The impulse toward tact is understandable. Most Americans who have worked in Japan are aware of raw anti-Japanese prejudice in the United States and don't want to pander to it. They are also reluctant to do anything that would aggravate Japan's ever-present fears that the rest of the world is about to gang up on it and exclude it. The last time Japan felt left out was in the 1930s, when it started down the road to fascist nationalism after it suffered a number of international snubs. These started with the British Commonwealth's opposition to an anti-racism resolution at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, which the Japanese saw as a rejection of their racial equality with the white West. In 1941 the Japanese Imperial Navy went ahead with the attack on Pearl Harbor despite a widespread belief among naval strategists that the war would be a catastrophe for Japan. The country's military leadership was convinced (and Japanese students are now taught) that the West had decided to choke Japan to death, with boycotts, so Japan might as well strike. Japan is not likely to lash out again through military aggression. But people aware of its history and sensitivities think twice before saying anything that would make Japan feel cornered.

Now, however, Japan has become too important to be treated with such delicacy. Excessive politeness prevents Japan and the United States from facing the conflict that in the long run endangers their relations much more than the comments of any bigoted Japan-bashers could.

For the foreseeable future Japan will be America's single most valuable partner, because of what it can do in three areas. First is the U.S.-Japan military understanding, which prevents Japan from building as large an army as it would need on its own, leaves the United States as the reigning power in the Pacific, adds very little direct cost to the U.S. military budget, and prevents an arms race throughout Asia in which all other countries would try to defend themselves against the Japanese. Second is finance: Japan has become America's financier, providing investment capital and covering much of the U.S. government's debt. Third is business: Japanese-American business relations provide technology, markets, talent, supplies, and other essential elements to both nations' companies.

These three realities tempt many people, especially American diplomats, to assume a fourth: that Japanese and American interests do not clash in any fundamental way. This assumption is wrong. There is a basic conflict between Japanese and American interests—notwithstanding that the two countries need each other as friends—and it would be better to face it directly than to pretend that it doesn't exist.

That conflict arises from Japan's inability or unwillingness to restrain the one-sided and destructive expansion of its economic power. The expansion is one-sided because Japanese business does to other countries what Japan will not permit to be done to itself. It is destructive because it will lead to exactly the international ostracism that Japan most fears, because it will wreck the postwar system of free trade that has made Japan and many other nations prosperous, and because it will ultimately make the U.S.-Japanese partnership impossible to sustain.