A Mix of Admiration, Envy and Anger

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"Go, man, go!" exclaims George Young. "That's how I feel about the Reagan Administration's trade sanctions on the Japanese." Young, 34, the co-owner of Village Records & Tapes in Grosse Pointe, Mich., is speaking against his self- interest. He readily admits that higher tariffs on the many Japanese products his store sells could force prices up enough to hurt his business. More than half of his compact discs, for example, are pressed in Japan. But sanctions are necessary, says Young, because the "U.S. needs to be more self- sufficient. I'm a real nationalist when it comes to trade."

That line, however, gets an immediate and sharp rebuttal inside his own shop. "If we have a trade war with Japan, we're in bad shape," says Young's partner, John Denomme, 35. "We almost totally rely on Japanese hardware to play our software. Nearly every component in home audio and video systems is manufactured in Japan. If the Japanese decided they were going to make it difficult for everybody else, they could." Denomme is far from comfortable with that situation. In fact he finds Japanese economic power "frightening." Nonetheless, he is dead set against protectionism: "What good is it going to do? The Japanese have it all over us in terms of goods. U.S. protectionism is like a spoiled child having an angry fit."

This exchange is not exactly typical. Young and Denomme are much better informed, and far more concerned, than the great majority of their fellow citizens about the threat of economic warfare between the U.S. and Japan. But their argument does point to some of the bewildering crosscurrents in American attitudes toward Japan, its products and trade policies. As reflected in polls and interviews by TIME correspondents across the country, those attitudes are a strange mixture of admiration, envy, resentment touched now and then by fear, and no little confusion. Protectionist sentiment does exist, but it is rarely voiced with much passion. And the sharpest criticisms of Tokyo's "unfair" trade policies are likely to be mixed with equally unsparing criticism -- sometimes from the same person -- of Americans for being less energetic and skillful than the ubiquitous Japanese.

That, to be sure, is not the impression anyone would get from listening to politicians in Washington. Among them the dominant mood is unalloyed anger. Speech after speech in Congress accuses Tokyo of wiping out American jobs with floods of imports while keeping the Japanese market closed to U.S. and other foreign goods and services. That resentment does not just ring through debates on trade policy; it also creeps into remarks that are supposed to be focused on banking, mergers, education, defense, science -- almost anything a legislator feels moved to orate about.

"The level of anti-Japanese trade feeling is higher than ever before," says Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige. One notable example: resolutions calling on Ronald Reagan to take action against alleged Japanese dumping of microchips and the lack of market access for U.S. chipmakers passed both House and Senate without a single dissenting vote. California Republican Pete Wilson introduced the Senate resolution by resorting to the crudest sarcasm: "Unlike in all of those grade-B Japanese horror movies, the Japanese semiconductor Godzilla is now destroying everything but Tokyo." The U.S., said Wilson, should strike back "even if our retaliation . . . precipitates a trade war. Indeed, the point is that we are already at war with Japan."

Wilson's rhetoric is overheated even by Washington standards. But foreign- trade experts inside and outside government, including some who consider themselves dedicated free traders, sound just slightly less exasperated. Says one Administration official who has sat in trade negotiations: "The Japanese always wait until the 59th minute of the eleventh hour before they make any concessions. Even then they won't move, because they want to improve the relationship or because they recognize the validity of the ((U.S.)) argument. They just move because they are forced to." C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank, agrees: "They give us very clearly the message that they only move when hit over the head by a two-by-four. So, we will accommodate and hit them over the head."

Outside Washington, however, attitudes are nowhere near as bellicose. Indeed, polls consistently turn up a surprising amount of admiration for the Japanese and their business prowess. In a poll for TIME by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman two months ago,* respondents declared 51% to 23% that Japanese work harder than Americans. By 53% to 25%, they judged Japanese corporations to be better managed than U.S. companies. The upshot: most respondents deemed Japan's success in world trade to be well earned. Though half of those polled believed that the Japanese engage in unfair trade practices, only 24% thought those practices were the main reason for their export success. Some 68% believed that the Japanese have been capturing markets around the globe primarily "because they produce quality products for a good price."

Answers to questions about Japan's invasion of the American market were far more mixed. Somewhat surprisingly, 50% of those surveyed thought U.S. products superior in quality to Japanese goods, vs. only 29% who believed Japanese merchandise to be better. But they, divided just about evenly on which products offer a better value for the price: 42% said American, 41% Japanese.

