Business: Japan, Inc.: Winning the Most Important Battle

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advanced Western countries, industrial production and the production of social capital have been balanced, but we have been so busy exporting that we have not balanced these things."

Instead of fighting the Japanese, U.S. businessmen can join with them in some mutual projects to make money and, incidentally, help out the have-nots of the world. Harold Scott, director of the U.S. Bureau of International Commerce, believes that as Japan's labor shortage worsens, its industrialists will gradually shift their stress from exports to American-style overseas investment. U.S. companies could speed the process by proposing joint ventures with Japanese firms in third-country markets. Scott envisions, for example, a combination of U.S. and Japanese timber companies to develop the huge lumber resources of the Upper Amazon.

U.S. businessmen could also learn a few lessons from the Japanese system. Its labor practices, for example, are both humane and efficient. Some of them might be tried in the U.S.—not lifetime one-company employment, of course, but perhaps some training practices. Japanese industrialists train many of their workers in several skills rather than insisting on greater specialization as their Western counterparts do. A Japanese engineer is encouraged and even expected to learn something about accounting, finance and personnel work. This seems to help produce better-rounded, more mobile and more highly motivated workers than are found in many Western factories and offices.

A society as heterogeneous and individualistic as the U.S. probably cannot rally most of its people behind a national economic goal in the Japanese sense. But Japan has shown that busi ness and government do not have to consider each other as adversaries, as they often do in the U.S. Though the U.S. certainly should not cartelize its industry Japanese-style, Japan's success might stimulate some thinking in Washington as to whether the antitrust laws should be liberalized to promote the nation's competitiveness in world markets.

Needed: More Japans

In any program of trade cooperation with Japan, the U.S. can count on support from some of the biggest Japanese businessmen. Morita has been calling for Japan to open its industry more rapidly to U.S. investment, though he gives the idea a characteristic Japanese twist of self-interest. "If we allow more U.S. investment, we will not need a security treaty," says Morita. "Of course the Americans will protect us then. Everybody protects his property."

Morita also proposes international harmonization of product standards, safety regulations, antipollution laws and food standards in order to equalize costs and guard against the possibility that differing national rules will be used to keep out foreign goods. Beyond that, he has begun to believe that the world's industrial leaders have been too narrow in their trade thinking. "There are three big industrial areas: the U.S., Japan and Europe," he says. "Now we have manufacturers trying to sell each other the same things. It doesn't make sense. Two-thirds of the world's people are still living under low standards, and because of that they do not yet constitute a viable market. Just as the U.S. helped Japan rise from nothing, we should all join to try to make more Japans in other parts of the world." That is a sound