JUN 06 1991

Japan Society

JAPAN SOCIETY, INC. 333 EAST 47TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10017 (212) 832-1155 FAX: (212) 755-6752

May 31, 1991

The Honorable
Henry A. Kissinger
Kissinger Associates
350 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Dear Henry:

We are pleased to present you with five copies of our
Distinguished Lecturer Series publication based on the
speeches given by you and Ralph Nader at the Japan Society
last fall.

If you would like additional copies, please let us know.

Thank you again for taking the time to speak at the Japan Society.

With best wishes,

Encl.

/anj

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The Japan Society, founded in 1907, is an institution with individual and corporate members, actively engaged in the promotion of understanding and enlightened relations between the United States and Japan. It is a private, nonprofit, nonpolitical organization devoted to cultural, educational and public affairs, and to discussions, exchanges and studies in areas of vital interest to the people of both countries.

Published by
Japan Society
333 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017
(212) 832-1155

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Acknowledgments

The Japan Society and Xerox Corporation are proud to sponsor the *Distinguished Lecturer Series*, presenting recognized leaders of thought and opinion in the United States and Japan addressing issues of substantial interest to both countries and the world. This unique forum allows these important individuals to explore and explain their view on topics of social, cultural, economic, political, intellectual and artistic importance to the U.S.-Japan relationship and global affairs. Inaugurated in 1987, the *Distinguished Lecturer Series* featured Ralph Nader on October 18, 1990 and Dr. Henry A. Kissinger on December 4, 1990 at the Japan Society.

The *Distinguished Lecturer Series* would not be possible without the support of Xerox Corporation, and we would like to express our appreciation for their support and generosity.

The opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of either the Japan Society or Xerox Corporation.

William H. Gleysteen, Jr.
*President*
*Japan Society*

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AN EVENING WITH
RALPH NADER

October 18, 1990

Each time I go to Japan, which is about every
ten years, I sense a considerable change in the
magnitude of the expectations that we have
toward that country. Early on, our expectations
centered on the recovery from the devastation of
World War II; then on the establishment of cer-
tain basic industries, like textiles, in order to
secure a foreign trading position; then on the
challenge to the U.S. auto industry at the time of
the rise of the energy crisis in 1979; and, of
course, last year the magnitude of expectation
widened to include how this economy, which is
now number two in the world in formal GNP, is
treating its own people as consumers.

Japan presents some real challenges to free
trade theory. The way we look at foreign trade
is archaic and colored by our interests, especially
when compared to the far more intricate manner
in which the Japanese economy is run. For
example, I was told by a former foreign service
officer in this country, an ambassador, that about
five years ago he had arranged what he thought
was a fairly lucrative market for towels to be
exported to Japan. They were obtained from
Central America and were going to be exported
by a U.S. trading company of which he was a
part. He had arranged for a retail chain in Japan
to purchase them. Everything was in order, but
the towels had to be reviewed by certain govern-
ment officials, who prohibited the importation of
the towels on the grounds that when the corners

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were rolled up, they were too large for Japanese ears. I am convinced he was telling the truth; he went so far as to state that he could withstand any challenge from the Japanese press on this matter.

Whenever we look at an economic system from a consumer point of view, we do not just simply take GNP measurements and say, “What’s steel production? What’s the capital investment? What’s the savings rate?” All of these are means, and conventional business economists tend to mix means with ends. They are always generating indices of economic measurement that philosophically should be viewed as means to a better life for everyday people, but they never seem to arrive at that end. They seem to decide whether something is good or bad in an economic system in terms of certain seller-side or production indices. They do not consider, “What is the impact on the consumer?”

Clearly, a good deal of GNP in industrial countries proceeds from having to expend money, capital and equipment for needs that arise out of preventable harms. For instance, there are epidemics of injury and death on highways in our country that generate $75 billion a year in GNP due to repair costs, health care costs, funeral expenses, legal costs, insurance costs and the like. Our economies are increasingly reflecting these kinds of expenditures, which I call involuntary expenditures—that is, we would rather not spend them if we had our druthers. If you look at the overall expenditures of an economy, you ask yourself how much of it now is involuntary? Voluntary expenditures include those for food, shelter and transportation. There is also a murky gray area where it’s not quite clear whether the expenditure is voluntary or involuntary, but these are important distinctions in determining the quality of any economic system. For example, pollution corrodes and requires

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frequent repainting or replacement of rusted equipment. Pollution also damages health, and thus creates economic demands for all kinds of health care services. Badly structured bumpers on cars generate billions of dollars in expenditures; fender benders keep a lot of garage repair shops busy and a lot of people busy writing checks. Street and corporate crime generate economic responses which produce billions of dollars in sales and profits. Just look at the "industry" that is handling the savings and loan wreckage. How many of these expenditures are involuntary and how many are voluntary?

