Rather than merely choosing enemies for his hero according to those politics and then getting on with the story, Cussler is quite emphatic about the view that the economic challenge from Japan, and the Japanese, characterizing Japan as engaged in economic warfare against a United States whose leaders and people consistently failed to see that they were in fact in a war and act accordingly. Indeed, in a piece of particularly striking symbolism (not a word one uses often when discussing Dirk Pitt novels) the villains use as a critical component of their scheme for blackmailing the United States into political and economic submission Japanese-made cars imported into the U.S.--American commentators at the time regarding such vehicles as key symbols of Japanese industrial success and American decline.1 Similarly pointed is the reference Cussler makes to Japanese theft of American aerospace secrets, another then-significant but long since forgotten fear, as the furor over the FSX fighter program demonstrated--which program, incidentally, Cussler references more than once (on one occasion, informing them that a squadron of FSX fighters escort the villain's aircraft back to his home country). Meanwhile all these acts lead up to the villains' proceeding beyond economic warfare to the other kind, with their superiority in robotics becoming a key basis for their subjecting the U.S. to a latterday equivalent of the "Twenty-One Demands" the Japanese government attempted to impose on China during World War I.2 However, long before that point Cussler repeatedly made his view explicit in the remarks of the good guys, be it Pitt's longtime girlfriend Senator Loren Smith grilling a Japanese financier in committee, or the normally cool Pitt's own uncharacteristic political rant when they are alone together that prompts from her the joking suggestion that he follow his father, and her, into the U.S. Senate.
In the process, as was customary in Japan-themed thrillers of the early ‘90s like this one, Cussler retailed the stereotypical and simplistic cultural comment about Japanese society of the approved, "Establishment," experts to whom the mainstream media loves giving a vast platform, and then never calls out when they prove disastrously wrong. Thus we read here plenty about how the Japanese have always been and always will be a closed, culturally homogeneous, individuality-stifling society of ultra-conformists who "know their place"; follow harder, more ruthless leaders who brook no nonsense about rights, egalitarianism and democracy; and cheerfully sacrifice themselves on demand at their leaders' behest; in contrast with open, free-wheeling, diverse, tolerant, liberal, democratic America--such that many an American conservative, if deeming the Japanese irreconcilably Other and threatening, still seems to deep down envy them their model. (Thus does Pitt's rant at one point accuse Americans of "overconsuming" and preferring the "fast buck" over the foundations of prosperity and sovereignty as against the Japanese opposite--with the implication that some fault of the American culture evident in its people as a whole is the cause of the matter, and elite interests had nothing to do with the "fast buck" mentality and the supposed overconsumption. Thus does a different character, surveying a fully robotized Japanese workplace, think to himself of the "workers" operating "twenty-four hours a day without coffee breaks, lunch, or sick leave," and gratuitously add the cheap shot that such a setup would be "inconceivable to an American union leader"--implicitly endorsing the right-wing scapegoating of the '80s that held the "coddling" of the American workers whose unions were at that time being squashed to be what was holding the country back.)
It was a less than one-dimensional view of Japan that (a few token remarks about the villains not representing their country's people aside) overlooked the reality that all societies are complex, divided, conflicted, with Japan's no exception--as the "experts" should have better appreciated at the time, and would have appreciated at the time, had they bothered even to pay attention to the (Japanese) cartoons and (Japanese) video games their own children and grandchildren were growing up on. Now it all looks still more foolish. (After all, what a far cry this image of a hyper-dynamic but overcrowded superpower intent on acquiring Pacific Rim Lebensraum is from our contemporary image of a stagnating country in danger of being unable to keep itself peopled, as its supposedly ultra-conformist young people are now derided as NEETs, hikikomori, "parasite singles" in what the more prominent social commentators belatedly realized was not a purely Japanese trend!)
