case, for a price of billions of dollars, they had purchased three hundred or so
hectares of real estate in Los Angeles and a piece of paper that said they now
had the ability to make movies. In both cases the previous owners had taken
the money and quite openly laughed, and in both cases the previous owners
had recently made a quiet offer to buy the properly back lor a quarter, or less,
of what the Japanese businessman had paid-enough to retire the outstand-
ing debt and not a single yen more.
It went on and on. Every time a Japanese company had taken its profits
from America and tried to reinvest them back in America, the Americans
screamed about how Japan was stealing their country. Then they over-
charged for everything. Then their government policy made sure that the
Japanese lost money on everything, so that Americans could then buy it all
back at cut-rate prices, all the while complaining that those prices were too
high. America would rejoice at recovering control of its culture, such as it
was, when in reality what had happened was the largest and best concealed
robbery in world history.
“Don’t you see? They’re trying to cripple us, and they are succeeding,”
Yamata told them in a quiet, reasonable voice.
It was the classic business paradox which all know but all forget. There
was even a simple aphorism for it: borrow one dollar and the bank owns you;
borrow a million dollars and you own the bank. Japan had bought into the
American auto market, for example, at a time when the U.S. auto industry,
fat from its huge exclusive clientele, was driving up prices and allowing
quality to stagnate while its unionized workers complained about the dehu-
manizing aspects of their work-the highest-paid jobs in blue-collar Amer-
ica. The Japanese had started in that market at an even lower status than
Volkswagen, with small, ugly cars that were not all that well made and con-
tained unimpressive safety features, but that were superior to American de-
signs in one way: they were fuel-efficient.
Three historical accidents had then come to Japan’s aid. The American
Congress, upset with the “greed” of oil companies who wanted to charge
world price for their products, had placed a cap on the wellhead price of
domestic crude oil. That had frozen American gasoline prices at the lowest
level in the industrial world, discouraged new oil exploration, and encour-
aged Detroit to make large, heavy, fuel-inefficient cars. Then the 1973 war
between Israel and the Arab states had placed American drivers in gasoline
lines for the first time in thirty years, and the trauma had stunned a country
that had deemed itself above such things. Then they’d realized that Detroit
only made automobiles that drank gasoline as though through the floodgates
of a dam. The “compact” cars that the American manufacturers had started
making in the previous decade had almost immediately grown to midsize,
were no more fuel-efficient than their larger cousins, and weren’t all that
well made in any case. Worst of all, the American manufacturers, to a man,
had all recently invested money in large-car plants, a fact that had almost
been the undoing of Chrysler. This oil shock had not lasted long, but long
enough for America to rethink its buying habits, and the domestic companies
had not possessed the capital or the engineering flexibility to change rapidly
to what unaccustomedly nervous American citizens wanted.
Those citi/ens had immediately increased purchases of Japanese automo-
biles, especially in the crucial, trend-setting West Coast markets, which had
had the effect of funding research and development for the Japanese firms,
which in turn had hired American styling engineers to make their products
more attractive to their growing market and utilized its own engineers to
improve such things as safety. Thus, by the second great oil shock of 1979,
Toyota, Honda, Datsun (later Nissan), and Subaru were in the right place
with the right product. Those were the salad days. The low yen and high
dollar had meant that even relatively low prices guaranteed a handsome
profit, that their local dealers could add a surcharge of a thousand dollars or
more for allowing people to purchase these marvelous automobiles-and
that had given them a large, eager sales force of American citizens.
What had never occurred to any of the men at the table, Yamata knew,
was the same thing that had never occurred to the executives of General Mo-
tors and the United Auto Workers union. Both had assumed that a happy
state of affairs would extend into blissful eternity. Both had forgotten that
there was no Divine Right of Businessmen any more than there was a Divine
Right of Kings. Japan had learned to exploit a weakness of the American
auto industry. In due course, America had learned from its own mistakes,
and just as Japanese companies had capitalized on American arrogance, in
the same way they almost immediately built-or bought-monuments to
their own. Meanwhile the American companies had ruthlessly downsized
everything from their automobile designs to their payrolls because they had
relearned the economic facts of life even as the Japanese had allowed them-
selves to forget them. The process went mainly unseen, especially by the
players, who were not assisted by the media “analysts” who were too busy
looking at trees to discern the shape of the cyclical forest.
To normalize things further, the exchange rate changed-as it had to
change with so much money flowing in one direction-but the Japanese in-
dustrialists hadn’t seen it coming any more clearly than Detroit had noted
the approach of its own troubles. The relative value of the yen had gone up,
and that of the dollar down, despite the best efforts of Japanese central bank-
ers to keep their own currency weak. With that change went much of the
profit margin of the Japanese firms-including the values of properties
bought in America that had crashed enough in value to be seen as net losses.
And you couldn’t transport Rockefeller Center to Tokyo in any case.
It had to be this way. Yamata saw that even if these men did not. Business
was a cycle, like riding a wave up and down, and no one had as yet found a
way to make the cycle smooth out. Japan was all the more vulnerable to it,
since, in serving America, Japanese industry was really part of the American
economy and subject to all of its vagaries. The Americans would not remain
more foolish than the Japanese indefinitely, and with their return to sanity,
they would have their advantages of power and resources yet again, and his
chance would be gone forever. His country’s chance, too, Yamata told him-
soil’. Thai was also important, hut it was not the thing thai made his eyes
hum.
His eountry could not be great so long as its leaders-not in the govern-
ment, but here around this table-failed to understand what greatness was.
Manufacturing capacity was nothing. The simple act of cutting the shipping
lanes to the sources of raw materials could idle every factory in the country,
and then the skill and diligence of the Japanese worker would have no
greater meaning in the great scheme of things than a Buson haiku. A nation
was great because of power, and his country’s power was just as artificial as
a poem. More to the point, national greatness was not something awarded,
but something won; it had to be acknowledged by another great nation that
had been taught humility … or more than one. Greatness came not from a
single national asset. It came from many. It came from self-sufficiency in all
things-well, in as many things as possible. His companions around the-
table had to see that before he could act on their behalf and his nation’s. It
was his mission to raise up his nation and to humble others. It was his des-
tiny and his duty to make these things happen, to be the catalyst for all the
energy of others.
But the time was not yet right. He could see that. His allies were many, but
there were not enough of them, and those who opposed him were too fixed in
their thinking to be persuaded. They saw his point, but not as clearly as he
did, and until they changed their way of thinking, he could do no more than
what he was doing now, offering counsel, setting the stage. A man of sur-
passing patience, Yamata-san smiled politely and ground his teeth, with the
frustration of the moment.
“You know, I think I’m starting to get the hang of this place,” Ryan said as
he took his place in the leather chair to the President’s left.
‘ ‘I said that once,” Burling announced.’ ‘It cost me three tenths of a point
of unemployment, a fight with House Ways and Means, and ten real points
of approval rating.” Though his voice was grave, he smiled when he said it.