There he goes again. Shintaro Ishihara, an ultranationalist member of the Japanese Parliament and his country’s No. 1 Americanophobe, is out with another book. His first, published in 1989, was called “The Japan That Can Say No.” It created a ruckus in Washington with brash (and exaggerated) assertions that Japan could tip the balance of power in the cold war merely by selling its technology to the Soviet Union instead of the United States. The book provided fuel for America’s Japan-bashers and embarrassed the Japanese establishment (including coauthor Akio Morita, the chairman of Sony). It also sold a million copies.
Now comes round two. In “The Japan That Can Really Say No,” Ishihara and rightist intellectual Jun Eto give a new gloss on the Persian Gulf War. “What made [the Americans’] pinpoint bombing so effective,” Ishihara writes, “was PTV, a high-quality semiconductor used in the brain part of the computers that control most modern weapons. There were 93 foreign-made semiconductors in the weapons used by the United States. Among them, 92 were made in Japan.” It’s ludicrous, Ishihara continues, for the United States to think of itself now as the world’s sole remaining superpower. After all, Washington “had to ask other countries to contribute money so it could fight, and it depended on foreign technology to carry out its war strategy.” The United States, says stormin’ Shintaro, “should wake up from this illusion” of superpower status.
As in the original “No,” Ishihara plays the bad cop to his coauthor’s good cop. In the first book the-sections Morita wrote were now familiar banalities about how shoddy American manufacturing has become. In the present work, coauthor Eto is similarly low-key, talking about how the United States could ill afford the war given its weak economy and claiming that the gulf encounter only “Made things worse.” Eto concludes that Japan should continue to be friends with the United States, even though “a friend is not someone who says ‘yes’ to everything. There are times when one has to say ’no’ to one’s good friend.”
Ishihara has no time for such Council on Foreign Relations-style sobriety. “I gather there are voices in the United States and Europe calling to exclude Japan from participating in the reconstruction projects of the Middle East,” he writes. “Let them be. After all, they were the ones who started the war … Japan should just sit back and observe how the United States and European countries get burned dealing with the people of the complicated races of the Middle East.”
Two years ago many Japanese were uncomfortable both with Ishihara’s views and with the blunt way he expressed them. But many also privately believe much of what Ishihara is saying and were similarly embittered by American criticisms during the war. This time around, the embarrassment might not be so pronounced. The book’s been out six weeks now; it has sold 150,000 copies. The publisher, Kobunsha Press, says they are not yet sure whether it will be translated into English. It’s a work Americans might want to say “no” to.
