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BASELANDIA
In 1949 George Orwell conjured up a dark future for Britain. Atomic warfare had ravaged the industrial world. A dictator had taken command. Seeking to “narrow the range of thought,” the government was gradually replacing the English language with a nightmare version of Basic, called Newspeak. And Britain had been absorbed into the United States. Its name had even been changed, from Britain to “Airstrip One.”
Orwell’s novel 1984 was mainly a warning about totalitarianism. But in imagining Britain as a forward base for a U.S.-centered empire, Orwell noted another important trend. The Second World War had seen millions of U.S. servicemen touch foot on British soil. In theory, their presence had been temporary. But as the “cold war” (a term of Orwell’s coinage) began, it became clear that the United States would be staying for some time.
During World War II, one of the most important British bases for the United States had been Burtonwood, which hosted more than eighteen thousand personnel at peak. In 1948, the year before Orwell published 1984, the U.S. Air Force returned there. Burtonwood was repurposed to support the Berlin Airlift. It became the largest air force base in all Europe. Thousands of servicemen stayed there, and they didn’t leave until the 1990s.
This was an important feature of the United States’ pointillist empire. Some of its “points” were on islands or remote spots, such as Thule, the Bikini Atoll, or the Swan Islands. But others were in heavily populated areas. Troops spilled out from the bases, drinking, frequenting clubs, trading on the black market, and organizing trysts. And people who lived nearby found work on the bases or in selling to servicemen. The bases and their environs, in other words, were bustling borderlands where people from the United States came into frequent contact with foreigners.
The bases were there by agreement—Washington offered protection and usually funds in exchange for the right to plant its outposts. But for the people who lived next to them, it could feel like colonialism. French leftists complained of U.S. “occupiers” and grumbled about “coca-colonization.” In base-riddled postwar Panama, thousands marched carrying signs reading DOWN WITH YANKEE IMPERIALISM and NOT ONE MORE INCH OF PANAMANIAN TERRITORY.
For the British, the main issue was the nuclear weapons. The United States had been storing its weapons at British bases, and it flew B-47s over England. Were they carrying nuclear bombs? “Well, we did not build these bombers to carry crushed rose petals,” the U.S. general in charge told the press in 1958. He was bluffing, slightly—those bombs were unarmed. But the terrified British public had no way of knowing that.
Within months, more than five thousand well-dressed protesters gathered in the rain at Trafalgar Square. From there, they marched for four days to a nuclear weapons facility in Aldermaston. By the time they reached it, the crowd had grown to around ten thousand.
These numbers weren’t enormous. But the fact that people had turned out at all, in the 1950s, in the heart of NATO country, to protest the logic of the Cold War was impressive. NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT and NO MISSILE BASES HERE, their banners read in sober black and white.
An artist named Gerald Holtom designed a symbol for the Aldermaston march. “I was in despair,” he remembered. He sketched himself “with hands palm out stretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle around it.”
The lone individual standing helpless in the face of world-annihilating military might—it was “such a puny thing,” thought Holtom. But his creation, the peace symbol, resonated and quickly traveled around the world.
In Holtom’s eyes, the bases sowed fear. Yet seen in another light, they had a certain glamour. The men posted to them were flush with money and consumer goods. So even as the bases provoked protests, they also stirred other passions.
Take Liverpool, a port city in the north of England. Before the war, it had been a dreary factory town without much by way of entertainment beyond the music-hall scene that typified much of provincial England. Then suddenly, in the 1950s, it lit up like a Christmas tree. It turned out far more chart-topping acts in the following decades than it had any right to. Some, like the Searchers or Gerry and the Pacemakers, have faded with time. Others, like the Beatles, have not.
A classmate of John Lennon’s estimated that between 1958 and 1964, five hundred bands were playing Merseyside, the area around Liverpool.
