East is East Page 14

  Sato shook his head sadly. “Shima Computer has decided to plead guilty and accept whatever penalty is imposed. They hope thereby to avoid the legacy of bad feeling that would be engendered by a protracted—and futile—resistance.”

  “Ah!” Arai breathed softly. He then addressed himself to his teacup and waited to see if Sato could resist the theme.

  “Shima has much to reproach itself with,” Sato continued censoriously. “The passage of the microchips could have been treated as a piece of carelessness. Deplorable to be sure, but not entirely avoidable in a large firm. The existence of the bribe, unfortunately, renders that interpretation impossible. And of course it encourages the continued slander of our business practices.”

  Arai shook his head.

  “We all have a great deal to lose by such an image. I, for one, would be dismayed at the suggestion that one of our national industries routinely employs bribery,” he said sedately, sinking his shaft into the bull’s-eye.

  The minister’s teacup became stationary at the implications of this statement.

  “As you say, an appalling consequence,” he murmured at last, “and one which we need not consider at the moment.”

  Arai indicated token agreement, then moved on to less sensitive areas.

  “It is regrettable that these disclosures have emerged this week. Even if we are spared a major political crisis, it will make an awkward situation for those of us attending the Midland Research meeting in Great Britain.”

  Awkwardness, particularly for others, was something Sato could view with composure.

  “We only proposed a meeting in Birmingham as a means of terminating an impossible situation here. There should be no insuperable difficulty in delaying the date Mr. Kruger suggested. He can scarcely object.”

  “On the contrary, Kruger is seizing the opportunity to sound out other potential buyers for MR.”

  In order to underline this news, Mr. Arai paused to inspect the pastry tray and make a careful selection.

  “I had not realized there were other firms in contention,” Sato said with a puzzled frown. “Do you know who they are?”

  “My people in London tell me that the agent of several Korean interests has just spent two days at Midland Research.”

  There was a long, appreciative silence. Korea’s economic miracle was a sore spot.

  Arai, delicately licking his fingers, had said all that he had come to say. First the minister had been forced to consider the possibility that Shima’s criminal acts might well have extended to MITI. Then, with Shima’s claims to public support neatly undermined, Arai had delivered the real body blow. Could Sato, already fighting for his political life, afford to become the minister who had handed MR’s robotics to Korean steel?

  On the whole, not a bad morning’s work.

  The Shima indictment even affected Tomaheko Matsuda. For all practical purposes he had been a pariah since Ushiba’s murder. His superiors dropped him from their conferences, his peers shunned him like the plague, and his subordinates approached only in response to a direct command. At first incredulous, Matsuda slowly realized that his guilt was silently and universally assumed. Without a single colleague available for consultation, he shouldered the burden of his problems alone. After a week’s miserable silence, he was reduced to discussing the matter with his son.

  “It was bad enough before,” Matsuda lamented out of the agony of his soul. “But since the Shima admission, it is even worse. Because of a violation that has absolutely nothing to do with me, they assume there is evidence of corruption in my office.”

  “They are embarrassed by the Shima news. As soon as the initial reaction has worn off, they will realize there is no connection between the two incidents. You must be patient, Father.”

  The son was a levelheaded young man of thirty, but Matsuda still regarded him as a giddy youth.

  “Don’t you understand what I’m saying? They are comparing me to a wretched customs clerk!”

  The son tried again.

  “It is certainly an unfortunate coincidence. If the timing had not been so close, nobody would dream of such a comparison.”

  Old habits die hard.

  “Don’t be so silly,” Matsuda snapped with all the vigor he usually brought to these exchanges. “The Japanese government discovers a bribe and ejects a party of Americans with the clear implication that they are at fault. Within a week the American government indicts a Japanese firm for an offense that centers around a bribe. And you call that a coincidence. How can you be so innocent? That timing was no accident.”

  Chapter 16

  The Shima scandal was a topic of conversation in suburban New York as well.

  “. . . so it’s a hell of a time to be on vacation,” said Gene Fleming. “I’ll be stuck with the IFMA in London till Thursday. But the minute that’s through. I’ll grab a flight back to Tokyo.”

