Japan Confers Third-World Status on U.S. : Asian perceptions: We are portrayed as a violent, illiterate society in decline; America must counter this one-sided image, lest 1930s mistakes be repeated.

TOKYO — The United States is losing public support in Japan. Over the past six or seven years, the United States has been portrayed here in steadily unfavorable terms. The result is a rising negative perception among the Japanese public of the United States as a nation, Americans as a people and American firms as reliable suppliers, employers and corporate citizens.

The United States is routinely characterized in Japan as a violent, drug-ridden, illiterate, uncompetitive society in decline. Exposed daily to reports of Third World conditions in America’s cities, Japanese tourists traveling to the United States have been known to ask whether it is safe to drink the water in the United States. The sensationalized coverage about the shooting last October of a Japanese high school student in Louisiana has reportedly led some Japanese to buy bullet-proof vests before boarding trans-Pacific flights. And the verdict in the Rodney King beating case in April, 1992, and the ensuing riots in Los Angeles gave the Japanese media a field day in portraying the United States as a racist, crime-ridden, lawless society whose preachings about human rights to China, Burma and South Africa are filled with hypocrisy.

Concrete examples may better convey a flavor of the Japanese mass media coverage of the United States.

In late 1991, NHK, the “BBC of Japan,” aired a program titled “Fifty Years After Pearl Harbor.” According to the announcer: “It’s a pity the United States and Japan have so many conflicts. As complementary societies, we ought to be able to cooperate: the United States has things we lack, and we have things the United States lacks. We in Japan have limited land space and a small population, whereas America has lots of land and a large population. We in Japan have plenty of capital and advanced technology, whereas America has no capital and no technology. Therefore, our two countries should be able to cooperate.”

Last year, in a speech on U.S.-Japan relations broadcast on cable television, a prominent Japanese who has lived in the United States for many years and is widely considered a “friend of America,” had this to say: “The United States is in such dire straits that it is begging Japan for help. We need to go the extra mile to accommodate the suffering United States. For instance, our two governments negotiated an agreement under which Japan committed to buy more foreign semiconductors. But Japanese companies are throwing away the U.S. semiconductors they are forced to buy because they are all defective. That’s the kind of sacrifice we Japanese have to endure in order to appease the Americans.”

In the wake of the current recession, Japanese companies are offering early retirement packages to their older employees and, in some case, revoking commitments to college students who had been offered jobs upon graduation. A few American companies operating in Japan have also faced similar personnel cutbacks. But the Japanese mass media’s treatment has typically been as follows: “Thirty companies have recently announced they are reneging on promises to hire college students upon graduation. Let us focus in depth today on two such firms: Kodak and American Express.” None of the Japanese firms was (until just recently) mentioned by name. What followed was a one-sided tirade against “American-style management that hires and fires at will, with absolutely no loyalty toward employees.” The most recent example of sensationalized treatment of the United States appears in the June issue of Bungei Shunju, the largest-circulation monthly magazine in Japan. Titled “Hillary-Style ‘Japan-Bashing’ Has Begun,” it blames heightened U.S.-Japan tensions on Hillary Rodham Clinton. The author, a Japanese lawyer and Harvard Law School fellow, links Mrs. Clinton to yen appreciation, political correctness, criticism of the status of women in Japan, CIA targeting of Japan as an enemy and white American racism toward Asia to predict that she may emerge as a major source of Japan-bashing.

There are numerous other examples. However, the point is clear: The vast reservoir of Japanese goodwill toward the United States developed since the end of World War II is rapidly eroding. The United States should realize the dangers of this trend and act on it.

In October, 1960, the late Edwin O. Reischauer, then a Harvard professor and soon to be ambassador to Japan, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs titled, “The Broken Dialogue With Japan.” In it, he argued that the June, 1960, riots in Japan against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty reflected discontent toward the United States not only among the Socialists and labor unions “but also the bulk of Japan’s intellectuals and college students--that is, the would-be ideological pathfinders and the generation to which the future of Japan belongs.”

Thirty-three years after this prescient article, the United States urgently needs to formulate and implement a strategy to counter the one-sided negative portrayal of the United States gaining ground daily in Japan. A major challenge for the United States today is to ensure that countries such as Japan do not repeat the errors of the 1930s by underestimating and dismissing the United States as a corrupt, decadent and declining nation, incapable and unworthy of world leadership.