Why? “There has to be some reason,” wrote the Beatles’ producer George Martin, “that Liverpool, of all British cities, actually had a vibrant teenage culture centred around pop music in the 1950s, when the rest of Britain was snoozing gently away in the pullovered arms of croon.” That Liverpool had a port surely helped. Yet for Martin, the answer was to be found elsewhere. Liverpool was a base city. It was, in fact, fifteen miles west of Burtonwood, the largest U.S. Air Force base in Europe.
Burtonwood was, it must be emphasized, enormous. It was the “Gateway to Europe,” where transatlantic military flights landed. Its 1,636 buildings included the largest warehouse in Europe and the military’s only European electronics calibration laboratory, which technicians used to set their instruments and test standards. It had a baseball team, a soccer team, a radio station, and a constant influx of entertainers from the United States (Bob Hope, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby).
Burtonwood’s significance would be hard to overstate. Whole neighborhoods of Liverpool had been bombed during the war, especially around the Penny Lane area, and its economy was still in shambles. The thousands of U.S. servicemen who came through were like millionaires. Teenage girls charged at them at the train station (The Daily Mirror, suspecting prostitution, judged this “shoddy, shameful, and shocking”).
In its official contracts alone, Burtonwood plowed more than $75,000 into the local economy per day. And that doesn’t count the money for entertainment. Musicians did especially well. They could get gigs on the base, or they could catch the troops who, pockets bulging with dollars, made their way to the Merseyside clubs at night.
In George Martin’s eyes, this was transformative. The troops, he recalled, “brought their culture—and their favourite records—plugging both directly into the mainstream of Liverpool life.” The men dispensed nylon stockings, chocolate, money, and records like an army of boisterous nocturnal Santa Clauses. The base became “an absolute magnet for any woman between the ages of fifteen and thirty.”
Young men got caught in its magnetic field, too—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr especially. Ringo’s stepfather worked on the base and fed Ringo a steady diet of comic books and records from the United States. John’s mother, Julia, was known as a “good-time girl,” an avocation that, whatever else it entailed, left her with an admirably large and up-to-date record collection, which John and Paul eagerly raided. George got his records by stealing them from Brian Epstein’s shop, which, thanks to the troops, was brimming with the latest music from across the Atlantic (Epstein later became the Beatles’ manager).
At a time when Britain’s cultural institutions were locked in the vaudeville age and the BBC was trying to stamp out rock, Liverpudlians found themselves in a special position. They had records, particularly those featuring African American artists, that no one else had access to. And they had strong financial incentives to master the songs emanating from the United States.
Their music scene exploded. Tellingly, the Liverpool groups were essentially cover bands. They one-upped one another not by composing new songs, but by replicating faithfully the sounds they heard on records and the radio.
The first side that John, Paul, and George recorded was “That’ll Be the Day,” a Buddy Holly number performed with remarkable fidelity to the original. They weren’t trying to dislodge Holly, just to establish themselves as recording artists in his style. There was only one copy pressed, which the bandmates passed around—today it’s the most valuable record in existence.
They cut it in 1958, the same year the antinuclear marchers moved on Aldermaston. The Beatles and the peace symbol, in other words, debuted within four months and a day’s train ride of each other. And both were side effects of the U.S. basing system.
Eventually the Beatles themselves would join the movement that began with the march on Aldermaston. Paul McCartney appeared on television in 1964 calling for a ban on nuclear weapons. Three years later, John Lennon offered his own protest of the United States’ basing system. “Look what they do here,” he complained. “They’re spending billions on nuclear armaments and the place is full of U.S. bases that no one knows about.”
Such opinions may sound strange coming from a band that owed its very existence to the U.S. military, but that’s often how it went. Those who lived in the shadow of the bases both resented them and built their lives around them, vacillating between protest and participation.