We've just learned how the CIA and economists in government dramatically overestimated the GNP of the Soviet Union. I believe that part of the reason for this miscalculation is that they did not have the consumer measurement of that economy. As a result, the traditional GNP measurements made them vulnerable to official statistics of the Soviet government.

It was with this understanding that we traveled to Japan at the invitation of some consumer/environmental groups over a year ago, in order to look at what effect this enormous and fast growing economy really has had in terms of improving the quality of life of Japanese consumers. We wanted to know what rights and remedies, both political and economic, Japanese consumers have or do not have to better their condition. My observations should not be interpreted in an ethnocentric way. Needless to say, the U.S. has very serious consumer problems, and we have a whole agenda of new rights and remedies that we need to advance consumer progress here. Nonetheless, the first thing I noticed when I arrived in Japan and began speaking with people involved in consumer advocacy, was that they almost never said, "We are going to get the Diet to do this," or "We are going to get the political party to do that." They

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almost never said they were going to petition the courts; nor did they say they were going to enlist newspapers to expose this or that, although the press is discussed in terms of potential coverage or as an information outlet for certain vehicle defects. Consumer advocates don't seem to hold much hope out for the parliament or for the political parties—except for Mrs. Doi who was then very much in the news because of an upset in the Upper Chamber. The courts aren't very good outlets; the press is viewed as very centralized and beholden to some powerful advertising agencies, one of which is the largest in the world. This was not what I had hoped to see. I thought I detected a loosening of the process in the late 1970s in some of these areas and saw some excitement about class actions, whistleblower rights, product liability and lawsuits. There has not been much progress, apart from the growth of consumer cooperatives.

The currency of democracy is freedom of information, and so I promptly memorized my only Japanese sentence: There should be a Freedom of Information Act in Japan. I repeated the phrase everywhere, like I was on automatic pilot, to emphasize it. Everything starts with that principle, everything starts with the ability to get information about products, services, defects, kinds of tests and inspection reports that are in government files.

I addressed the Japanese bar association. Ten percent of the entire number of lawyers in Japan fitting into one room for the speech, raised another warning flag for me: How can you have a legal system—which the Japanese certainly do have—in which imbalances of power leading to conflict are to be resolved and not have any lawyers? There are 30,000 lawyers in Japan. One area in western Japan with 780,000 people has only 23 licensed lawyers. Even for domestic disputes that's not enough, and when I said

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there is a need for great expansion in the num-
ber of lawyers in Japan, that was music to some
of their ears. I made it clear that I wasn't talking
about lawyers specializing in mergers and acqui-
sitions; not only would that have been an
unfriendly suggestion, but I know of no faster
way to undermine the Japanese economy than to
export to Japan investment bankers and corpo-
rate lawyers specializing in mergers and acquisi-
tions. I was talking about lawyers representing
injured people against manufacturers of haz-
ardous products, or those who have suffered
from exposure to toxic elements like asbestos;
lawyers organizing or representing consumers in
class actions and economic disputes with distrib-
utors, retailers and manufacturers. There is a
handful of medical malpractice lawyers, a hand-
ful of product liability lawyers, and "handful" is
not an understatement.

While well-read and eager, these lawyers are
up against very powerful odds. For example,
suppose a lawyer specializing in medical mal-
practice wants information about pharmaceuti-
cals, such as labeling and side effects, which his
clients were exposed to. Such information is
very difficult to obtain. Doctors own a good
many of these pharmacies, which is one reason
why the Japanese have the highest per capita
consumption of pharmaceuticals in the world.
In addition, doctors in Japan have a medical cus-
tom wherein they don't reveal to a patient that
an illness is terminal, especially cancer. While
there are certain hints if one has cancer, certain
hints if one is terminal, nothing is definitive
enough to send alarms to cancer insurance com-
panies. Cancer insurance sells very well in
Japan, and yet the doctors don't tell patients that
they have cancer. In addition, many patients
don't want to know if they have cancer, which
makes the ratio of payouts to premiums very
advantageous for cancer insurance companies.

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The discovery procedure is very primitive in terms of law suits against doctors, and it's very hard to get expert witnesses. In short, I would say medical malpractice litigation in Japan is where it was in the United States before World War II, when a conspiracy of silence existed among medical professionals who would never testify against one another. Data was very difficult to find. The discovery procedures, the depositional rights, were very elementary.

