was called the Income-Doubling Plan. It was devised to give as many Japanese as possible a material interest in arrangements as they were. It may look today like a bribe, and it was -- partly. But it was more in the way of an offer the Japanese could not refuse.

The reverse course, the Yoshida deal, and the 1955 system had prepared the ground well for this moment. The Ikeda plan produced a kind of madness -- the madness of material growth at any human or environmental cost, of a ruling party whose sole task was good relations with America; the madness of a mutant democracy in which elections function to deprive voters of their democratic rights. Thereafter, production and consumption were everything. Ikeda also invented the notion of consensus politics. His slogan was "Tolerance and Patience." Everything was to be done by common agreement after 1960. Of course, tolerance and patience changed nothing in Nagatacho; they meant only that the opposition took its place at the table on the understanding that power would never change hands. The Liberal Democrats could still pass any law they wanted, as the treaty vote had proven. Consensus was advanced as a traditional Japanese value, but it was really nothing more than another word for the disguised power of the political brokers who controlled Nagatacho.

Ikeda's plan succeeded admirably, at least on its own terms: The average salary doubled in seven years, three short of the goal. So began the era of Japan Inc., the name we gave to the obsessed nation we created. It was almost as if America had chosen Ikeda for office, for he did much to produce the country America wanted Japan to be. "High exports through hard work," Kennan's prescient phrase in N.S.C. 13/2, was fixed as the national ethos. All at once Japan became a mass society, a corporate society, and a management society (that is, one planned and controlled by a technocratic elite, like a business). But it was no longer a society capable of managing the democratic process, or even of sensible decisions, for Hayato Ikeda put Japan to sleep as a civic society. So it was that the Diet assumed the lifeless gait and the taste for immense corruption that have been its hallmarks ever since.

Edwin Reischauer visited Japan shortly after the AMPO crisis. At an academic conference in Hakone, a resort district south of Tokyo, he and other scholars elevated the paradigm to the level of doctrine. Thereafter it was known as "modernization theory," which assumed as truth the ideas Reischauer and a few other Americans had been advancing for years: Japan was a place of contented conformity, and the Japanese had handily regained the democratic track after a few misguided nationalists, now banished, temporarily diverted them. Gradualism in all matters was the obvious prescription. The only way forward, anywhere on the globe, was the Western way. For its naivete (or cynicism, perhaps) and all-around inaccuracy, the new orthodoxy astonished the Japanese scholars at Hakone. But a few months after Reischauer returned to Cambridge the new American president, John Kennedy, named him ambassador to Tokyo. Kennedy no doubt had the revolt against AMPO in view when he chose the professor from Harvard. And in appointing Reischauer he presided over the formal marriage of American scholarship to Cold War ideology.

In his later memoir, My Life Between Japan and America, Reischauer made short work of these matters. He could not comprehend the vehemence of Japanese attacks upon modernization theory, he wrote. The idea of modernization theory was a fabrication in the first place; there was never any such thing. The Japanese scholars, in any event, were all "Marxists" -- Reischauer loved the term -- whose "deeply entrenched Marxist concepts" led them to misunderstand their own country: Americans understood it better. As to the anti-AMPO movement, that was a misunderstanding, too. Resurrected war criminals like Kishi were no problem; the problem was the Japanese people, who lived and labored in the dark:

Many Japanese . . . felt helpless and resentful in their dependence on the United States. . . . They feared that America's adventuristic foreign policy, as they perceived it, combined with American nuclear power would involve Japan in a new tragedy. They saw themselves as being at the mercy of American callousness and political folly. Although they believed that they had no choice but to remain economically dependent on trade with America, they wished to distance themselves politically as much as they could from United States foreign policy. . . .

It was necessary for the Japanese to realize that the United States was not an inherently aggressive, militaristic country, but that it had to maintain some military strength in the Western Pacific. . . .

It would be Reischauer's task as ambassador to correct "all these distorted concepts," as he put it in his memoir. He never entertained the idea that the Japanese, even if they were wrong, had a right to their mistakes. Or that they well understood the circumstances under which they lived -- and how they arrived at them -- and that they simply did not wish to host America's Pacific forces or continue living as they had for all but a very few years after their defeat.

Reischauer served in Tokyo for six years. We now know he helped plan the subversion of at least one election, in Okinawa, and it is difficult to accept that as the extent of his illegal activity. Reischauer never fooled the Japanese about the Americans. From his day to ours they have held to a hard-nosed understanding of the bargain with America, the old Yoshida deal, which is one reason Tokyo appears to be so relentlessly obstinate today in matters such as trade. But the professor from Harvard was a resounding success in fooling Americans about the Japanese. This can be measured by our failure to understand Japan's official behavior toward us, or by the ease with which we dismiss ordinary Japanese as conformist robots or "economic animals" with no interest and no pride in anything other than production and export.

