No wonder I never really wanted this job, Durling told himself, sitting
alone, looking down at yet another position paper. It was nil an accident,
really. Bob had needed to carry California, and Durling had been the key, a
young, popular governor of the right party affiliation. But now ho was the
President of the United States, and the fear was that the job was simply
beyond him. The sad truth was that no single man had the intellectual capac-
ity even to understand all the affairs the President was expected to manage.
Economics, for example, perhaps his most important contemporary duty
now that the Soviet Union was gone, was a field where its own practitioners
couldn’t agree on a set of rules that a reasonably intelligent man could com-
prehend.
Well, at least he understood jobs. It was better for people to have them
than not to have them. It was, generally speaking, better for a country to
manufacture most of its own goods than to let its money go overseas to pay
the workers in another country to make them. That was a principle that he
could understand, and better yet, a principle that he could explain to others,
and since the people to whom he spoke would be Americans themselves,
they would probably agree. It would make organized labor happy. It would
also make management happy-and wasn’t a policy that made both of them
happy necessarily a good policy? It had to be, didn’t it? Wouldn’t it make the
economists happy? Moreover, he was convinced that the American worker
was as good as any in the world, more than ready to enter into a fair contest
with any other, and that was all his policy was really aimed at doing . . .
wasn’t it?
Durling turned in his expensive swivel chair and peered out the thick win-
dows toward the Washington Monument. It must have been a lot easier for
George. Okay, so, yeah, he was the first, and he did have to deal with the
Whiskey Rebellion, which in the history books didn’t look to have been all
that grave, and he had to set the pattern for follow-on presidents. The only
taxes collected back then were of the tariff and excise sort-nasty and re-
gressive by current standards, but aimed only at discouraging imports and
punishing people for drinking too much. Durling was not really trying to
stop foreign trade, just to make it fair. All the way back to Nixon, the U.S.
government had caved in to those people, first because we’d needed their
bases (as though Japan would really have struck an alliance with their an-
cient enemies!), later because . . . why? Because it had become expedient?
Did anyone really know? Well, it would change now, and everyone would
know why.
Or rather, Durling corrected himself, they’d think that they knew. Perhaps
the more cynical would guess the real reason, and everyone would be par-
tially right.
The Prime Minister’s office in Japan’s Diet Building-a particularly ugly
structure in a city not known for the beauty of its architecture-overlooked a
green space, but the man sitting in his own expensive swivel chair didn’t
care to look out at the moment. Soon enough he would be out there, look-
ing in.
Thirty years, he thought. It could easily have been different. In his late
twenties he’d been offered, more than once, a comfortable place in the then-
ruling Liberal Democratic Party, with guaranteed upward mobility because
even then his intelligence had been manifest, especially to his political ene-
mies. And so they had approached him in the friendliest possible way, ap-
pealing to his patriotism and his vision for the future of his country, using
that vision, holding it out before his young and idealistic eyes. It would take
time, they’d told him, but someday he’d have his chance for this very seat in
this very room. Guaranteed. All he had to do was to play ball, become part of
the team, join up….
He could still remember his reply, the same every time, delivered in the
same tone, with the same words, until finally they’d understood that he
wasn’t holding out for more and left for the final time, shaking their heads
and wondering why.
All he’d really wanted was for Japan to be a democracy in the true sense
of the word, not a place run by a single party beholden in turn to a small
number of powerful men. Even thirty years earlier the signs of corruption
had been clear to anyone with open eyes, but the voters, the ordinary people,
conditioned to two thousand years or more of acceptance, had just gone
along with it because the roots of real democracy hadn’t taken here any more
than the roots of a rice plant in the pliable alluvium of a paddy. That was the
grandest of all lies, so grand that it was believed by everyone within his
country as well as without. The culture of his country hadn’t really changed.
Oh, yes, there were the cosmetic changes. Women could vote now, but like
women in every other country they voted their pocketbooks, just as their
men did, and they, like their men, were part of a culture that demanded obei-
sance of everyone in one way or another. What came down from on high was
to be accepted, and because of that his countrymen were easily manipulated.
The bitterest thing of all for the Prime Minister was that he had actually
thought he’d be able to change that. His true vision, admitted to none but
himself, was to change his country in a real and fundamental way. Somehow
it hadn’t seemed grandiose at all, back then. In exposing and crushing offi-
cial corruption he’d wanted to make the people see that those on high were
not worthy of what they demanded, that ordinary citizens had the honor and
decency and intelligence to choose both their own path for life and a govern-
ment that responded more directly to their needs.
You actually believed that, fool, he told himself, staring at the telephone.
The dreams and idealism of youth died pretty hard after all, didn’t they?
He’d seen it all then, and it hadn’t changed. Only now he knew that it wasn’t
possible for one man and one generation. Now he knew that to make change
happen he needed economic stability at home, and that stability depended on
using the old order, and the old system was corrupt. The real irony was that
he’d come into office because of the failings of the old syslcm. (nil at the
sume time needed to restore it so that he could then sweep it away. Thai was
what he hadn’t quite understood. The old system had pressed the Americans
loo hard, reaping economic benefits for his country such as the Black Drag-
ons hadn’t dreamed of, and when the Americans had reacted, in some ways
fairly and well and in others unfairly and mean-spirited, the conditions had
been created for his own ascendancy. But the voters who’d made it possible
for him to put his coalition together expected him to make things better for
Ihem, and quickly, and to do that he couldn’t easily give more concessions to
America that would worsen his own country’s economic difficulties, and so
he’d tried to stonewall on one hand while dealing on the other, and now he
knew that it wasn’t possible to do both at the same time. It required the sort
of skill which no man had.
And his enemies knew that. They’d known it three years ago when he’d
put his coalition together, waiting patiently for him to fail, and his ideals
with him. The American actions merely affected the timing, not the ultimate
outcome.
Could he fix it even now? By lifting the phone he could place a call
through to Roger Durling and make a personal plea to head off the new
American law, to undertake rapid negotiations. But that wouldn’t work,
would it? Durling would lose great face were he to do that, and though
America deemed it a uniquely Japanese concept, it was as true for them as it
was for him. Even worse, Durling would not believe his sincerity. The well
was so poisoned by a generation of previous bad-faith negotiations that there
was no reason for the Americans to suppose that things were different
now-and, truth be known, he probably could not really deliver in any case.
His parliamentary coalition would not survive the concessions he would
have to make, because jobs were at stake, and with his national unemploy-
ment rate at an all-time high of over 5 percent, he did not have the political
•Irength to risk increasing it further. And so, because he could not survive
Ihe political effects of such an offer, something even worse would happen,
•nd he would not survive that either. It was only a question, really, of
whether he would destroy his own political career or let someone else do it