The same ambivalence could be seen on the other side of the world, in postwar Japan. Rarely had a country endured such wrenching transformations at such high speed. In just two years the Japanese saw dozens of their largest cities firebombed, two cities destroyed by nuclear weapons, the collapse of their empire, their mainland conquered, their emperor humbled, and Douglas MacArthur’s men fanning out across their country. To Edwin Reischauer, who had grown up in Japan, the entire country seemed “confused” and “dazed.”
Humiliated would have been an apt word, too. The Japanese had gone from being the masters of Asia to subjects in an occupied country. MacArthur ruled Japan unabashedly as a dictator. He refused to socialize with the Japanese or even to travel within the country that he was ruling. Instead, he hunkered down in “Little Tokyo,” an unbombed section of central Tokyo that the occupation authorities turned into a command center. From it, MacArthur censored the press, ran the economy, and set the curriculum of the schools.
The Japanese quickly adapted to the new reality. The first postwar bestseller was a thirty-two-page English-language phrase book, which sold millions of copies. Children mastered key phrases such as “give me chocolate” and attached themselves to the legs of wandering GIs. Tens of thousands of women found work as prostitutes. Sex work was, in the early days, one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy.
The occupation lasted six years and eight months. Yet even after it ended, in 1952, nearly two hundred thousand troops remained on more than two thousand base facilities on the Japanese main islands. This kept Japan “bound hand and foot” to the United States, a leading politician charged. Only 18 percent of those polled after the occupation’s end felt unreservedly that Japan was truly independent. There were too many foreign troops still milling around.
And Japan wasn’t entirely independent, as the United States continued to occupy parts of Japan outside the main islands, including Okinawa. The U.S. ambassador referred to Okinawa openly as “a colony of one million Japanese.” Almost 5 percent of its population consisted at that point of U.S. military personnel and their dependents. Okinawa wouldn’t be returned to Japanese rule for another two decades.
The Japanese bases were run as “America Towns,” sealed-off enclaves of the United States within foreign territory. They had their own offices, housing, shopping centers, schools, and fire stations. But the bases were never perfectly self-contained. Sometimes they expanded physically, gobbling up land to make room for enlarged facilities. Other times, base activities seeped out into the surrounding areas. In 1951 a fighter plane’s fuel tank fell from the sky onto a house, killing six. In 1959 a jet crashed into an elementary school, killing seventeen and wounding more than a hundred. Such “incidents and accidents” were frequent and, to those who lived near the bases, terrifying (1965: trailer from an airplane falls and crushes a girl to death; 1966: tanker airplane crashes and kills a local; 1967: high schooler is killed by a military vehicle in a hit-and-run and a four-year-old is crushed by a military trailer; etc.).
There were crimes, too. In 1957 the Japanese public was outraged when a U.S. sergeant shot an empty shell case from his grenade launcher at a forty-six-year-old woman, killing her (he was irritated that she was collecting scrap from an army shooting range). Killings, rapes, and assaults by the men on the bases were not uncommon. The year after the occupation ended, more than a hundred Japanese died at the hands of U.S. service members. Technically, crimes committed by uniformed perpetrators were subject to trial in Japanese courts. But the Japanese government relinquished jurisdiction in 97 percent of cases in the early years, turning thousands of alleged criminals over to their superior officers for punishment.
Yet, as the Japanese were well aware, hosting bases didn’t mean just enduring bar brawls, plane crashes, and jeeps driven drunkenly down crowded streets. It also meant that Japan had a special place within the sprawling U.S. military complex. During the Cold War, that was one of the largest and steadiest streams of cash on the planet.
The U.S. military was, in fact, a major employer in Japan. On the base, Japanese found jobs as interpreters, stenographers, drivers, maids, and construction workers. Off the base, the bars and brothels did a steady business. And then there were the servicemen stationed around Asia who converged on Japan for their furloughs. Officially the program was called R&R, for rest and recuperation, but informally the men spoke of I&I: intercourse and intoxication. Whatever the letters, it meant money flying around hotels, shops, bars, and brothels.