  The Flemings’ brief stopover in New York entailed dinner with Haru’s married niece. An additional guest was John Thatcher, who had been invited to observe the growing Japanese community in Westchester.

  “Are you talking about motorcycles?” he guessed, hazily aware that Gene had some official capacity in that world.

  “The International Federation of Motorcycle Associations,” Fleming explained absently. “But you see, the ramifications from Shima may start a chain reaction that blows everything sky-high. I should be there with my ear to the ground.”

  Before Thatcher could comment, Fleming continued his lament.

  “And now that they’re stuck with sending Mr. Matsuda to the MR demonstration in Birmingham, anything can happen.”

  “You mean Matsuda’s still in charge?” Thatcher demanded.

  “They can’t help themselves,” Fleming replied. “They wanted to put him on the sick list, but he wouldn’t oblige.”

  Remembering Matsuda in triumph at the Prime Minister’s side, Thatcher said, “The man must be desperate.”

  This did not accord with the nephew’s view of deputy secretaries, so he was relieved to interrupt: “Dinner, I believe, is ready.”

  Thatcher expected a dinner conversation centering on Japanese impressions of America. Instead he got a pitched battle, with Haru Fleming taking on all corners.

  “Japanese society is about as stable as a rocket immediately before blast-off,” she announced defiantly.

  After a hissing intake of breath, the nephew regained his composure. “How can you possibly say that? We have maintained our traditional coupling of family, community, and workplace.”

  “That simply isn’t so,” she retorted. “We are no longer a bunch of rice farmers in rural villages.”

  “Naturally there have been changes due to modernization. But as Japanese, we have replaced the requirements of the farm with those of industry. Every individual still has his sense of uchi and—”

  “Uchi?” Thatcher interrupted.

  “It refers to one’s place of belonging,” Haru hastily explained. “One’s place of primary affiliation.”

  Undeterred, the nephew continued: “All over the world it is recognized that our achievements are due to establishing the company as a source of uchi.”

  Haru disagreed again.

  “I know that. What’s more, every mother is told that the uchi of her children comes from the school, while her own comes from the home. In fact, you are making my point. On that famous rice farm, everybody shared the same uchi. Now the husband, the wife, the child, all have different ones. It may be wonderful for industrial production, but it’s terrible for the family.”

  The introduction of the family threw the nephew into disarray, but to Thatcher’s pleasure, Haru’s niece moved onto the field.

  “Now, Aunt,” she said soothingly, “I know, when you were a girl, Grandfather walked to his works and came home for meals. All that has gone. But unlike the Americans, we’ve encouraged the schools to play an important part in socializing the children. That’s where they learn about responsibility and diligence
and cooperation.”

  “That’s also where they learn about role playing,” Gene remarked to Thatcher. “They learn the formal courtesies expected of them.”

  “It is not role playing,” the nephew said huffily. “It is an acknowledgment of the fact of authority, whether it’s child with parent, student with teacher, or employee with employer.”

  Gene was more than agreeable. “Actually, once you cotton on to the rules, things are a lot simpler.”

  This admission unleashed the floodgates, as they all related their shock upon first encountering the American system.

  “I laughed and laughed,” Haru confessed. “Everybody calling each other by first names and pretending to be equals, when they aren’t.”

  “The lady next door is twenty-five years older than I am, and she wants to be friends,” the niece said indignantly.

  “They even do it in the office,” the nephew marveled.

  Across the table, Gene Fleming solemnly winked at Thatcher, then added fuel to the flames.

  “The Japanese always think it’s comic,” he said tolerantly, “and after all these years, it seems pretty weird to me too. But it’s not entirely divorced from reality. With job relocation what it is in the States, many employees can regard themselves as free agents. So they’re not the only ones who have to measure up. The employer has to as well. And under those circumstances, you get less of the yes, sir, no, sir routine.”

  “As a matter of fact, on this last trip over, I thought I noticed some slight movement in that direction even in Japan,” Thatcher observed.

  The nephew was lofty.