In this country, one recent study for New York state by the Harvard School of Public Health indicated over 8,000 deaths in 1985 from medical malpractice in hospitals in that state—more than double the number killed on the highways. Japanese researchers have great difficulty getting elementary statistics such as these in order to make a case against the performance of some physicians, which in turn could lead to higher standards of care in Japan.

Product liability, warranty back-up and claims in consumer area after consumer area are 20, 30 even 40 years behind the United States. Japan has the highest consumption of asbestos of any country in the world. Our asbestos consumption is moving towards zero because of litigation which has resulted in several asbestos manufacturers choosing voluntary bankruptcy and because of some action, lamentably late, by the federal government. The Japanese government, however, is lenient toward the use of asbestos, which is consumed at a level three times greater per capita than in the U.S. The big new City Hall in Tokyo is being built with asbestos. Asbestos litigation is minimal; though there are some cases of compensation, these are scattered and inadequate.

Tobacco is probably the biggest killer in Japan, as in our country. Sixty-two percent of Japanese males smoke; as of 1985, 29 percent of American males smoked, and it might be even

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lower now. A further cause for concern in Japan is that the biggest manufacturer of cigarettes is a government-owned company, Japan Tobacco Inc., which is under the Ministry of Finance.

Until recently the Japanese were told that smoking was connected with a higher degree of mental concentration; to be more productive at work, you puffed away. This was not all that long ago. The Ministry of Health took until 1987 to point out, for the first time, the connection between smoking and lung cancer, heart and respiratory disease and damage to fetuses. A year earlier, Kozo Watanabe, the former Minister of Health said, "Smoking is the basis of health." Japan Tobacco produced $13 billion in revenues for the government in a recent year. The spokesman for the tobacco company, Mr. Kudo, is quoted as saying, "Our position is that there is no pathological evidence definitely establishing smoking as a health hazard." They are still talking that way in U.S. tobacco circles, although they don't use such categorical phrases. But the Philip Morris Company is not run by the Department of the Treasury. In Japan, tobacco smoking is advertised on television, warning labels are weak, and the popular view that smoking helps workers to concentrate, while less widely held, is still prevalent.

The one bright spot is a very active consumer group against smoking which is gaining more and more adherence and engaging in direct action—picketing and demonstrating. This group is becoming uncharacteristically vigorous in terms of the Japanese way of protesting in the consumer area. If you extrapolate it from the U.S., there are about 200,000 people a year in Japan dying from smoking-related diseases. One has to extrapolate because there are no statistical estimates to provide us with a better quantitative appreciation of this incredible human destruction. Smoking also causes fires, stains everything it

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comes in contact with and costs consumers a lot of money. One night, we drove by a place that was all lit up and I asked my Japanese colleague, a young lawyer working in the free information area, what it was. He told me it was a pachinko parlor, that they are all over Japan, and that a lot of Japanese, men in particular, stop in on their way home. He seemed hesitant to tell me any more than that so I asked him if we could go in. It was lit up enormously and the din was unbelievable; a sure violation of any OSHA-type noise standard. The smoke was colossal; you could hardly see the people sitting in front of the machines.

Japan has very good press here. Americans don't know about pachinko parlors in Japan, and that the Japanese sitting there hour after hour, totally overwhelmed by smoke, would make perfect material for statistical studies on the dangers of second-hand smoke. These are almost laboratory conditions, that is, if you could find anyone in the pachinko parlor who didn't smoke. That is the problem, and it is a problem that the U.S. has contributed to. For example, since we're buying too many Japanese cars and Sony electronic equipment, the Reagan Administration had a smoking-hot idea for balancing out the trade a little better. It was to get the 20 percent tariff on imported cigarettes abolished so that U.S. tobacco companies could get a share of this lucrative market. They succeeded, I believe in 1987, and now are increasing their market share for Marlboro and other brands. Japan sells us cars and televisions, and we sell Japan cancer sticks to balance out the trade, something we're also trying to do in Thailand by fighting any effort to ban tobacco advertising from television there and working to open up the market for tobacco.

The third leg of this lethal triangle is the heavy promotion and sales of cancer insurance. Our book called, *Winning the Insurance Game*,

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has a section on the kinds of insurance you should never buy—*never* buy, not just buy astutely or buy less of—and cancer insurance is one of them. If they have health insurance, and Japanese have universal health insurance, why do they need cancer insurance which is sold at an exorbitant premium with a *very* favorable payout ratio for the company? Cancer insurance is being sold in a country where tobacco consumption is rampant, where the cancer rate, and other morbidity rates, are going up, but where doctors routinely do not notify their patients when they have cancer.