More transformative still were the large military procurement orders, which began in 1950 with the Korean War. Goods from the U.S. mainland heading for Asia might take weeks to arrive. Those from Japan could be made cheaply and arrive in hours. And so the U.S. military began a shopping spree. From the start of the Korean War to the end of the Vietnam War, Japanese firms took in at least $300 million a year from U.S. purchase orders. At the peak of the Korean War, 1952, it was nearly $800 million.
This was huge. The president of the Bank of Japan called the procurement orders “divine aid.” Japan’s prime minister called them a “gift of the gods.” On the eve of the Korean War, the auto firm Toyota had laid off workers, cut wages, and reduced pensions by half. It was the military contracts that reversed its fortunes. They were, the firm’s president recalled, “Toyota’s salvation.” Toyota’s output swelled between three and four times its size in the six years between 1948 and 1954.
Not only did the contracts provide profits, they offered Japanese firms a chance to master U.S. standards—i.e., the standards that were rapidly spreading out all over the world. The U.S. military was the largest and one of the most exacting standard-setting agencies on the planet. Producing for it was like having a well-paid internship: lucrative in the moment but also conferring skills that would prove extremely valuable later.
It is telling that one of the visitors from the United States whom the Japanese held in the highest regard was a statistician named W. Edwards Deming. He’d worked in logistics during the Second World War, and his specialty was quality control—techniques for ensuring that industrial products were built to specification (the Total Quality Management movement derived in part from his ideas). None of this earned him much renown in the United States, but he was, as they say, big in Japan. Engineers there flocked to his lectures, read his works, and signed up for courses from him. “I never felt so important,” Deming remembered. He received a medal from the emperor.
Was this because Deming was a genius? Probably not. It didn’t take Japanese engineers long to absorb what he knew and surpass it. Deming was famous, rather, for what he stood for. As one of Sony’s founders put it, he was the “patron saint” of quality control in Japan. In a dependent economy, where so much hung on winning military contracts and adhering to standards, that was the saint who was prayed to the most.
Deming’s beatification spoke to the centrality of the U.S. military in Japan’s economic growth. The more that military fought, the more Japanese firms profited. The Korean War had been a godsend. The Vietnam War helped, too. The men who fought it drank Kirin beer, carried Nikon cameras, rode Honda motorbikes, and dropped bombs with Sony parts. The polyethylene body bags they came home in? Made in Japan.
Not every corner of Baselandia made out as well as Japan did. The Philippines, for example, hosted large contingents of U.S. service members, yet no one was driving Philippine trucks to the battlefronts. It mattered that Japan had other factors spurring its growth, including a high rate of savings, market protections, an entrepreneurial culture, and a government that ably promoted industrial development. Still, the patronage of the United States was essential to the recipe.
Whatever the proportion of ingredients, their combined effect was staggering. Between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Vietnam War, the Japanese economy grew fifty-five-fold. It was, by that point, common to speak of Japan’s growth as a “miracle.”
Yet even for Japan, the most prosperous site in Baselandia, success came at a cost. In exchange for its privileged position within the world economy, Japan surrendered a great deal of autonomy. It had to stand aside as the United States used Japanese land to launch Asian wars, spy on the Soviet Union, and store nuclear weapons, with all the dangers that entailed.
Public sentiment was profoundly complicated. Japanese people protested base expansions, but they also protested plans by the United States to remove its servicemen, since the bases were vital sources of employment. In polls from 1958 to 1966, most respondents registered disapproval of the bases. Yet their responses grew more ambivalent over time, with increasing numbers confessing that they weren’t sure how they felt. Even a leader in the campaign to end the occupation of Okinawa acknowledged the “contradiction”: Okinawans had little interest in helping the United States fight in Vietnam, but they desperately needed the money.