Protectionism? Despite the attractions of Japanese products, respondents voted 60% to 35% to put limits on the number of goods that can be sold in the U.S. But when asked about charging a tariff that would make Japanese products more expensive -- the course that the Reagan Administration has since chosen to retaliate against the alleged Japanese dumping of microchips and lack of market access -- only 48% were in favor, while 44% were opposed. Given the 3% margin of polling error, that is very close to an even split. Attitudes toward Japanese investment in the U.S. have varied from poll to poll. Some 50% of the people answering a Louis Harris & Associates poll in 1985 thought that the U.S. should discourage such investment, while only 15% said it should be encouraged. But in the latest Yankelovich survey, 52% thought the opening of Japanese-owned manufacturing plants in the U.S. is good for the American economy, and 62% said they would be willing to work for a Japanese company.

Individual Americans voice equally mixed feelings, when they have any. Many, of course, simply have not been following the latest trade disputes, even if their own jobs are affected by Japanese imports or investments. Workers streaming out of Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue assembly plant in Detroit last week at shift-change time generally declined to express any opinion about the Administration's decision to impose sanctions on several Japanese products. Reagan "is just blowing smoke," volunteered one. "Anyway, it ain't gonna do nothing to help us." Joel Padgett, treasurer of AZS Corp., an Atlanta chemical company owned by Toyo Soda Manufacturing Co. of Tokyo, asserts, "Of our 200 employees, 198 probably don't know anything about it."

Among those who do know, just a few express views that could remotely be considered anti-Japanese. "If unfair trade practices go on, I fear for my job," says Doug Kelly, 32, an engineer at Micron Technology, a Boise chipmaker that has been in the forefront of the call for sanctions and is one of the last two American firms to produce the chips under dispute. But many more people sound far too perplexed to hold any simple views.

Jon Deex, 3l, a businessman in Torrance, Calif., vows to buy U.S. products whenever he has a choice. When shopping for a TV set six months ago, he refused to look at Japanese models; he would consider only RCA and Sylvania sets. "Each person has to do his own part to try to solve the trade deficit," explains Deex. Nonetheless, he opposes protectionist legislation because "we live in an interdependent, interconnected global village. You just can't oversimplify."

Dan Hilliard, a manufacturing engineer at the Japanese-owned Nissan truck plant in Smyrna, Tenn., has no doubt that the Japanese unfairly keep out American goods. Nissan has sent him to Japan three times for training, where, he reports, "I saw very few American products on the market there, whereas here Japanese products are all over the place." Consequently, he believes the "U.S. Government is justified" in placing restrictions on Japanese imports. Yet Hilliard has praise for the management methods of his employer. Nissan's profits in Smyrna are down, he says, because "parts from Japan cost much more than they did one year ago" as a result of the rising exchange rate of the yen against the dollar. "But job security is one of the things the company stressed when I started in 1981, and Nissan is trying to keep its promise and keep everybody on. If I had been at Ford, Chrysler or General Motors, I would probably have been in the streets by now."

Joe Henson, president of Prime Computer, an export-oriented company located on Route 128 near Boston, believes the U.S. is taking a "reasonable and cautious approach" in trade policy toward Japan. "We have to be able to sell things like supercomputers and our American construction services" in Japan, he says, and if it takes retaliation against Japanese products to open Tokyo's markets, so be it. But Henson has no illusions that trade policy alone can solve the U.S.'s problem of regaining competitiveness in world markets. "We have major challenges within our own economy," he says. "We have to cut costs, improve quality and understand market requirements. The U.S. is consuming more than it is producing. We are borrowing money to do it, and we have become a debtor nation. We ourselves have to deal with this problem of overconsumption, or we will be forced to stop it."

This idea that the U.S. is responsible for many of its own trade difficulties, whatever practices the Japanese follow, runs through comments by many people much less expert than Henson on world economics. Says Sheila Saunders, office manager for a monthly magazine in Atlanta: "There was not enough foresight to see that Japan would eventually outproduce us. Basically, we did not meet the competition. We need to advance our technology to produce quality products cheaper."

Perhaps the most striking thing about these and many other viewpoints is that they are expressed with a complete absence of the fiery anti-Japanese rhetoric so currently fashionable in Washington. The public is worried about Japanese competition, disposed to believe that much of that competition is unfair, and willing to consider some limited retaliation. But it has considerably more than a sneaking suspicion that much of the blame for the American trade deficit can be placed right within the borders of the U.S., and it is in no mood to give up its Sonys, Toyotas or Minoltas. Congress and the Administration are impressed by the cries of protectionist lobbyists and justifiably annoyed by the frustrations of negotiating with the Japanese. But one question for them to ponder as they plot strategy is this: What if a trade war starts between the U.S. and Japan, and American consumers do not answer the call to arms?

FOOTNOTE: *This survey was conducted by telephone February 17 and 18 among 1,014 adult Americans.

With reporting by Rosemary Byrnes/Washington and Frank S. Washington/Atlanta