Smoking cigarettes and breathing asbestos particles are a particularly deadly combination. The bright spot is Watanabe's "Bungaku's Group," called Action on Smoking and Health, which is making more headway than any single Japanese consumer group that we were able to observe. This is likely to be a most effective group in terms of changing public opinion and in initiating some of the policies that we have in our country, such as non-smoking sections in many buildings and other public areas.

I think there's more and more pressure in Japan for enacting a freedom of information act. The majority party is, of course, against it; the Socialists are in favor of it. But there are draft bills in the works, and I am told that next year a draft bill will be considered in the Diet. Some advances have been made at the local level as well. A very few municipalities have passed freedom of information acts. Laws exist in areas such as Kanagawa prefecture, which includes Yokohama, but some of the court interpretations curtailed the access that freedom of information laws have offered citizens. In Osaka, there was a conflicting judicial interpretation about expense accounts of prefectural governors. The Osaka courts said yes, they can be made public, but another court in another prefecture said no.

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All the opposition coalition parties, except the Communist party, will go before the Diet next year with a freedom of information law. But, the proposal in this current draft does have the merit of requiring all "information, disclosure of which is deemed necessary to protect human life, limb or health from danger that results or is feared to result from the activity of an enterprise, or to protect people's property or livelihood from damage or interference that results or is feared to result from illegal or wrongful activity of an enterprise." Why did I say "but," since that's a good piece of drafting? Because it will dramatically change the public dialogue and the media coverage of what is going on in the consumer/environmental area in Japan, and it is quite clear to observers in Japan that the Prime Minister is going to oppose this proposal on the grounds that an administrative procedure act should be enacted first.

Moving on to health care, we are doing a comparative study with consumer/environmental groups in Japan on the rights of Americans and Japanese in the marketplace. We want to draw some good lessons, learning from each other as well as seeing how the lagging society in Sector A, B or C can rise up to the leading society. The difficulty in trying to develop estimates of the quality of health care in Japan has been formidable. We hear stories about people who bribe nurses and doctors in order not to wait four or five or six hours for treatment. Cross-ownership of the pharmacies is a problem, as is the lack of disclosure in labeling on drugs.

There is a practice of informed consent in our country which is entrenched in the law. We found that the standard practice in Japan has been to give patients experimental drugs without their consent or knowledge. In theory, this should begin to change with the recent adoption of the "good clinical practices" rules by the Min-

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istry of Health and Welfare. However, physicians and drug companies' long-standing practices will not easily be dislodged, particularly since the new rules allow patients' "consent" to be oral. There's no guarantee that they would receive explanations of drug hazards or of alternative treatment choices. That's just part of the overall flagrant lack of informed consent in the Japanese medical establishment, whether for drug prescriptions, major surgery, invasive diagnostic techniques or any other aspect of health care. Physicians expect patients simply to do as they are told. And in the three- to five-minute exam which is typical in Japan, the patient is scarcely given time to ask anything at all. In our country, the doctors are upset because they think that more and more patients are uppity, that they are asking too many questions, that they want to have explanations, that they are too willing to sue. Unfortunately, they are not willing to sue enough in this country; only 1 out of every 20 victims of medical malpractice receives any money at all by verdict or settlement. Thirty years ago, it was 1 out of a 100. The ratio is much more severe in Japan. The Japanese Medical Society has begun issuing pronouncements in favor of the theory of informed consent in the last year or two.

Polls are showing more Japanese consumers want to participate in health care decision making. Consider how modest their expectations are—to be told if they have a terminal disease, for instance. There are occasions in this country when patients are not told if they have a terminal disease. Doctors tell the relatives; they do not want to shock the person who has terminal cancer. But this practice is not nearly so widespread here as it is in Japan. Patients' rights groups have started springing up around the country, but medical practices will be slow to change.

One of the interesting differences between

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U.S. and Japanese consumer protests is that when Japanese consumers are upset, they are really upset. When we were in Japan, we were told that for several weeks, people in a western province were sitting in the mayor's office because of a proposal to build a nuclear plant. Minamata disease and other infamous tragedies elicited similar pervasive protests. This leads me to believe that there is not a lack of the articulated sense of consumer justice and injustice; the lack arises when you get into legal arenas which have not been developed in terms of consumer rights, as in the warranty (or applied warranty) area. When Japanese feel they have been subjected to a fraud or to harm, they express themselves with a refined sense of injustice. The challenge is to channel these feelings to devise ways to organize consumers, ways to address the convergence between environmental and consumer problems.