The Japanese went through a long period after the war with the pervasive feeling that they were ugly. People who lived through the defeat will sometimes still mention this in passing. One also finds vestiges of a time of profound self-rejection in ordinary expressions. Nihonjin banare shiteiru -- you look different from a Japanese -- was a common compliment among young women well into the 1980s. A poignant sense of inadequacy dates to Japan's first modern contacts with the West in the last century. But defeat in 1945 intensified it dramatically. The Japanese wanted somehow to disappear after the war. And the Americans invited them to do so, to efface themselves before the world, with the idea that they were not nationalists but internationalists.

"Thus, the Japanese, not long ago one of the most militaristic peoples of the world, have now become ardent champions of internationalism," Edwin Reischauer wrote after the war. "Some may doubt the sincerity of this sudden conversion, but it is not difficult to understand in a people entirely at the mercy of foreign military powers and completely dependent on trade with the outside world."

Reischauer's reasoning worked well for the Chrysanthemum Club. For example, it excused orthodox scholars from engaging the thorny question of wartime coercion on the part of Washington's new friends in Tokyo. But as a piece of logic it is a little preposterous. The Japanese were not a militaristic people, any more than any other ever was or will be. They suffered under a militarist regime over which they had no control. Neither does Reischauer's conclusion stand up to scrutiny. It is precisely those at the mercy of others whose sincerity must be questioned. Only those who willingly supported the dictatorship could be considered candidates for conversion. And many of them did not convert; in the reverse course Americans allowed them merely to bury their sentiments or reinterpret them.

By embracing internationalism the Japanese were supposed to have repudiated any claim they may have made to nationalism. It is true that the pacifism and neutrality popular after the war remain so today. But that is not the same as professing internationalism to the point of giving up one's national pride and identity, even for a people who wanted to disappear out of self-loathing. To be internationalist instead of nationalist: This is a false equation, commonly proposed. It has left the Japanese themselves confused and inarticulate as to their place in the world and the meaning of the awkward but often used term "Japaneseness." And so it escapes us that beneath its calm surface Japan still suffers the same restlessness and unease that was evident until the summer of 1960.

If we are to understand Japan today, and what Japan is likely to become, we must recognize that this restlessness has reemerged, as inevitably it would. To put it another way, the Japanese have come to realize that it is impossible to disappear from the face of the earth, or to make the bogus exchange of nationalism for internationalism. Or another way again: the Japanese are outgrowing their feelings of ugliness and inferiority in comparison with others. And these realizations that have now led them to begin redefining themselves.

Among the curiosities of modern Japan are the many slogans it has produced. They are like capsule philosophies, rich in meaning. Fukoku kyohei, wealthy nation, strong defense; wakon yosai, Japanese spirit, Western things; bunmei kaika, civilization and enlightenment: These were some of the phrases Japan used to describe itself when it began to modernize, and each one stood for an idea. During the war the dictatorship exhorted the populace with "Desirelessly on to victory," a telling admonition to suppress the self for the sake of the state. In the late 1980s Japan invented a slogan in a single word: kokusaika, internationalization. It was a complicated notion, never well explained, but it, too, gave an insight into the age.

It was difficult to tell what kokusaika meant when bureaucrats, scholars, and television commentators used the term. It was supposed to mean nothing less than the reinvention of the national ethos. Somehow, Japan Inc. would be decommissioned: The Japanese would work less, export less, and consume more of other people's products. They would take a greater part in world affairs. But these were rather large projects: Japan Inc., after all, could not be discarded just because some Japanese decided they were finished with certain aspects of it. That would require American dispensation. In any case, there were too many definitions of kokusaika and too little agreement as to its true meaning. How would Japan internationalize? What would it mean to the rest of us?

Japan stammered for a simple reason. "Internationalization" was the wrong word. Japan was trying to articulate a revived nationalism it feared the world (especially its neighbors and the Americans) would not accept. Along with "internationalization" came other notions -- less often discussed but more to the point: "soft nationalism," "resurgent cultural nationalism," "prudent revivalist nationalism." And along with these came Japan's arrival on the world's economic stage. In the mid-1980s the yen began a climb in value that put it among the world's strongest currencies. At home, interest rates were dropped to record lows, which quickly produced the "bubble economy," a five-year period of high but frothy, speculative growth. The Tokyo stock market tripled in value. Land prices doubled in a year -- and then doubled again the next year. The bubble brought the Japanese into the world's real estate markets, resorts, and auction rooms. Investors bought Hollywood studios and trophy properties such as Rockefeller Center. Japan became the largest aid donor and number one source of credit. At economic summits the world began to bow in Tokyo's direction. Can anyone doubt that these events were a form of national self-assertion -- that the Japanese, so to say, were making themselves visible again?