On occasion, Japanese antipathy toward the bases erupted into serious protests. The antinuclear movement after the Bikini tests in 1954 was one example—it gave the world Godzilla. There was another eruption in 1959–60, during the run-up to the renewal of the basing agreement between the United States and Japan. Demonstrators took to the streets of Tokyo roughly every other day—the largest protest drew nearly a third of a million people. Eisenhower had planned to come to Japan to celebrate the renewal of the agreement, but when his press secretary arrived to prepare for the visit, some eight to ten thousand protesters blocked his path from the airport. They surrounded his limousine, breaking its windows, rocking it back and forth, and jumping on the roof—it took a U.S. Marine helicopter to rescue him. Eisenhower had to cancel his visit because the Japanese prime minister couldn’t guarantee his safety.
Japan renewed its basing agreement, yet the toll this took on its government was evident. The day the treaty was signed in 1960, the prime minister announced his resignation. The next month, a protester stabbed him six times in the leg.
Ten years later, the treaty came up again for renewal, and Japanese protesters once more took to the streets. They called for an end to the Vietnam War, the return of Okinawa, and closure of the bases. In the Okinawan city of Koza, things turned violent. Koza was the Okinawan Liverpool, a base city with a vibrant rock scene pulsating to the music of Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, Cream, and Led Zeppelin. When a GI-driven vehicle hit an Okinawan man and then the police released the driver, a riot broke out. Protesters threw Molotov cocktails, burned dozens of cars, and broke into the base itself, where they smashed windows and attacked schools. Even the rockers, many of whom spoke English and had GI fathers, rioted.
Yukio Kyan, the bassist in Okinawa’s first rock band, the Whispers, told a historian why. He had strong connections to the United States: his sister’s father was from there, so was his wife’s. And, of course, he owed his career to the free-spending men from the base. Yet, at the same time, Kyan felt that the occupiers had “screwed up” his family. His home had been destroyed by bombers during the war. His aunt was killed after a U.S. jeep hit her—the driver rushed back to the base and was never punished. Kyan confessed that, even as he played U.S. music, a hatred for the United States had built up. His feelings had been “pent up” until finally, in the 1970 riot, they “exploded.”
Marine Corps Air Station Futenma: An outpost of the United States lodged in the heart of a tightly packed Okinawan city
In the face of the protests, the United States returned Okinawa to Japan in 1972. But it kept the bases. Today, 20 percent of the island is used by the U.S. military.
The protests that gripped Japan weren’t a surprise. Officials in Washington knew that bases caused unrest—that’s why they sought out islands and remote locales when feasible. Or they sited bases in places where dissent counted for less: Okinawa rather than the Japanese main islands, Guam rather than California, Greenland rather than Denmark.
But as prescient as Washington’s planners were about the political blowback from bases, they thought little about the economic consequences. They propped up Japan’s economy, including allowing it to discriminate against U.S. imports, on the assumption that it would be a regional powerhouse but never a rival to the United States. As John Foster Dulles, who presided over the treaty ending the occupation, put it, Japanese products had “little future” in the United States. They were just “cheap imitations of our own goods.”
Dulles was, to put it gently, wrong about that. What he didn’t foresee—what no one foresaw—was that in using Japan to launch its military campaigns in Asia, the United States was sowing the seeds of its own deindustrialization.
To understand how that happened, turn back again to the end of the war, to a Japan on the brink of starvation. That might not have seemed like an auspicious time to start a technology company, but for Masaru Ibuka, a technical officer in the then-defunct Japanese navy, it was probably as good a time as any. Japan was so destroyed that pretty much anything could find a market.
Ibuka set up shop in Tokyo, on the third floor of a burned-out department store. He recruited a friend from the navy, a physicist named Akio Morita. In the usual course of things, Morita would have been the fifteenth-generation heir to one of Japan’s oldest sake-brewing firms. But in the aftermath of war, all bets were off. Morita became Ibuka’s vice president, and the two established their new company, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo—the Tokyo Telecommunication Engineering Company. It went by Totsuko, for short.