Of course, environmental and consumer concerns are often two sides of the same coin. We made some suggestions. The transfer of technical information operates not just in corporate technology: what we've done in the U.S., the Japanese might want to do in Japan. A delegation of Japanese lawyers visited the United States a number of months ago to learn about product liability law. It is wonderful to see among Japanese environmental and consumer groups such intensity and determination to take on the large corporations on consumer issues. We're very pleased to help them; it's the kind of balance of citizen trade we really like to engage in. Because of the freedom of information drive in this country, a lot of the cases here are studied by Japanese consumer groups and leaders. The Japanese have shown an interest in whistleblower rights. This is a very touchy thing for Japanese, given the loyalties that surround the corporate institutions in Japan. It takes a very

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bold person to be a whistle blower. Mr. Matsu-
da, who used to work as an engineer with Nis-
san years ago, quit and blew the whistle; he is
now an advocate for auto safety and a repository
of all kinds of information on vehicle defects, as
well as a good source for many Japanese
newsletters. He went through some very diffi-
cult times, including a phony extortion accusa-
tion against him that landed him in jail for a few
days before he successfully protested his inno-
cence. Apparently, a negotiated session with
Honda representatives had been bugged under
the table and sent to the prosecutor in a selec-
tively edited manner.

Japanese are also showing interest in what we
call “check-offs,” something we are advocating
here in the U.S. This is an insert in utility bills,
insurance premium bills, bank statements. People
open their bills and out falls a small envelope
inviting them to join a nonprofit consumer group
in which they vote to elect their council directors.
The directors hire full-time consumer specialists
to deal with banking, insurance and utility issues.
This was accepted in Wisconsin, Illinois and in
San Diego, and the idea was ready to spread
around the country when the Supreme Court
ruled that requiring a utility monopoly to insert
this, even though no postage or printing costs
were involved, was a violation of the utility’s
right to remain silent and not be provoked into
rebutting the context of this insert. That’s our
Supreme Court in action, allocating legalistic anim-
mism to inanimate corporate entities that would
startle a native from New Guinea. The group in
Illinois, with 180,000 members, was able to per-
suade the Illinois legislature to pass a law requiring
state government mailings, such as motor
vehicle registrations, to carry this invitation.

Concerning food safety, I know there have
been some protests in Japan about not allowing
U.S. food imports because of contamination, pes-

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ticides, coloring agents and so on. Some of the objections are well taken, although one wonders if quality is the real reason or whether it is reluctance to open up the Japanese market to imported food stuffs.

We are concerned about the pollution of shellfish and other products and lack of regular testing for heavy metals. Given what we know about pollution in Japan, regular testing for heavy metals in food stuffs would produce some very disturbing results. The results from recent testing in the Soviet Union are absolutely staggering in terms of levels of mercury, cadmium, lead and others. Children and infants in particular are extremely vulnerable to heavy metals.

A word on environment. The reports that we are getting back from Japanese environmental circles is that there is more and more activity in this area. Japanese environmentalists are going to Southeast Asia and taking pictures of the forest devastation. They are becoming more concerned about global effects, and the United States and Japan are more interested in collaboration. Here's where I think some of the Japanese foundations in this country could make a major contribution. This was suggested to me by some people in Japan as well as in the United States. What is needed is a well-conceived training program of American and Japanese experts in consumer and environmental matters. They would share their expertise, learn each other's language and study political strategies used in both countries, forming a core of specialists to work together rapidly as global leaders on behalf of the two largest economies in the world.

The trend of present-day corporate technology is homicidal. If the way motor vehicles are built, the way petrochemical companies operate, the way use of plastics is growing, the way nuclear power is expanding were extrapolated, this world could not survive another century.

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Change must come and it will come. The only question is whether it will come in time to ensure the survival of millions of people, thousands of square miles of natural ecologies, millions of species and our very atmosphere and oceans. If every person in the world consumed the same kind of fossil and nuclear energy as Americans, the world would cease to be livable. Japanese energy efficiency is twice ours. Along with Canada, we are the most wasteful energy user in the world. We may look back and say Communism's greatest contribution to the world was making sure there was not a car in every Russian and Chinese garage.

