Lance Morrow

COVER STORIES 1. Japan in the Mind of America Friction between the U.S.and Japan masks a deeper truth: the two nations need each other. They admire one another much more than either realizes, and in some ways their ties are stronger than ever. Following are two stories that explore how Americans and Japanese look in one another's eyes.

A schoolchild looking at the outlines of South America and Africa on the world map may intuitively fit the puzzle together, and behold -- the principle of continental drift.

No one studying a cultural map of the world would make the mistake of thinking Japan and the U.S. once came from the same place. The two belong almost to different universes. Each is the other's antiworld: Japan an exclusive, homogeneous Asian ocean-and-island realm, tribal, intricately compact, suppressive, fiercely focused; and the U.S. a giant of huge distances, expansive, messy, inclusive, wasteful, rich, individualist, multicultural, chaotically diverse.

Yet in the years after 1945, Japan and the U.S. became the odd couple of the free world, the brilliant parvenus. They collaborated -- victor and vanquished, senior genius of industry and eager, hardworking apprentice. America sponsored Japan almost ex nihilo, out of the ashes, became its protector and ultimately its best, most lucrative customer. The Japanese stood in grateful awe of all things American and overlaid their ancient culture with a new layer mockingly like that of their sponsors. The Japanese sent back to their benefactors a steady stream of goods, tinny toys in the early years, then better stuff. Much better stuff.

Over the years the two peoples accomplished a cultural convergence after all: they met on the hard, bright surfaces of consumerism. But in each other's minds they remained mutually uncomprehending presences, like mythic cartoons, action figures: G.I. Joes, Mutant Ninja cultures. They tended to caricature each other, always getting things just a little off. That was all right as long as admiration and deference remained the organizing principles, as long as nervous laughter and bowing smoothed the way.

Now the harmony of deference and dependence is gone. For years after the war, the Japanese suffered from an inferiority complex. Now it is the Americans who have begun suffering from an inferiority complex, a disorienting, unfamiliar sense of being economically vulnerable and not entirely in control of their destinies.

The Japanese, commanding a powerful, dynamic economy, the second largest in the world, may overtake the U.S. by the year 2000. The American economy is stalled after 18 months of recession. The presidential election is focusing the nation's attention and rhetoric, and possibly the appetite for scapegoats.

This is becoming a familiar line: "The cold war is over, and Japan won." Much of the rationale for America's global military role is gone, and the U.S. must now find a new place in a complex world economy. Robert Frost once wrote a poem called The Oven Bird: "The question that he frames in all but words/ Is what to make of a diminished thing." America, still the most powerful economy, nonetheless feels itself to be somehow the diminished thing.