In certain ways the late 1980s resembled a party, as many Westerners who lived in Tokyo during those years understood. And like most parties, it was an occasion for both remembering and forgetting. The Japanese remembered nothing less than themselves. At home and abroad, they grew more confident -- as a nation and as individuals. They began to assert themselves politically for the first time since the anti-AMPO protests of 1960. But in the intoxication of the time they forgot about their larger circumstances. They forgot the immense influence America still exercised over Japan. They forgot that Japan had placed its faith in efficiency and technology, not democracy, and that reversing that decision was their greatest challenge. They forgot, too, that all the property deals in the world would not change the fact that Japan was a nation that had "power without purpose" -- a phrase that was famous by the decade's end.

The bubble lost its air in 1990, when Japan tumbled into recession. But something more abrupt than an economic downturn brought the Japanese back to sobriety. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait. And when the United States began gathering international support for a military response to Saddam Hussein, the Persian Gulf became a critical moment for Japan. What was Japan to do within its constitutional constraints, which exclude it from collective security actions? As much to the point, what did Japan want to do? As Tokyo dithered, Washington grew shrill. Japanese leaders looked like fools -- at least from America's perspective. They sent no soldiers to the Persian Gulf -- no troops, no supplies, no ships until it was too late. Japan eventually pledged $13 billion and got more criticism than thanks for it. Twenty-nine nations contributed to the Persian Gulf effort; Washington gave twenty-eight of them regular progress briefings during the assault and pride of place at the celebrations that came afterward.

There was singular irony in this obvious snub -- the irony of America's blindness to the history Americans themselves made. No one seemed to remember the old Yoshida deal, or that Japan's place in the Western security alliance had been imposed upon it. It never seemed to occur to anyone in Washington that Tokyo's fumbled response was partly the consequence of a document Americans wrote for the Japanese and then made law. And it was a measure of Tokyo's long habit of deference that no Japanese official ever pointed these things out.

The memory of those months will be long in fading among the Japanese. The Persian Gulf crisis suddenly ended the party of the late 1980s, the dream that Japan would never have to face the tasks of dismantling the Yoshida deal, rethinking the notion of internationalism, and becoming -- the phrase was soon universal -- "a normal nation."

The chrysanthemum club is still with us. It is now supported, vigorously and generously, by Japanese institutions. There is a Mitsubishi chair of law at Harvard and a Toyota chair of anthropology at the University of Michigan, among numerous other endowments like them. The Japanese spend many millions on such positions, which are almost invariably occupied by the geisha of the Chrysanthemum Club. Geisha still direct Japanese studies in many of our most esteemed universities, not just Harvard, and as the scholar Chalmers Johnson once pointed out, "You never have to tell a geisha what to do."

The Berlin Wall was a year in ruins when the Gulf War broke out. Saddam Hussein's invasion was a mere taste of the complex new world Japan, along with the rest of us, entered when the Cold War ended. Products of the Cold War, the Chrysanthemum Club and its "Japan" could never survive the end of it. Neither could the postwar political elite in Tokyo, janitors of our Orientalist creation. The Tokyo political landscape has changed forever since the late 1980s. Yet our postwar images linger, partly as a matter of inertia. We will eventually have to examine all our old assumptions if we are not to drift dangerously far from reality. But inertia, especially when it is rooted in a fear of change, can be a considerable force.

At the brink of the Cold War's end the Chrysanthemum Club was openly challenged for the first time in many years. It was the challenge of journalists and scholars known as the revisionists. They were (and remain) a loose group; on many questions they are far from universal agreement. None among them especially likes the revisionist label (as members of the Chrysanthemum Club did not like theirs). But they are legitimately bound by a simple assumption: The paradigm is false; the West should reassess the way it looks at Japan.

It is time to recognize, the revisionists said, that Japan is different from America and other industrial nations. At least as it is presented, it is a model of nothing. It has assumed the trappings of democracy but does not function as one. Its institutions do not serve the purposes we think they do. The government is not merely a regulator -- an arbiter, as in the West; it is an advocate. It plays an active role in the economy, with defined social and economic goals, as governments do in many Third World countries. Chalmers Johnson, best known of the revisionists and a scholar who has devoted his career to Chinese and Japanese studies, coined a new term for the Japanese system: He called it a "capitalist developmental state" -- a creature unknown until postwar Japan came along.