The only way America is getting away with this is that 75 percent of the rest of the world doesn't come close to us in terms of per capita consumption. The idea of building up a technical core of advocates and researchers with technical materials would be attractive to the younger generations in Japan and the United States and would have far-reaching consequences. Even those who are part of the status quo and the establishment must realize that they are not going to be able to do it themselves. They are too comfortable with their profit modes and their technology appendages. They must expose themselves to provocation from the outside through well-trained people, aware of the options, conversant with and able to change public opinion, to persuade public agencies to adopt a different course of action. That is the ultimate statesmanship of a person in power; to be unthreatened by displacement of that power and to have foresight enough to know that they have to be provoked and challenged into action before it is too late for them as well as others in their society.

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AN EVENING WITH
HENRY KISSINGER

December 4, 1990

The proposition I would like to advance tonight is that in their totality of performance, the two strongest nations in the world today are probably the United States and Japan. I would argue that in terms of their historic views, neither of these countries is all that well qualified to deal with the new international environment that is emerging. I would argue further that their interaction is complicated by the fact that they are starting at opposite ends of the spectrum: the United States is a nation of universalists, believing in principles that are applicable to all mankind; Japan is emerging from an insular condition having historically focused on its immediate environment without producing a general theory of international relations or cooperation. What has happened in the last year—from Eastern Europe to the Middle East—was not predicted by any student of international affairs, although I’m sure if you invite me back here in a year or two, I will have convinced myself that I saw it all.

In fact I know of no one who foresaw the huge transformations in Eastern Europe, the collapse of Communism, the sudden emergence of a major military crisis involving a vast American deployment in the Persian Gulf, or indeed a present in which Asia has become the relatively calmest part of the globe. All of these changes have produced a truly major alteration in the international situation.

We begin with Europe. For 300 years a pow-

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erful Russia has been a central feature of Euro-
pean politics. In the 18th century, Russian
armies took Berlin in the Seven Years' War and
they've never been very far away ever since. It
now appears that for the next five to ten years,
Russia is likely to be heavily preoccupied with its
domestic affairs. It is even conceivable that so
many republics will defect from the Soviet Union
that a belt of medium and small-sized states will
emerge between the center of Russian power
and the center of European power. And that
would create a totally different situation not only
for the Europeans, but also for the United States
in terms of its post-World War II experience. It
further would mean that NATO as we have
known it would either wither or require funda-
mental alteration. I say this as someone whose
entire intellectual formative experience has
revolved around the North Atlantic relationship.

The changes in the Soviet Union may bring
about a state of affairs whereby the Soviet
Union, with 60 million Muslims either directly in
the country or semi-independent at the periph-
eries, will have to become a more active day-to-
day player in the Middle East. Ironically, the
part of the Soviet Union where government con-
trol is most firm is in Siberia: in Asia. At the
beginning of this century, that region was the
site of the Russo-Japanese War precisely because
at the time Russia, frustrated in Europe, began to
be very active in Asia. We also have to
remember that between 1905 and 1910 one
could have said about Imperial Russia many of
the things that are today being said about the
Soviet Union—that it is in a state of semi-chaos
and serious domestic upheaval. Yet, by 1913, the
German General Staff had become convinced
that Russia was progressing so rapidly that by
1917 it would be able to defend itself without
allies against Germany and, therefore, could
defeat it in conjunction with other countries. This

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was one of the reasons for accelerating the war. In my fitful research on Japan, I have come across certain documents of the same period in which the Japanese as well came to the conclusion that the development of Russian railways, despite Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and its subsequent weakness, was creating a new element of potential instability. I'm not arguing that either the Japanese or the Germans were right, but simply pointing out that Russia's capacity for recovery has been amply demonstrated in the past.

In any event, I am not here to discuss what might happen in the future. The point I wish to make simply is that even the few fragments I have described indicate that old power centers are shifting and new ones emerging all over the world: Japan, the United States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union and China; and that the approaches used by the United States and Japan in the early post-World War II period really no longer apply.

Let me make a few comments about the United States. The American view on foreign policy, if one can make such a generalization, has been as follows: other nations have interests but Americans have principles; other nations are concerned with the balance of power, we are concerned with collective security; other nations adjudicate—they calculate penalties and rewards—while we focus on legal principles. In the American conception, peace is the normal state of affairs amongst people. Therefore, when there is aggression or war or tension, it is the doing of evil men who must either be destroyed or converted, or both. That, essentially, has been the theme of the American conception of most of the conflicts of this century.

