Lost in Syndication: The Case of the Hatoyama Essay

I've been centrally embroiled in a fascinating controversy involving an essay published in a Japanese magazine by Yukio Hatoyama, the soon-to-be prime minister of Japan, that caused a big stir when excerpts were published abroad, especially in the United States, which in turn caused a bigger stir back in Japan. Hatoyama's essay extolled the virtues of "fraternity" within societies and among nations, criticized the excesses of US-led globalization and mused about the fate of the dollar and a possible future East Asian community.

The old reflexes that set in motion this latest lost-in-translation episode suggest that neither the tendency toward insularity in Japan nor arrogance in America have quite adjusted to the new realities of the interconnected global age.

First, the facts. When I learned of Hatoyama's essay, entitled "My Political Philosophy," which appears in the September issue of the Japanese magazine VOICE, I immediately asked my associate in Japan to obtain permission to translate and syndicate an excerpted reprint worldwide. The Global Viewpoint Network of Tribune Media Services (formerly the Los Angeles Times Syndicate), which I edit, has 35 million readers in 15 languages through scores of the world's top newspapers.

My associate faxed over a letter to VOICE explaining that Global Viewpoint appears in as many as 100 papers worldwide. We received permission from the editor of VOICE, who in turn checked with Hatoyama's office, which agreed and provided the English translation. "VOICE and Hatoyama's office are happy for you to run an excerpt on Global Viewpoint," my associate e-mailed me. "Please mention VOICE."

Our abridged version of the essay was published across the world, from El Pais in Madrid to O Estado de Sao Paulo in Brazil to the Gulf News in the Middle East to the Bangkok Post, among others. In the US it ran in the Christian Science Monitor and the Huffington Post. When the International Herald Tribune picked it up, it was posted on the New York Times website, which they share. In all cases it was clearly noted that it was excerpted from the essay in VOICE. If there was any confusion about "excerpt" and "syndication," it resulted from a good faith misunderstanding all around.

(Despite some complaints in Japan that the abridged version gave short shrift to Hatoyama's idea of "fraternity," the fact is that El Pais, O Estado de Sao Paulo and the Bangkok Post -- you couldn't get a broader spread -- all used the word "fraternity" in their chosen headlines).

As the contents of the essay wended its way into awareness in the US just as the Democratic Party routed the LDP with a landslide in the August 30 election, it elicited a strong reaction from some "Japan experts" (mostly unengaged former diplomats in think tanks), neo-conservative magazines such as The Weekly Standard and some Japan-watching blogs. Most critics seemed shocked at what they regarded as a surprise bout of insolence from a normally indolent ally. Used to obsequious mumbo-jumbo from the Japanese political class, these critics apparently found it hard to swallow the straight talk about America's shortcomings as an economic model or about the relative decline of American power noted in the essay. In effect, they seemed to consider it a slap in the face of all those Americans who had just bought Toyotas through the "clunkers for cash" program.

As the ripples of this stir made their way back to Tokyo, meek diplomats scurried into apologia mode while others in the media hastened to blame Hatoyama's naivete for letting ideas meant for domestic consumption become splashed across the pages of the global press. Hatoyama and his staff expressed extremely agitated surprise that his words had shown up in the on-line edition of the New York Times, the very heart of the American establishment. By week's end, the "kerfufflle," as one analyst called it, was front-page headlines. Hatoyama felt compelled to put in a call to President Obama to affirm the centrality of the Japan-US alliance in the new government's foreign policy.

All this in itself is indeed surprising. Doesn't everyone get that today we live in a global glass house? That in a world tied together by social networks, the Internet, YouTube, web journalism, innumerable blogs and even print syndication, anything you say in Japan is going to be heard everywhere else?

(Kurt Campbell, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Asia and the Pacific said in a phone conference with the Pacific Council on September 10 that, from what he could tell, Hatoyama had prepared the essay for a "narrow audience" in Japan during the campaign and didn't imagine it would get such enormous circulation worldwide. In any case, he said, power now imposes a different discipline than campaigning).

The reaction of US critics was surprising in a sillier way. Who hasn't criticized the excesses of American "market fundamentalism" or the damage done to "local economies" by globalization, as Hatoyama did in his essay? When Barack Obama was a community organizer on the south side of Chicago he sought to help those who lost their manufacturing jobs because of globalization. He won the presidency by campaigning against the unregulated fat cats on Wall Street whose greed and irresponsibility brought the US economy to ruin.