The revisionists detonated an explosion with another simple idea: If Japan is different it should be treated differently. As revisionism spread into newspapers and magazines, this assertion was immediately applied to matters of trade. Suddenly America could understand its chronic deficit with Japan, for it could dispense with the fiction that, apart from a few specific problems, the Japanese were free-market capitalists, just like the rest of us. The problem was systemic: Japan was closed, by virtue of numerous visible and invisible mechanisms, because Japan's political and business leaders liked it that way. And it would not open until the West forced it open -- a task left chiefly to the Americans.

Revisionism arrived like fresh air in a windowless room. It was an act of creative destruction in that it began the work of dismantling the postwar paradigm. It bore no ideological load, no Cold War imperative, so that it made the prospect of clear sight at last realistic. Revisionism held much appeal for ordinary Japanese, who stood to benefit greatly from an economic system stripped of some of its elaborate controls. Not surprisingly, the Japanese elite quickly labeled the revisionists "Japan bashers," a term whose sole purpose was to preclude open discussion of the institutions whose levers they pushed and pulled.

Revisionism has had a considerable impact in America. The old picture of Japan advanced by the Chrysanthemum Club is scarcely credible now. That it continues to be taught in American universities is faintly ridiculous. It is a vestige. Washington and Tokyo still guard the wall between trade and security that they erected after the war. But this artificial distinction is now under threat -- as it should be, for that is a vestige, too.

The revisionist version of Japan has also begun to sway ordinary Americans -- though not always in so favorable a direction. In the early 1990s we suddenly decided we were confronted with another version of the "evil empire." As the Soviet Union collapsed, there was serious talk that Japan would replace it as public enemy number one. All that remained was how Americans could protect themselves from the conspiring country across the Pacific.

Such notions have a long history. For more than a century America has swung like a pendulum in its views of Japan. A hundred years ago we wondered how long it would take before the primitive but innocent Japanese would become Christian and democratic. Then came the yellow peril, when the Japanese were cast as predatory militarists with a love of the sword deep in their souls. During the war they were simply "beasts" -- Harry Truman's judgment. Then they became diffident workaholics. And here we were again, hatching conspiracy theories. Suddenly, nothing happened by accident in Japan. Narita, Tokyo's international airport, was not big enough because Japan wanted to limit the influx of foreigners and the foreign travel of the Japanese. Japan did not enter a recession in the early 1990s: It was "blindsiding" us, a sort of sneak attack, the better to achieve economic domination. This view has receded precisely because Japan has been in recession, but it is likely to return as soon as our trade problems do.

Revisionism is partly to blame for this sort of paranoia -- if not its originators, then those who made the revisionist perspective popular. What went wrong? Why did revisionism not mark the beginning of a genuine understanding of the Japanese -- and so the end of the stories spun around various "Japan's"?

The revisionists' faults had something to do with their timing. When they appeared Japan had just finished a quarter of a century of gray, monotonous stability, during which nothing seemed to change. Of course, there is no such thing as a static society -- it is a human impossibility. On this point the revisionists should have learned from that other eternally unchanging nation, the Soviet Union. Instead, at the very moment everything was to begin changing, they posited a nation incapable of movement.

Most of all, the revisionists' advocates displayed little understanding of history. They seemed unaware of the extent to which America was responsible for the "Japan" that was suddenly so threatening. Every important component of Japan's postwar economic machine was in place by the end of the occupation, in 1952. M.I.T.I., the demonized Ministry of International Trade and Industry? Up and running precisely one day before the first allied soldiers arrived in Tokyo, in 1945, and its bureaucrats have never looked back. Targeted industries -- ships, steel, electronics, cars? The policy to concentrate resources in them began under the Americans in 1947. It was called "priority production" then; the only thing the Americans did not like was the name.

One of the terms that came up often in the late 1980s was gaiatsu, which translates as "outside pressure." There was nothing new about gaiatsu, but the term was current then because gaiatsu seemed the only way things got done in Japan. Outside pressure almost always meant pressure from the Americans. Washington would demand, say, an open market for beef or baseball bats. Tokyo would resist until the last moment, when it would present the case to the Japanese public as "inevitable" -- so relieving itself of responsibility.