Ibuka and Morita’s company didn’t make any one thing in particular. Rather, Totsuko made whatever its workers could piece together from the scraps they found: a rudimentary electric rice cooker, some drastically unsafe electrically heated cushions, vacuum-tube voltmeters. Ibuka and Morita fashioned tools from the junk lying around, such as screwdrivers made from motorcycle springs. They also relied heavily on “Yankee Alley,” a black market where GIs fenced items they stole from the bases. That’s where Ibuka and Morita got their vacuum tubes.
What really interested them was sound. “The Americans had brought their music with them,” Morita remembered, “and people were hungry for it.” Ibuka declared that the company would try to make a wire recorder, though early efforts proved challenging.
In the meantime, Totsuko worked other jobs, including taking contracts from the occupation authorities. One was to supply a broadcast mixing unit to the Japanese national radio station, then an arm of MacArthur’s occupation. When Masaru Ibuka dropped the unit off, he saw something he’d never seen before: a tape recorder, which the U.S. troops had brought with them. This is what Totsuko should be making, he thought. He persuaded an officer to bring it by Totsuko’s shop so his entire staff could examine it.
The engineers at Totsuko understood how tape recorders worked. The occupation authorities had stocked a library in central Tokyo with up-to-date Western technical journals, which Japanese scientists copied out by hand and disseminated. Where Totsuko’s engineers struggled was in finding the materials. Japan had no plastic for the tape, so they tried to use a stiff paper instead. After endless trial and error, they figured out a way to magnetize it using local materials. They fried up ferrous oxalate in a pan to make ferric oxide and then painted it by hand onto the paper, using the soft bristles from a raccoon’s belly. It wasn’t how 3M back in the United States did it, but it worked. Totsuko’s hundred-pound tape recorder hit the market in 1950.
Could Japanese buyers afford the tape recorder? Did any want it? Akio Morita was the one who worked out how to market it. The occupation authorities were replacing rote memorization in Japanese schools with audiovisual learning. This meant flooding the schools with U.S.-made educational films. Unfortunately—and this was typical of the occupation—the films were in English, which Japanese students didn’t speak.
Morita saw a way to attach his firm, like a remora, to the underside of the occupation. Totsuko would make tapes of Japanese translations designed to accompany U.S. filmstrips. The market for the tape recorders would thus be not individuals, but schools. It was Totsuko’s first major success.
By this time, Ibuka and Morita had figured out which side their bread was buttered on. The tech came from the United States. The money came, directly or indirectly, from the United States. If their company wanted to grow, it was to the United States that it must look.
Ibuka, despite speaking almost no English, visited for the first time in 1952. While there, he learned of the transistor Bell Labs had developed. Again, as he had with the tape recorder, he made up his mind to invest heavily in a new U.S.-derived technology. He bought a Japanese patent for the transistor, despite warnings from U.S. engineers that the most profitable application for it was probably hearing aids. Ibuka waved them off. He wanted to make radios.
He also wanted to market them beyond Japan. For this, his firm would need a new name. Morita had also visited the United States and discovered that the old name—Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo—while perfectly normal for a Japanese business, tripped up English speakers. Even the short version, Totsuko, got him nowhere.
Ibuka and Morita sought a name that “could be recognized anywhere in the world, one that could be pronounced the same in any language,” Morita recalled. He wanted it to be short, like Ford. The two passed possibilities back and forth and ransacked dictionaries. Though neither yet spoke English well, they were drawn to the word sonus, the Latin root for the English sound. It had an additional resonance in Japan. GIs used an affectionate term for Japanese men: sonny or sonny boy. To many, that surely sounded condescending. But to strivers like Ibuka and Morita, it sounded like money.
We “thought of ourselves as ‘sonny-boys’ in those days,” Morita noted. “We were little boys in the business of sound.”
They knocked off an n and trademarked the name: Sony. Noting the spread of English in Japan and elsewhere, they insisted on writing it in roman rather than Japanese characters, even for their advertisements in Japan. They adopted a mascot for the firm: “Sony Boy.” He was brown-haired, eager, and, to Western eyes, Caucasian.