There is no American tradition of foreign policy as an ongoing process of the adjustment of risks. Rather we have had a distinct reluctance

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to think in terms of equilibrium or a balance of power. In 1936, when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, President Roosevelt asked the State Department what this meant. What it meant was that the small countries of Eastern Europe were at the mercy of Germany as soon as Germany was able to fortify the Rhineland and prevent France from coming to their assistance in a timespan relevant to their survival. But that was not part of the State Department's reply to the question. Instead, the State Department's reply consisted of a listing of all the treaties Germany had violated in taking the Rhineland and, since the United States had not signed any of them, Germany's action was not perceived as involving any American interests. This tendency always to call our legal advisors first to see what our formal obligations are recurs in a given crisis again and again.

In the post-World War II period this approach worked tolerably well because the United States had such a huge percentage of the world's GNP that it represented a balance of power all by itself; we could overwhelm our problems once we recognized them by the sheer strength of our resources. Moreover, the experience of the post-war period seemed to fit America's historical experience. There was the persistent overwhelming, or seemingly overwhelming, sense of ongoing danger throughout the cold war. It was not hard to organize many of the nations of the world against it; there were enough clear dividing lines. Both the experiences of World War II and the New Deal could be applied: from World War II we learned how to amass overwhelming power; from the New Deal we learned that domestic stability comes about from bridging the gap between expectation and realization.

In the 1960s and '70s this began to disintegrate; in the '80s and now in the '90s it is gone. We no longer have overwhelming power,

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although we are still the single strongest nation. There are no longer two set powers; there are many, and we are faced with the perennial foreign policy problem: peace by domination or peace by equilibrium. If you are not strong enough to dominate, you must balance. But in order to balance you must have some sense of where the process is heading—and here we come to the great American trauma. We see it now again, in part, in the Gulf where one of the big debates is whether it is enough to restore the status quo, or whether we want to fix the situation that produced it by creating a new balance of power in the area.

This universalist conception is at the heart of much of American domestic policy. It has led us, for example, to view Gorbachev—whose whole career has been within the Communist party and whose reflex action to any domestic crisis is to ask for additional power for himself—as a sort of folk hero. The reason is that he so neatly fulfills the traditional American dream of what I call conversion: on seeing any people, even the Russians, as misguided Americans who finally see the light. This also applies to Japan, although it is a nation with a long tradition of conducting its own foreign policy, certainly throughout its recorded history which is well over a thousand years. Yet in 1945, Americans did not think it at all unusual that that nation should become democratic from one day to the next, and they expected the new Japan to be another version of America.

Now let me give you my perception of the Japanese approach to foreign policy, though I do not claim to be a scholar of Japan. Indeed, the extent of my knowledge of Asia was apparent in 1950, when I was sent by our military to Korea to study the impact of the army on Korean life. My first stop was Japan. As it was also my first visit, I thought it would be better if I got myself

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introduced in Korea by another Asian, and I asked a number of my Japanese acquaintances to give me letters of introduction. In Japan, they were too polite to tell me that this was insane. So, I arrived in Korea with a batch of Japanese letters of introduction. That I survived was a miracle; the Commander of our army had to go to President Rhee to get permission for me to remain in the country. Thus, I started from an unpromising beginning.

And so it was when I entered government in 1969. I had barely heard of the factions in the Liberal Democratic Party, nor did I understand the enormous subtleties of the consensus system by which the Japanese painstakingly reach a decision. When Japanese ministers first appeared at my White House office, I followed the hallowed tradition of overt pressure to achieve a meaningful solution to whatever issue was under consideration—at the time it was a dispute over textile quotas, which President Nixon had vowed in his campaign to resolve. But I did not understand that when a Japanese minister says “yes,” it only means, “I have understood what you said,” and not “I will do what you have requested.” Ultimately we became involved in a protracted textile negotiation which was resolved in the context of forces bigger than the issue itself. With these caveats, I make the following statements with some hesitation.

My perception is that Japan's dominant approach to foreign policy is based on a conviction on the part of both the Japanese leadership and the people that they are unique, and that Japan could adjust to changes in the balance of power of the world and still retain its Japanese essence. So, while Japanese actions are, naturally, the results of Japanese decisions, they are also a result of the Japanese view that their country can join dominant currents of any period while at the same time remaining impervious to

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those currents.