Gaiatsu is indeed how many things got done in Japan. But what kind of relationship does gaiatsu imply? Is it one that does credit to either side -- or does it diminish both? More, does it represent a long-term solution to the problems Japan has in its relations with America and the rest of the world, or is it, at the core, Orientalist? Gaiatsu was much favored by many revisionists and still is, which brings us to their most basic mistake. Like the Chrysanthemum Club, many revisionists failed to acknowledge Japan's complexity and humanity. Instead, they took Japan to be the Japan of its institutions -- the Japan of the center, the Liberal Democratic, corporate, consensual Japan America did so much to create. This is the Japan Kenzaburo Oe described -- an "official" Japan made of samurai tradition and efficiency. And it is a mistake for any of us to accept it at face value.

Oe drew a fundamental distinction when he talked about the other Japan, the "blank where the Japanese live." By this he meant a Japan that is more authentic but less familiar to us in the West. It is a country of ordinary people with ordinary desires, people neither more nor less efficient than anyone else, neither more nor less individual, neither more nor less given to feudal arts and formality. Borrowing terms from Buddhist history and bending them, we call the familiar, official Japan the Japan of "the great tradition." Beneath it is the Japan of "the little tradition," the Japan we do not easily discern.

The difference between the two is very old. In one form or another it is no doubt universal. But nowhere has it been so influential for so long as in Japan. For as long as Japan has recorded its history there has been antagonism between the great and the little, the refined "above" and the ordinary "below." The famous saying of the late feudal period was "Revere officials, despise the people." This crude notion survived into the Meiji era as a clear line drawn between kan and min, officials and commoners, and it is not absent, to put it mildly, in Japan today. There is one other point worth noting: The great tradition has always reflected what Japan has borrowed from abroad. It is, then, an imposed import, while the little tradition has always been by nature indigenous.

The conflict between the great and the little is rarely explained in our mainstream accounts of Japan. Yet it is the coiled spring of Japanese history. It is as evident today as at any time in the past, and it will inform the rest of this book. To grasp it, at least in a general way, is essential to improving our understanding of Japan and the Japanese.

Consider again the matter of protectionism. We have always taken Tokyo's protectionist trade policies to reflect the nation's essential ethos -- its xenophobic mentality, its dislike of the foreign. Assuming protectionism enjoys universal support, we view it as a problem of "the Japanese." It has never been so simple. Who and what do Japanese policies protect? Is it ordinary Japanese people or the Japanese system, the bureaucrats and ministries at the center of Japan. Had this been considered, American might have thought better of gaiatsu. Gaiatsu does nothing to alter the system, and the system is the problem -- for the Japanese as well as for us.

Because the revisionists, or most of them, did not make the distinction between the great and the little, they did not see that America's problems with Japan were merely symptoms of more fundamental problems, many of which America either caused or prolonged. And they exhibited no confidence in the ability of the Japanese to alter their nation's course by themselves. Isn't this, in a new form, the same mistake Westerners have made since they first arrived, in 1542 -- the essential mistake of all Orientalists -- that is, the failure to allow the Japanese their own past, their own history? late in 1995, three American soldiers stationed in Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture, molested a twelve-year-old girl outside their base. Two admitted to abduction, the third to rape. (In the end a Japanese court sentenced all three to roughly seven years.) A gruesome crime in any circumstance, the incident set off a storm in America's relations with Japan that went far beyond the conduct of guests in another country. Three G.I.'s on a night off managed to put the entire postwar security system back on the table between Tokyo and Washington.

In this the incident was reminiscent of the AMPO upheaval thirty-five years earlier. The question soon became the American military presence as a whole -- the core of the Yoshida deal. What were so many Americans doing in Japan? More accustomed to foreigners and less influenced by Japanese tradition, Okinawans are more direct than Japanese of the main islands. This was an unfortunate accident of history for the Americans. For the protests of Okinawans made it evident once again that change between Japan and America is, sooner or later, inevitable.

It is not easy to hide almost fifty thousand troops from public view for nearly half a century -- especially when thirty thousand of them operate seventy separate military facilities, spread over a fifth of usable land, as is the case in Okinawa. For a long time Washington and Tokyo did a thorough job of hiding these soldiers from Americans and was pretty good at keeping them out of sight in Japan. That was one reason three-quarters of the American bases in Japan were concentrated in the country's most distant prefecture. And it is why the rape incident once again challenged our simple idea of Japan and of how we have conducted ourselves there. In its way Okinawa was another signal of "the end of victory culture," as the writer Tom Engelhardt titled the book that gave us this useful phrase.