Cussler's espousal of these ideas to the point of building a thriller around them can seem the more significant in that, if Japanaphobia had been a theme of American popular culture for years (with Black Rain a hit and a grown-up Marty McFly being fired by his caricature of a Japanese boss the year before Dragon hit bookshelves), Cussler was still probably ahead of the curve, his book preceding by years other bestsellers emergent from that mood such as Michael Crichton's Rising Sun or Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, and so not just a sign of the times, but a likely influence on them. Indeed, I got the feeling that Clancy (whose applause for Cussler's novels I see in the front matter of my paperback copy of this book) not only read this one, but was considerably influenced by it as he wrote Debt of Honor--in the care he took to dissociate the villains from the Japanese government and the people, behind whose backs they for the most part operate; the attempt at nuclear blackmail in defense of the country's economic position; the Japanese-American intelligence agent key to exposing the villains' plans; and even the assault by vengeful Japanese villains on American legislators (the kidnap of Congressman Mike Diaz and Senator Loren Smith, perhaps, the germ of the idea for Debt's finale).
These days any attempt to make a movie of Dragon seems unlikely in the extreme--given how Hollywood has twice attempted to launch a Pitt franchise, and each time seen it end in very costly failure, while I suspect that, addicted as the studios are to sequels and prequels, reboots and remakes, Hollywood these days is less prone than before to adapt material that has appeared in book than in other forms (for the simple reason that fewer and fewer people read books these days, the interest of yesteryear's bestselling thrillers have a short half-life, and the Pitt franchise being rather a less hot "property" than it was in the early 2000s).3 Still, we are hearing reports of plans for a Debt of Honor movie.
I suspect that if such reports have any substance to them, and the movie actually gets made, it will bear no resemblance to that book in this respect, not least given the present attitude toward Japan in the U.S. press. Cussler's book is heavy on evocations of Japan's wartime aggression and atrocities; of the fact that that Japanese Establishment responsible for them never lost power (war criminals' remaining in power, and seeing their descendants follow them to the same high places) or ceased to defend its crimes; and of the equally factual reality that that Establishment hypocritically attacks Western racism and colonialism while denying its own racism and insisting on the "uplifting" character of its colonialism. By contrast today the American press can seem more eager to see Japan rearm than the Japanese people themselves, with that people's anti-militarism leaving American commentators scratching their heads--ever obtuse toward how people actually feel in Japan, and the neighboring countries, where memories of the war do not line up neatly with what seems convenient to American neoconservatives.
1. One might add that Cussler and his characters repeatedly compare the brown paint job of the cars in question to the color of "fertilizer," and at at least one point, more directly compare it to the substance “fertilizer” is intended to evoke.
2. As it did of China, Japan demands of the U.S. concessions of strategic territory it regards as particularly significant to its interests and ambitions (outright cession of not just Hawaii but California, just as Japan had demanded the cession of the Fukien province on the opposite side of the Strait of Formosa); and cession of control over government finances and the direction of its economy, not least by demanding accept Japanese administrators in key government positions. As Cussler makes no reference to the 1915 demands I have no idea whether they were a model for him here or not. (Cussler displays little interest in Japan's imperialism prior to World War II, and is all too reflective of the kind of comment available to most Americans at the time in that the experts tended in general to have no knowledge or interest in Japanese history, about which little was available in English--as many an anime fan learns when their interest is stoked in, say, the Shinsengumi and tries to read up on them.)
3. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels had been around for three decades in the early 2000s, but this particular action-adventure series, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, weathered the end of the Cold War and the broader collapse of the action-adventure fiction market rather better than most of the competition. Moreover, the coincidence of its release with one of the twenty-first century's most catastrophic events would seem to have helped make 2001's Pitt novel, Valhalla Rising, a stronger than usual seller; while the success of Doug Liman's adaptation of The Bourne Identity seems to have strengthened the interest of Hollywood in the rights to comparable thriller series (like Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series, which got a movie version in 2007, and the Pitt novels, which got their second crack at the big screen in 2005's Sahara). No such inducements to Hollywood's giving Pitt another chance have been seen since.
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