In Europe, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- not to be speak of Brazilian President Lula --have all railed against American-style capitalism and sought to curb derivatives and hedge funds. As I write, the European Union, led by France and Germany, is preparing to put tight reins on compensation and bonuses for the big bankers when the G-20 meets in Pittsburgh. Indeed, is there a world leader today who doesn't criticize market fundamentalism?

Some in the US scored Hatoyama as "nearly anti-American" because he said in his essay that, after the war in Iraq and the financial crisis, America was losing its preeminence, trying to hang on to its dominance while China was trying to assert its power, and Japan was caught in between. I remember no similar outcry, to take one of many examples, when French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner uttered this biting epitaph of America's once lustrous image: "The magic is gone."

Within a decade, Hatoyama guessed, the dollar would no longer be the prime reserve currency -- something a UN commission has actually recommended and China's leaders, who are also America's bankers, have spoken about openly. While pointedly reaffirming the centrality of the US-Japan alliance to East Asian stability, Hatoyama also voiced the hope that, as in Europe, one day an East Asian community would replace suspicion and conflict among nations of the region. Every time the ASEAN nations get together, for example, isn't that is all they talk about?

Only Americans with an outdated sense of US supremacy could quarrel with the obvious. Hatoyama's great crime, I suppose, was merely to be the last to say what everybody knows. I suspect however, that President Obama himself pretty much shares Hatoyama's general worldview about the market and society, and about "fraternity" in an interdependent world. This is certainly the sense I got when the Global Viewpoint Network syndicated Obama's op-ed before the last G-20 summit, "A Time for Global Action." Also, having been photographed reading Fareed Zakaria's "Post-American World" during the campaign, Obama surely appreciates Hatoyama's description of the shifting balance of global power.

Clearly, as this controversy exposes, both Japanese insularity, which in my view has deepened in the "lost decade" of stagnation, and the stubborn remnants of American arrogance need a reality check.

In the information age, no country is an island anymore, not even Japan. Geography is no longer destiny. Though a far younger nation, America's adjustment won't be any easier. As Lee Kuan Yew, the godfather of Asian modernization once put it to me, "for America to be displaced, not in the world, but only in the Western Pacific, by Asian people long despised and dismissed with contempt, is emotionally very difficult to accept. Americans believe their ideas are universal. This sense of cultural supremacy will make the adjustment most difficult."

Of course, as Kurt Campbell said in the Pacific Council call, and I agree, it is in the US (and global) interest that this be a "trans-Pacific, not a Pan-Asian" century.

Both new leaders,Yukio Hatoyama and Barack Obama, have big visions. That is a hopeful place to start in unwinding the old reflexes.

 

 

Comments

[the mean in meaningless]

What exactly did people expect when they began electing radicaI EvangelicaIs and Neocons first into the upper echelons of the Republican Party, then into federal office? Sustainability??

[blackmouth]

The decline of the United States, brought to you by the Republican Party.

[slowtono]

Hardly!!!!!!!!

[the mean in meaningless]

Reality obligates.

[lastpost]

“Hatoyama's great crime, I suppose, was merely to be the last to say what everybody knows.”

True fraternity?: Friends who will tell you what they actually think. Rather than what they think you’d like to hear.

[TISN]

There are no political solutions only technological ones.

[Kaviraj]

Technological "solutions" have brought us climate change. They will bring us only more of the same. They are no solutions. The industrial revolution is the single biggest mistake of humanity.

[porsche996]

Mr. Gardels,

I found this article only peripherally interesting or illuminating. It seems to serve only you in its publication in the HP.

Crowing about your perspicacity at distributing the Japanese doctrine and campaign literature from VOICE that was meant solely for domestic consumption and would serve to allow Mr.Hatoyama to display his knowledge of current events and international economic awareness to his supporters.

In a purely ethnocentric fashion you describe what we already know, the final throes of empire are awful and disturbing to witness. What aid can come from the concept unproven and untested of fraternity and co-dependence? That remains to be seen but it is uniquely and fortuitously not America that will find its destiny, but Asia, surely.

[Steven Duke]

Reflexive American exeptionalism or just further reactionary rhetoric and manipulative propaganda from the usual sources?