Fifty years ago we interrupted the Japanese. We defeated them, of course, and, in a time we briefly provided for them, they took their first tentative steps toward resolving the tragedy their modernization had come to. Then we decided to delay such resolution -- a delay that has lasted five decades. If we are to make our relationship a healthy one, we must now do what we failed to do a half century ago -- stand aside -- and what the first Westerners in Japan failed to do five centuries ago: look at the Japanese only for what they are.

The first thing we discover about them, ironically, is that they are accustomed to hiding -- from themselves as well as others. Every Japanese wears a mask, or so each one is taught. And within their masks the Japanese have learned to live close to one another by living far apart. But beneath the placid, unchanging surface of Japan's oddly vacant, undecided present are countless conflicts, tensions, crosscurrents, and anxieties. They have always been there. They have merely become more apparent now, as if a lid were lifted, or a mask partially removed.

In Masks, the novelist Fumiko Enchi described her antagonist as possessing an "indestructible face." One of the essential questions the Japanese have begun to ask themselves -- one posed in this book -- is whether their masks are indestructible, too, or whether it is time to live without them.

Hidden History

Look closely and you will see what an enormous variety of human types are represented in the huge crowd.

-- Shimei Futabatei, Drifting Clouds, 1889

In kanazawa, a city on the Sea of Japan noted for its old samurai quarter, there is a family that traces its ancestors back four centuries. Their name is Meboso, and they have made sewing needles and fishhooks for nineteen generations.

The Meboso's are as proud of their uncommon name as they are of their craft, for the two cannot be separated. "Meboso" comes from meboso-bari, narrow-eyed needle. In the sixteenth century their skill was such that the local daimyo, the feudal lord, let them take a surname and carry swords. "An unusual honor," Tadayoshi Meboso said when he explained this to me. "Almost no one of our status could have a name or own a sword." Today the Meboso's sell fly-fishing gear, along with boxes of tailor's needles, from the same shop they have run since 1575. It is on Meboso-dori -- Meboso Avenue.

It was hardly unusual for people under feudal rule to have only a given name and to be identified according to their village or some other obvious attribute. But where else among the advanced countries is this point of a family name still important, still dwelt upon in casual conversation?

The feudal past is near in Japan. Until late in the last century only daimyo and samurai, and an exceptional few like the Meboso's, had family names. Everyone else was nameless. Allowing everyone a surname was among the early reforms of the Meiji era, Japan's great period of modernization, which began in 1868. It is because names were so recently granted that many still correspond to villages or rural features. Kurokawa: Blackriver; Ishibashi: Stonebridge.

What is to be learned from the simple historical fact that the great-grandparents of many Japanese alive today had no names? Seeing Japan as a group society, we conclude that there was no notion of individuality among the Japanese until a few generations before our own. No individuality, and for the vast majority no history -- just as the serfs of feudal Europe lived out lives as unrecorded as the lives of farm animals.

Such reasoning is logical enough. It is a commonplace that the Japanese are given to groups. No matter what version of Japan one subscribes to, it is likely to include the assumption that the individual's worth and power are secondary to the worth of the collective, whether it is a village, a baseball team, or a corporation. History offers abundant evidence to support this idea. The fact that the Japanese were nameless until little more than a century ago is but one of numerous examples.

But this is a misreading. For the group is a kind of fiction in Japan. It is within the group that the Japanese put on their masks. To assume a mask is to assume a role -- a public, designated role in the group. The masks of the Japanese are also masks of sameness. By wearing them, the Japanese signify to themselves that there are no differences among them, and that having no differences is part of what it means to be Japanese.

One of the first Westerners to live in Japan, a Jesuit called João Rodrigues, seems to have understood the Japanese mask uncannily well. Rodrigues arrived in 1576, around the time the Meboso's got their name, and remained more than thirty years. He was fluent in the language and eventually translated for the shogun. The Japanese have three hearts, Rodrigues surmised: "a false one in their mouths for all the world to see, another within their breasts only for their friends, and the third in the depths of their hearts, reserved for themselves alone and never manifested to anyone."

To wear a mask among others: Is there a better measure of how thoroughly the individual is effaced, of how well the Japanese personality learned to peek out through the reed screen of a purposely blank expression that hides the true face from public view? These habits of mind and physiology have been so completely internalized that Japanese even today have difficulty discussing their own ways of thinking or feeling. But a nation of effaced personalities is different from one in which individual personalities -- somehow, miraculously -- do not exist.

Neither individuality nor a sense of history is missing from the assumptions by which ordinary Japanese live. Nor were they absent in the past. These basic aspects of human life have simply been submerged. So there is a more accurate conclusion to draw from the nameless majority that lived and died in Japan until a century ago. Then as now, it was not individuality that was missing so much as public individuality, the open manifestation of the self, the self unmasked within the group. In the same way, the Japanese did not live without their own history -- no more, at least, than anyone else in a feudal society. Their history was merely hidden by the society that preferred them to remain nameless.

