Viewed Sideways. Donald Richie
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translates, innocently enough, as “person from the outside.” Foreigners in Japan, to be sure, find the term loaded with prejudice, but that is their privilege. There are many worse that could be used yet rarely are—keto (“red-haired barbarian”) for example. And when it comes to bad-mouthing foreigners Americans have little ground to stand on. I remember from Occupation days Eighth Army notices forbidding “fraternization with the indigenous personnel,” and few languages can have had terms so unlovely as the standard G.I. for a Japanese person, gook, as in: “Hey, that’s a good-looking gook girl.”
Still, tempered though it is in terminology, the truly politically correct, with all of its triumphs and terrors, has never knocked on Japanese doors. And for good reason. Japan is very suspicious of knocked-on doors. This tendency was much strengthened when, in the mid-nineteenth century, American warships appeared with what seemed to be a trade offer but was widely perceived as a bid for imperialistic takeover. With this threat, however, Japan did not, as given its history might have been expected, close its borders and retreat into an even more hermit-like seclusion.
Rather, it compromised and opened its borders, but it did so ever so slightly for the would-be invaders from the West, just a port here or there. But it opened all the way for those Japanese who now needed to go out and learn all that they could about this country that was so politely menacing theirs.
This ploy is a popular one, this one-direction border-crossing convenience. Many countries have found it of use, particularly in Asia—getting in and out of Burma, for example. It is cost effective and considerably slows down invasions, military or mercantile.
It sometimes malfunctions, however. Several years ago Japan, still deep in what it termed “oil shock,” occasioned by just one more of Nixon’s perfidies, decided to shop elsewhere. Iran was to be the new oil supermarket, and to speed transactions the Japanese government initiated a visa treaty, a tit-for-tat arrangement where I freely enter your country and you freely enter mine. This would, it was thought, allow the Japanese oil people to get in and out of Iran with a minimum of fuss.
Perhaps it did, but the fuss this occasioned in Japan was maximum. While Japan was sending a person or two a month to Tehran, Iran was allowing hundreds to travel weekly to Tokyo. Soon the city was awash with friendly, well-behaved young Iranians, all looking for work.
Naturally they did not find it, though the work was there. After their money had run out these friendly young Iranians found themselves employed mainly by the yakuza, who used a number of them for drug running. Thus the authorities could, eventually, after several years, round up and deport as criminals most of these men who had come to Japan to gain a better life. The one-way boundary was reinstated and Japan experimented no more with porous borders.
There are borders other than the corporeal, however. Those, for example, of economic necessity. Perhaps some readers will recall the so-called trade imbalance, a disequilibrium, which for a time remained unchecked, dividing Japan from the rest of the world. Cheaper (and often better) cars and cameras from Japan were bought by too many people in other lands while the Japanese refused to buy in like number the products of the offended nations.
The United States was particularly outraged, claiming that Japan was unfairly excluding products from its populace through wrongful manipulations of Japanese quotas, qualifications, and distribution procedures. Whether this was true or not, Japan waxed wealthy during this period, and the trade imbalance was among the reasons why. This kind of economic boundary was practical.
It was not, however, the kind of boundary that could last long. Shortly the bubble collapsed because cheap production could not be maintained, and other Asian countries could undercut Japanese-product price. The economic borders (some quite imaginatively named: “Japanese structural impediments,” “Japanese lack of interface,” even “Japanese cultural differences”) fell and gradually the trade imbalance, the result and the cause of many an economic barrier, appeared to right itself.
It is still there; to be sure, it always is; it is one of the qualities of having other nations border yours, but the objects exchanged are now different. Japan, which once purveyed judo, sushi, and Zen to the world, and then turned more palpable with cars and cameras, now began exporting manga, anime, and the more flashy kinds of pop culture. Since this latter does not make nearly as much money as do cars and cameras, there is no mention of trade barriers. And indeed there are none. Mickey Mouse is welcomed so long as Hello Kitty is reciprocally admitted.
During this decline, however, and all of this closing and opening of barriers to the West, Japan had also been busying itself with its borders to the East. This had occurred earlier, to be sure, but never to the extent that Japan’s proximity to the rest of Asia might have suggested.
The reason was that Japan first recognized as its major border fissure that of its border with the West, in particular the United States. It was the country with which Japan thought it had to compete and, even now, it is the country to which Japan most often compares itself, sometimes to its own advantage, sometimes not. The rest of Asia, however, does not have this impediment or this advantage. Cambodia compares itself to Thailand, China compares itself to India, and the borders turn into boundaries, or don’t.
When Japan thought of other Asian countries it all too often considered them backward and worthy only of being taken advantage of. Having itself escaped imperialism, Japan, imitating the admired West, turned imperialist, concluding successful wars with China and Russia, taking over Korea and, as it is called, enlarging its borders.
Successful in this, in the first part of the last century it extended its colonial ambitions to, eventually, the rest of Asia. This destruction of other countries’ borders was sloganized as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It expressed the idea of an economically and politically integrated Asia freed from Western domination and under benevolent Japanese leadership.
At the same time the same phrase was used back home to rationalize Japanese expansionist ambitions on the continent. Claiming that it was saving these unfortunate countries from the perils of Western imperialism, Japan—or at least a part of the Japanese government—was seeking for leverage that would allow an invasion of Japanese people and Japanese money. “Asia for the Asians” was the slogan used.
Members of the sphere, the “New Order,” eventually included Japan (along with annexed Korea), China, Manchukuo (the puppet state in Manchuria), French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies—those countries that had suffered most from the “Old Order,” a system of international relations erected by the Western imperialists.
A problem presented by proponents of the plan was Japan’s own record in East Asia, which was as self-aggrandizing as that of the Western imperialists. Japan’s seizure of Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria—and its more recent efforts to promote an autonomous North China—all constituted a kind of proof that Japan was initiating various economic ties with the peoples it was attempting to subjugate in the name of freedom. In this it was admittedly more civilized than some Western nations, which had used opium to subjugate. It also seemed to offer economic advantage. And some still believe in Japan’s sincerity in its stated intentions. For example, Burmese Ba Maw, then head of that country, said that though he deplored the brutal and arrogant behavior often displayed by Japanese soldiers throughout Asia, still, “nothing can ever obliterate the role Japan has played in bringing liberation to countless colonial peoples.”
If so, Japan was suitably rewarded. After the war ended (from Japan’s view disappointingly) it renounced war entirely. Presumed to be no longer a military threat, it became seen as a place that still, naturally enough, sought economic exchange. Thus what Japan failed to gain through war it has gained through peace. Japan’s economy is larger than all the other Asian economies combined.
With all this wartime scrambling over boundaries and postwar cleaning up of borders there are now myriad economic ties with the nations of Asia, and Japan has been able to make the most of occasional relaxations of these, to give aid where it is needed, to cross borders that might otherwise be closed to it.
Some Asian localities—Singapore, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur—seem in some sense to be modeling themselves on Tokyo. Japan, however, still models itself on America. Some even say that this is but to be expected,