“Little boys in the business of sound”: Sony’s transistor radio and its brown-haired mascot, Sony Boy
Sony’s first transistor radio, introduced in 1955, wasn’t the world’s first—a U.S. firm had beat it to the market. But Sony’s radios were the ones that sold. And starting with the 1957 model, they sold in the United States.
Not only did the radios sell, they effected a momentous shift in consumer culture. Before Sony, radios, tape recorders, and record players were furniture. They were large and expensive, and manufacturers competed to offer the purest sound—“hi-fidelity” was the buzzword. Sony changed that. Transistors allowed for tiny, cheap, battery-powered radios, which meant that music could be consumed by an individual rather than a household. Morita bragged that Sony’s radios were better than “portable”; they were “pocketable.” To drive the point home, he had his salesmen carry them in their (slightly enlarged) shirt pockets.
Sony wasn’t just selling a radio, it was selling a new way to consume media. Young listeners could now tune in without adult supervision (a teenage John Lennon had a transistor radio on display, the Beatles chronicler Bob Spitz has written, “like priceless art in his bedroom”). To the degree that we live in a world of pocket-size personal devices rather than one of large screens and subwoofers, we have Sony to thank. Or blame.
Sony’s transistor radio also inaugurated another epochal trend: Japanese technology firms producing superior goods. No longer was Sony the remora on the underside of the U.S. leviathan. It had detached and swum ahead.
Way ahead. Sony was the Apple of its day. In the 1960s it introduced the portable television, high-quality color television, and the first desktop calculator that didn’t require vacuum tubes. In the 1970s it was the VCR and the Walkman. In the 1980s Sony debuted compact discs, the Discman, the camcorder, the 3.5-inch floppy computer disk, and—despite its predilection for small sizes—the jumbotron.
Sony’s story was similar to that of the Beatles. Enterprising young men living cheek by jowl with the U.S. military get their start by imitating what they see around them. They learn guitar licks from Buddy Holly songs or struggle with stiff paper and raccoon-hair brushes to replicate a tape recorder. But give them time, and soon enough you’re listening to Abbey Road on your Walkman.
Standards work in a funny way. The firms or countries whose standards prevail sprint ahead while their competitors retool or learn the new system. Economists call it a “first-mover advantage.” But that advantage subsides with time. Once everyone uses 60-degree screw threads, there’s no benefit to having been the first one to have used them (though there may be other rewards for having gotten ahead of the learning curve). The longer the race, the less meaningful a head start is.
The United States’ ability to promulgate its standards gave it considerable first-mover advantages. But those who adopted U.S. standards early did well, too—call them the second movers. In nursing, the Filipinos were the second movers. In rock, it was the Liverpudlians. In industry, it was Sony and the other Japanese firms that grew up around the U.S. military. Their privileged position within the world economy, close to the source of standards and technology and with easy access to U.S. markets, allowed them to go global.
In other words, the international order that the United States built around itself after 1945 redounded to its benefit, but not permanently. Once other countries mastered U.S. standards, they too could profit and even compete with the United States itself. It is telling that the countries hosting the most U.S. peacetime bases—such as Britain, Japan, West Germany, and South Korea—numbered among the United States’ most formidable competitors.
In the sixties, the “British Invasion” reversed the cultural flow of rock music. Starting with the Beatles, British musicians who had mastered rock and blues made their way to the United States: the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, the Who, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison, and Led Zeppelin. Whatever first-mover advantage artists such as Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry used to enjoy had clearly expired, as the British bands could dominate the charts just as easily.