There is a vast chasm between the simplicity arriving foreigners often find in Japan and the furtive, unrevealed complexity that lies within. In this space the Japanese still make their hidden history -- the record of their endeavor to achieve public, unmasked individuality. the term for "group" is nakama. The first character, naka, means "inside," and the second, ma, refers to an enclosure in either space or time -- a room, a field, an interval, a long duration. The importance not only of belonging but of being hidden within can be judged from the first lines of poetry Japan ever produced:

Eight clouds arise.

The eightfold fence of Izumo

Makes an eightfold fence

For the spouses to retire within.

Oh! that eightfold fence.

These lines are about the whole of Japan. There were eight clouds and eight fences because in the old chronicles Japan consisted of eight islands. One still finds a suggestion of the much-treasured fence in Izumo, a coastal city in southwestern Japan where an ancient god is said to have descended from heaven. The Izumo shrine, Shinto's oldest, is still enclosed by a fence beyond which ordinary mortals may not pass. Outside of it there are several torii, the classic Shinto gates, which reveal perfectly the essential abstraction of the belonging ritual. No fence ever flanks a torii. It is freestanding but nonetheless alters the space around it. The outermost torii at Izumo is most of a mile from the shrine along a busy commercial street. Candy stores, trinket shops, and garages stretch out on either side, yet the gate marks the difference between outer and inner space, the profane and sacred.

The duality of outside and inside, the enclosed and the exposed, is the first thing to confront the arriving visitor. The standard term for oneself is "gaijin," outside person. It is one's first notice that life in Japan will consist of a series of acceptances and rejections. Nothing is excepted. What is sumo, the popular wrestling tradition held to extend back to 23 b.c., if not a ritual celebration of the distinction made between the included and excluded? The two wrestlers purify the circle where they stand by dusting it with salt. They square off, squat, and stare. There is almost nothing to see, for the match usually lasts no more than a minute or two, and often mere seconds. What matters is the consequence. The sumo contest produces not so much a winner and a loser as a change in status: The vanquished is the man pushed out of the circle.

In feudal Japan the matter of belonging came down to one's ie, or household. The ie was more than a family in that those not related by blood could be adopted into it. Villages were groups of ie; commercial enterprises were organized as ie. The ie remained important until 1945, a building block of imperial Japan. In the ie one learned to suppress the self. And all of Japan was an ie, the emperor being the head of the Japanese household. The prewar ideologues claimed that Japan was unique in the world because it was a "family-state."

Today the Japanese live in a universe of intersecting, constantly shifting circles -- "households" made of families, schools, graduating classes, universities, sports clubs, sects, social cliques, nightclub regulars, companies. The list is infinite, the question of belonging continuous. Alone, two people from different sections of the same organization are outsiders to each other; joined by a third from another organization, they become insiders, and the third is the outsider. Such variations occur over and over in the course of daily life and are signified in commonplace objects: not just fences and gates, but walls, bridges, banks of desks, paper screens.

Japanese is rich in its descriptions of this essential distinction. There are words denoting what is outside and inside, public and private, the spoken and authentic versions of the truth. One pair of these terms will be useful. Omote and ura mean the explicit and the implicit, the outer and the inner, the front and the back, or, more broadly, the revealed and the hidden. In old Japanese they meant "face" and "mind." Today one speaks of omote-dori and ura-dori, main streets and back lanes; omote-ji is kimono cloth, ura-ji is kimono lining. Futo no omote is the front of an envelope; ura-niwa is a back garden. These terms have numerous dimensions and, like others, can be revealing. Urameshii means to feel bitter, urayamu to feel envious, and urami is a grudge. None of these is an acceptable thing to reveal in Japan, where the group's primary purpose is to preserve harmony and the appearance of sameness. So feelings of envy and bitterness are by definition ura, hidden.

Common to the various terms for inside and outside are the values of belonging versus exclusion, revelation versus concealment. What is public has always been the higher social value in Japan. And what is public is associated with order and the group, while what is private is individual and therefore secretive, selfish, and corrupting. One may belong to a group, and that group to a larger group, but the price of belonging is the subjugation of the individual to the group, the private to the public, the authentic to the represented.

