The Japanaphobic Thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s: Why All the Two-Bit Sociology About Japan?

Reading the Japan-themed thrillers of the '80s and '90s I was struck time and again by how, more than in the case of thrillers about other countries, the authors postured as experts on the culture of their villains and presumed to educate their readers about it--in the main, retailing the clichés then in vogue among Establishment experts. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novel Dragon was no exception, my own review of the book finding it to have repeated the standards

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.

However, as was also common to such commentators, whose sensibility tended well to the right of the center of the political spectrum, much as they saw the Japanese as "Other and threatening," they all too plainly envied them that social model--the respect for elites, the deference of inferiors--in part because of the reason why there was so much comment about Japanese culture in the first place. Such persons, as conservatives inclining toward a stress on difference over similarity between societies, have also been prone to explain the hugely important matter of a country's economic success or failure in terms of culture, particularly as it makes for individual qualities. Except when banging on about the necessity of society pandering to "entrepreneurs," regarding itself as owing them everything and they as owing it nothing in return, they brush aside such matters as geography, institutions, the spillover effects of others' actions (and of course, the matter of exploitation) in favor of, for example, chalking up a success or failure to their people being more or less "hard-working," etc..

Looking at the Soviet Union, even in that period in which seemed to them most dynamic (the years surrounding the launch of Sputnik), Anti-Communism meant that they were sure they had nothing to learn from, or admire in, the Soviets. By contrast the Japanese in the '80s, if practicing a form of capitalism that seemed distastefully statist to many commentators (the main source of skepticism about Japanese success in those years), was still a conservative, capitalist, country they feared was beating America at its own game. And that drove them to try and make some sense of the country--if with the meager results that have many of those picking up these books today appalled by what it was common to write then, just as, in relation to many a different culture, many will similarly be appalled by the two-bit sociology standard in the early twenty-first century.