[allensf]

Japan's history with the US has always been paroxysmal with periods of emulation interspersed with consternation. In many ways it has been like a drama filled romance. America has benefited and loved them so many times, and has hurt them and suboordinated them at other times. If you study Japanese history, there really is no other nation that has given them as many black eyes as America. My trips to Tokyo now reveal that America is still adored, but Americans don't capture their interest and intrigue like the French and Australians do.

[WilliamP]

This essay just seems to be stating the obvious. And this bad news is something that the political climate in the US can't handle. Many of our leaders are willing to delude themselves into detriment to placate their constituants. And, though the problems of the shifting balance of power is a problem, the bigger problem is that we can't even face the issue.

[mcmchugh99]

I'm one historian who believes that the days of US hegemony are long since over. We are no longer the Great Superpower of 1945, and have not been since the 1970s. Nor is our model of free market capitalism desirable to anyone in the world but Republicans in the US--who have competely taken leave of any reality on this planet.

We no longer have the strength to play the role we once did decades ago, and even if we tried, we would quickly see an informal coalition assemble against us--as Bush-Cheney did when they attempted to establish old-style hegemony over the Middle East. Our days of getting away with things like that are long past.

One alternative is to slip back into islolationism and nationalism, another is to play our part in reformed world organizations and institutions, not as the reigning superpower, but one power among many.

[GrainOSand]

"Hatoyama's essay extolled the virtues of "fraternity" within societies and among nations, criticized the excesses of US-led globalization and mused about the fate of the dollar and a possible future East Asian community. "

I see nothing wrong with what Mr. Hatoyama expressed. That should be his viewpoint and ours as well, with some modifications, in the interest of broader inclusion in solutions for perils the world faces and not just this or that community. Nations should be brotherly and they should be prosperous based on something real not imagined or concocted. Sustainability as buzz word or reality, you be the judge.

[yappnmutt]

the usa has never understood japan or the rest of asia. the usa is about to get a very expensive lesson but will probably not understand what it is that is supposed to be learned. this ignorance is very dangerous for the usa but, more importantly, for asia.

a pan-pacifica century may only be possible in the transfer of wealth sense. it is, in the end, only natural for china to retake its position as the most important economy in the world after a short 150 year hiatus during the western experiment. there will be no denying the momentum of the 4 billion people in asia with china as the center.

hatoyama was simply asking the question that will define japan in the 21st century. how will japan move away from the usa and toward china and asia?

[andyg]

Japan has a bloody history with China. I don't think the Chinse have forgotton the rape of Nanking, so easily.

[yappnmutt]

the people of nanking may have an issue with the japanese. the chinese .gov and people have a bigger issue with the west. the chinese need japan. japan needs china.....and they understand each other.

[Billy Hell]

Like Albert Einstein said: "We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."

"Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist.

The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has -- as is well known -- been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature.

For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, guided in their social behavior."

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm

[GrainOSand]

The economist makes many assumptions where the pragmatist deals with the “hard cold reality” (though reality is perception and perception is often found to be subjective). At times, such an approach (cold pragmatism) is a detriment to new demands of pragmatism requiring boldness, such that...the bar is raised, the envelope is exceeded, and the boundaries of the possible extend beyond whatever imagined boundary of what was once deemed practical

The economist assumes much, where the pragmatist consumes much (energy) in pursuits of compromise to get at what is deemed possible in the moment of existence that defines any now that is now. It is said the data can be interpreted in many different ways, it all depends on perceptions, wills, and most importantly, indoctrination towards whatever truth. The mind, the I, the collective as an objective of combined prosperous existence. That is a very difficult business, that is the ending and the beginning of any slippery slope.

[GrainOSand]

"The mind, the I, the collective...as an objective of combined prosperous existence -- that is a very difficult business. That is the ending and the beginning of any slippery slope.

[FogBelter]

I think the reason that this type of comment coming from Japan is treated differently from similar statements coming from other places in the world is that Japan has had a neo-colonial relationship with the United States since the end of WWII. This is like one of the United States' children chastising it. The US could care less what the French say, but critical words from Japan are a lot harder to swallow.

[iblogleft]

These outcomes are not unavoidable. They are however, highly probable.

[TXfemmom]

We need to stop spending as much as the rest of the world trying to stick our noses in the entire world. For beginners, however, we spend a fortune to protect and defend Japan and S. Korea, and if they want our assistance, then they should have to pay the basic costs of us doing that.

We spend our future on protecting them while they spend their money on infrastructure, health care and undermining us economically.

[ceti]

Well, then the US could pack up and leave Okinawa for starters, but are refusing to do so.