João Rodrigues, the Jesuit who found three hearts in the Japanese, was smarter than we are in one respect. Our images of the Japanese encourage us to assume that there simply is no individuality among them -- that in some other than human way they are content to live, like penguins or lemmings, with nothing to distinguish one from another. Rodrigues understood that the individual was only obscured. But the Jesuit was wrong in another way. There is nothing "false" about the faces the Japanese present to the world, not so far as they are concerned, and nothing about unshared thoughts and feelings that make them truer or more valuable. This is a mistake only a Westerner could make, for we, like Father Rodrigues, do not share Japan's notion of the group as the superior value.

It is also true that the Japanese reserve a special place for what is concealed. They are dedicated diarists for the simple reason that so much of life must be hidden. One of Japan's aesthetic traditions, famously displayed in a temple garden in Kyoto, is called mie gakure, the seen and unseen. In the garden, fifteen stones protrude from a sea of combed gravel. But from no vantage point are all of the stones visible; wherever you stand, one is always hidden. In a friend's office I once saw an ink drawing of two peasants pulling a harness. The harness trailed off at the edge of the picture; nothing else was depicted. When I mentioned the drawing my friend smiled. "Yes," he said. "Can you see the cart?"

Mie gakure, applied to people, also means "to appear and disappear," or "to hide oneself." And there is nothing the Japanese are more accustomed to hiding than themselves, their inner beings. True heart, called kokoro, and ninjo, human feelings, are rarely manifest but all the more precious for it. Emotions are unsullied and innocent, which is why, when the Japanese expose them, they appear childishly sentimental -- as, for example, when they are drunk, or singing in a karaoke bar. Emotions are part of the "ura of the ura," the inside of the inside, and it is because they are withheld that each Japanese lives with a certain sense of crisis in his relations with the outer world.

"What is concealed is the flower," wrote Ze-ami, the fourteenth-century Noh master. "What is not concealed cannot be the flower." The thought survives in many contexts and is not irrelevant in this one. It is cited by the psychiatrist Takeo Doi in his explorations of the Japanese personality. Doi was a deeply traditional man. He believed that to live amid elaborate concealments was a normal, healthy thing. And he saw no tension between the security of belonging, which is undeniable among the Japanese, and the individual desire to break free of the group -- which, though traditionally unacknowledged, is also undeniable. "The ideal condition of the mind, the condition from which mental health derives," Doi wrote in 1985, "is one in which we can feel comfortable having secrets."

The confinements in which the Japanese live are enveloping and complete, affording only the dimmest view of a life without them. Something as simple as asking directions in Japan can often reveal the peculiar isolation the habit of concealment produces at the core of Japanese life. It is perfectly ordinary to find a person willing to oblige. But it is also common to be completely ignored, as if you had not spoken, as if you were not standing there -- as if you were a ghost. This is not so much impolite behavior as it is a recognition that there is (in the Jesuit's terms) no heart between you: With neither formal relations nor friendship there is only strangeness, a kind of nonbeing. Even if the passerby pauses to help, you may discover he knows nothing of a street or building only a hundred yards away, for it is not part of the tiny universe in which he lives.

Foreigners who reside in Japan are part of the system by virtue of their exclusion. Rarely does the "outside person" enter the intricate, burdensome web of duties and obligations that covers all interaction among the Japanese and binds each to the group. According to custom a resident gaijin, like a Japanese, will be known as Fuji Film's Wilson or Smith of the International Herald Tribune. One is considered to be part of a group, as every Japanese is. But the foreigner soon recognizes that just as Japan is a nation of insiders, it is equally one of "others."

There never seem to be enough groups to create new "others," new outsiders. It is as if people will resort to any ruse to obscure the matter of public individuality. Pseudoscience is popular in this regard. A European executive once sat with his Japanese manager to meet job applicants. After the routine questions, the manager ended each interview with, "And what is your blood type?" All but one candidate replied matter-of-factly and without surprise. (The exception laughed and did not know.) Later the gaijin asked about the strange inquiry. It is best, the manager explained, not to mix blood types in the same work space. The idea has many adherents; newspapers sometimes assess new governments according to whether cabinet members are A, B, O, or some other blood type.

When I arrived in Tokyo and began to staff my newspaper's bureau, I found many young Japanese intrigued by the prospect of joining a gaijin company -- an act that carried a whiff of individual risk and nonconformity, even of defiance. The Japanese have made a womb of their society. But if the temptation to exit it was strong, most found their fears still stronger. The womb of life is confining, but it is also secure, and so most Japanese remain, as it were, unborn. By the time I met Kay Itoi, who worked with me at the Herald Tribune for the duration of my tour in Japan, I understood that I was looking for someone with a certain courage and restlessness, even impatience.

It is in restlessness and impatience and the temptatio