Sony started something similar with its transistor radio. And after it came still more Japanese firms. Such names as Nikon, Canon, Mitsubishi, Honda, Toyota, Subaru, Nissan, Mazda, Kawasaki, Toshiba, Sanyo, Panasonic, and Nintendo gained household familiarity in the United States. The trade balance between the two countries flipped in 1965, ten years after the introduction of Sony’s transistor radio. Now Japan was selling more to the United States than it was buying. California’s governor described this, with great chagrin, as a “colonial” relationship. “We ship her raw materials, she ships us finished goods.”
Japan’s rise was particularly conspicuous in the auto industry, a linchpin of the U.S. economy. In 1980, hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers lost their jobs as auto companies closed forty assembly plants and some fifteen hundred dealerships. Meanwhile, small, fuel-efficient Japanese cars claimed ever-larger slices of the market.
Desperate business leaders tried to unlock the secret of Japan’s success. NBC ran a documentary called If Japan Can, Why Can’t We? that profiled W. Edwards Deming. Finally, after decades of semi-obscurity, Deming could command the fame in his own country that he’d enjoyed in Japan. “I’m proud to call myself a disciple of Dr. Deming,” Ford’s CEO declared.
Yet while an urge to emulate Japan seized executive suites, despair reigned on the shop floor. You could hear it in the music. The bubbly tunes of Buddy Holly had given way to gloomier fare. “Born down in a dead man’s town” was how Bruce Springsteen, the bard of deindustrialization, began his grim assessment of the national prospects in the song “Born in the U.S.A.” Five years later, Sony bought Columbia Records, Springsteen’s label. “Born in the U.S.A.” was now the property of Japan.
Nor was it just Springsteen. In buying Columbia Records, Sony claimed the catalogs of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Simon and Garfunkel, and many other rock mainstays. Next, Sony bought Columbia Pictures, which owned such film classics as On the Waterfront, Ghostbusters, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center in New York.
“Imagine, a few years from now. It’s December and the whole family is going to see the big Christmas tree in Hirohito Center,” warned an ad by General Motors. “Go on, keep buying Japanese cars.”
Resentment curdled, at least in some quarters. “They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs. They knock the hell out of our companies,” complained the real estate mogul Donald Trump on television. This issue marked Trump’s first foray into politics, and it struck a chord. The show’s host, Oprah Winfrey, noted that Trump’s message sounded like “presidential talk.” Would he ever consider running? “Probably not,” Trump replied, “but I do get tired of seeing the country ripped off.”
The author Michael Crichton took Japan-bashing further with his 1992 novel Rising Sun, a thriller about sinister, sexually perverse Japanese businessmen, one of whom murders a white woman. The film, starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, opened to protests by Asian Americans, who worried that it would incite violence. There had already been some. In Flint and Lansing in Michigan, Japanese cars had had their windows smashed and tires slashed. In Detroit, a Chrysler manager and a laid-off worker literally beat a Chinese American man’s brains out with a baseball bat—apparently they mistook him for Japanese. (“It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work,” a witness testified hearing one of the killers say.)
Akio Morita of Sony, who lived in New York, was the face of Japan at this tense moment. In the early 1970s, when Time started reporting on Japan’s economic success in the United States, it ran a story, “How to Cope with Japan’s Business Invasion.” The cover showed a portable Sony TV, with Morita’s face beaming out against a background of yellow light.
Morita had always taken pains to seem unthreatening. He’d written two affable English-language books about his thoughts on business, stressing how much he’d learned from the United States. But in 1989 he began to publish some distinctly undeferential thoughts about his adoptive home. He excoriated the United States for its racism, economic inequality, and lack of business acumen.
Morita may have gotten rich off the U.S. military-industrial complex, but his gratitude, it turned out, was not bottomless. “Let’s become a Japan that can say no,” he advised his compatriots. He coauthored a book of that name—The Japan That Can Say No—written with a right-wing nationalist. He published it in Japanese and refused to have it translated. It was a far cry from his days as a self-styled “sonny boy.”
Akio Morita, as it happens, wasn’t the only beneficiary of the United States’ pointillist empire who would come to say no.