In the 19th century, China and Japan faced a similar problem. Westerners arrived by force, established extra-territorial privileges and attempted to open up these countries for unilateral commerce. At first, both countries responded in the same way: namely, to overcome the indignity by modernizing their societies. Somewhere along the road, however, China decided that it could not risk its essence by instituting Western ways, thus the process of modernization which had begun never proceeded all the way to its end. Chinese governments found they could manipulate foreign ministers by playing them off against each other. Japan opted to go through to the end of the road, believing that its Japanese essence would be preserved even while its army was copied from Germany's and its parliamentary institutions, to some extent, from Great Britain's. This was a great act of faith because Japan could not know its outcome in advance. Later, in 1945, Japan was also able to adjust to new circumstances without altering many of the essential features of Japanese society. In the process, Japan seems to have passed through certain stages: first, an attempt to free itself of foreign domination; next, an attempt, once it had developed a certain amount of strength, to maintain a balance of power in Asia that would contribute to Japanese security. At this stage, Japan was following European models. But Japan faced unique problems on the Asian landmass—the enormity of China and the fact that England was expanding in the region from the south, and Russia was expanding from the north. In Europe, the geographic location of Great Britain is most similar to Japan's in Asia, and it has sought to maintain a balance of power. And Britain could do that because there were many smaller, weaker states it could support against the stronger states. In Asia, the

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Japanese dilemma was that it faced encroachment from two imperial powers, a situation it chose to handle in the traditional way: by making an alliance with one against the other—the so-called Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The problem with respect to the size of China was that it was a single state. My impression is that Japan did not want China united and strong but at the same time was also afraid of having a China that was too divided, lest foreigners exploit the division. Put another way, Japan felt that as long as China was weak it had to make sure that foreigners did not gain a dominant position.

At the start of the postwar period, Japan thought it could be neutral; soon it had decided it could avoid the consequences of the punitive peace by making a separate arrangement with the United States, which in turn necessitated a security treaty to protect it against the Soviet Union. The recounting of this superficial history is only by way of an attempt to show you that in my view at least, Japanese foreign policy is deeply rooted in tradition, and was not somehow spontaneously generated in 1945.

America now faces a new situation in Europe, in the Middle East and elsewhere. And Japan faces a new situation with a Russia that is temporarily weaker, with a China that will become stronger, and with a Korea where any change has strategic consequences for Japan. America and Japan have the problem of how to interpret this new environment, complicated by an atmosphere in which the United States has lost its economic predominance and in which at least some Americans blame the Japanese for taking advantage of our economic troubles, if not even causing them.

There are nationalistic undertones emerging in the discussions on both sides. And yet, whenever Japan has needed an ally, it has historically looked to a distant country with the least imme-

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diate interest in Asia (which was the reason behind the Anglo-Japanese Alliance). In terms of geography and the traditional power of politics, there are no clashing interests between the United States and Japan. Our differences are in the field of economics and in the perception of international affairs.

Not long ago, America made an effort to get some sort of Japanese military contribution to the Persian Gulf conflict. The reasons for this effort were that it would be very impressive to our Congress, and would at the same time fulfill American expectations that a nation with the economic strength of Japan was carrying its weight in international affairs. I told a highly educated and sophisticated friend that I could not imagine any American rationale that would encourage Japan to place its forces at a great distance from its home islands when there was no Japanese urgency to do so. He didn't understand. He said that any nation as powerful economically as Japan had a duty to participate, otherwise it is taking a free ride. Now that is an approach to foreign policy that might work if everybody had the same interests, but it is also historically unsound.

So, our problem is how these two nations, each with its own different history, are going to cooperate. I don't know the answer. I know what must not continue—the kind of miscommunication based on the American refusal to understand that a Japanese prime minister is not like an American president in that he does not have the same degree of executive authority. On the other hand, Japan cannot go on using its domestic institutions to remain impervious to outside arguments only to emerge from its shell with marvellous discipline whenever it focuses on a certain target and decides to proceed to overrun it.

How we can have a dialogue when neither nation has yet clarified its own thinking on the

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changing international situation is to me an
unsolved question. We in the United States have
to develop an approach to foreign policy rele-
vant to the transformations taking place. Japan,
in those portions of its history with which I have
some limited acquaintance, has never had a gen-
eral approach to foreign policy. It has had a
very specific approach to very limited circum-
stances; even in its Imperial period it was very
specifically oriented toward precise objectives
that were not related to an international consen-
sus. Yet, we now live in a world which is at
once universal and fragmented; in which we are
economic competitors, and yet, in terms of for-
eign policy objectives, we have at least a nega-
tive incentive to avoid conflicts with each other.
I don't mean military conflict—or even political
conflict. There is a multitude of problems around
the world that are not soluble unless we cooper-
ate. But how do we do this? It is one of the
unsolved problems to which the Japan Society is
dedicated, and to which I do not pretend to have
the answer.

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