The Land od the Rising Yen

still.’
    Painful silence.
    ‘But Japanese whisky better than
English?’
    ‘Much better.’
    The dethronement of Japanese beer
obviously rankled more than the fall of Japanese whisky. He was still brooding
over it. He asked: ‘German beer best in the world?’
    ‘No,’ I replied, somewhat
sadistically. ‘Czech beer better still.’
    ‘Small country, Czechoslovakia.’
    ‘Tiny country,’ I agreed, ‘but
excellent beer.’
    This was hard on him.
    ‘German beer is not best in world but
better than Japanese?’
    ‘That is so.’
    He had a few more drinks, perhaps to
drown his sorrows. He examined my jacket.
    ‘Japanese textile — better than
English?’
    ‘No.’
    Painful surprise. This seemed unfair.
We had more or less agreed that everything Japanese was better than anything
English.
    ‘English textile better,’ I declared
firmly and by then with a great deal of nationalistic pride.
    He, anxiously: ‘English textile best
in the world?’
    ‘Yes. Best in the world.’
    Relieved sigh. That was different.
After all, the English who had recently ruled the mightiest empire man had ever
known, were entitled to one first.
    Someone ordered sashimi, raw
fish — unmarinated and untreated in any way. Just raw fish. The inevitable
enquiry followed.
    ‘English sashimi better than
Japanese?’
    ‘No.’
    He looked at me suspiciously,
obviously waiting for the blow to fall. But no blow fell. Not a word about
Scottish sashimi or Irish sashimi.
    I didn’t wait for his timid question,
but declared myself: ‘Japanese sashimi best in the world.’
    Up to now he had taken no notice of
the other people in the bar, but he translated my verdict on sashimi for
all to hear. National pride was satisfied. We parted friends.

MERE IMITATORS
     
    Yes: imitators. But not mere.
    The necessity to imitate the West was
born out of Japan’s former isolation. Once the Japanese, after the lesson
received from Perry, decided to become a modern, industrial nation, they had
only one way of achieving this: to learn the skills of the West.
    Today the word ‘imitation’ has a
pejorative, almost contemptuous ring in Western ears; in Japanese it is a
laudatory term.
    The attitude of the West is a survival
from the twenties and thirties and is of course understandable. In those years
the Japanese just copied whatever they could lay their hands on, with complete
disregard of patent laws. The copies made were frequently skilful, sometimes
ingenious but always inferior to the original in quality and workmanship.
Relying on starvation wages paid to their own workers, and on the stolen
patents, they were able to dump a lot of cheap and inferior stuff on the
world’s markets. Little wonder the West became apprehensive and angry,
suspicious and contemptuous.
    Imitation — or some of its close
synonyms — has a different ring in Japan. In the Meiji period, innumerable
study-groups were sent to Europe with the sole, admitted purpose of learning
Western techniques and learning them fast. They went to Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy and a few other countries (also to the United States, across the Pacific), tried to pick up the best in every country, take it home and
improve on it.
    They came to Europe and, after
relatively brief inspections, transplanted our institutions wholesale. They
copied our dress, and our building methods; they copied our parliaments, our
press, our railways, our shipping, our mining methods, our royal courts, our
criminal and civil codes, our civil service, our armies and navies, our
taxation systems. They copied everything, deliberately and not only unashamedly
but eagerly, almost proudly. Many of these institutions — European
parliamentary democracy, for example — were in need of improvement; yet it
cannot be stated that the Japanese succeeded in improving upon them.
    For some time we were very
patronizing about the Japanese ability to imitate — and, of course, flattered,
too. We would go so far as to admit that their genius for imitation was better
than third-rate originality. During the period of Dumping we were less pleased.
After the last war, we saw their car-models and smiled at their names; Century,
Debonair, Corona, Gloria, Skyline, Contessa, etc.: all the names were Western
imitations and so were the cars. Even today, you can see Japanese Fiats,
Japanese Alfa Romeos, Japanese Minis. We grew more and more patronizing: let
them enjoy themselves, let them copy Western brand names, let them