  “Certain formalities may be abbreviated,” he pontificated, “but the system is unchanged.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Gene ruminated. “It was easy to create company loyalty when half the university graduates couldn’t find jobs. Now that the labor pool is becoming tight, you have a lot of pressure building up.”

  “But no one seriously anticipates Japanese employees starting to adopt American attitudes,” the nephew insisted.

  Gently Fleming refused the bait.

  “The change isn’t starting with them but with Mr. Arai and his ilk. He hasn’t made any bones about stealing personnel from other companies. It wasn’t difficult, since he offered young family men more money and the prospect of faster advancement. Arai has slipped the notion of job mobility into the labor market. That’s certainly new and probably asking for trouble.”

  “But nobody will admit it,” Haru sailed in. “Any more than they’ll admit the change in the schools.”

  This time the nephew counterattacked too quickly for his own comfort.

  “Naturally you feel that way—” he began, before coming to an abrupt halt.

  His wife, however, bravely advanced where angels feared to tread. “But, Aunt, you’re a special situation,” she said, her small hands fluttering in decorative apology. “Of course you had problems.”

  “And handled them magnificently,” her husband chimed in, determined to retrieve his lapse. “You got your son into Tokyo University.”

  Unfortunately his tone said that he would never understand how she had managed it.

  “I’m not talking about mixed marriage,” Haru said, calmly dismissing all this sensitivity. “I’m talking about the two-tier system.”

  “Oh, Lord, now we’re in for it,” Gene groaned in mock dismay. “This is Haru’s hobbyhorse. Just because, like all the other children, our kids spent half their day at the regular school and the other half at a cram school.”

  “I’ll do the same thing you did, Aunt,” the niece said earnestly. “After all, the crammer is necessary to get into the right high school and the right university.”

  “And then the right job,” the nephew said gravely.

  Haru was not retreating one inch.

  “That’s just it. The point of the whole system is continuing, relentless competition. But because that’s not acknowledged, the child is expected to pretend in the regular school that he’s only interested in team results. Then he goes straight to an environment that emphasizes individual results. That’s a heavy burden of pretense to lay on small children.”

  Gene was more relaxed. “But the Japanese are used to that sort of thing, Haru. They’ve been doing it a long time.”

  Haru had heard this before.

  “That’s the answer we get whenever any kind of social service program is proposed. They say it isn’t needed because the Japanese family is organized to take care of its own. But we’re already seeing grown children unable or unwilling to take in their elderly parents. And what is the suggested remedy? Building old-age colonies abroad to take advantage of the strong yen!” Her voice vibrated with scorn. “They want us to throw the elderly out of the country. We’d be worse than the Americans, and you say Japanese society is stable.”

  The niece and nephew were silent. Thatcher could appreciate their quandary. They disagreed with what they were hearing and disapproved of its being said. But while the Flemings might talk revolution, their track record was above reproach. Even Gene had been a model Japanese employee, loyal to his company until its last gasp of existence. Haru, while sighing for the serenity of a lost Japan, had racked up over twenty years as ideal wife and mother. Could the young people guarantee a comparable performance? Earlier in the evening the nephew had indicated a flicker of interest at the suggestion that his services might be valued by a more generous employer. The niece, with a year of graduate study at UCLA, was an unknown quantity. This couple might provide contradictions of their own. They might end up espousing conservatism while in fact they heeded the call of personal ambition.

  Unlikely as it seemed, it was Thatcher who became the champion of the new order.

  “You’re not being entirely fair either to Japan or to the United States,” he began.

  Haru was in no mood to mince words.

  “America treats its old people like garbage.”

  It was rare for Thatcher to hear this kind of candor from a Sloan wife, but few of them were in the position of knowing that the bank needed them more than they needed the bank.

  “Very true,” he agreed temperately. “But we didn’t always. Once, people in their sixties were taken care of by people in their forties. Now the near-old are being asked to maintain the very old. It’s happened here first, but life expectancy in Japan has jumped twenty years. Demographics are creating an entirely new problem for all of us.”

  He had played right into Haru’s hands. “Then why aren’t we doing something about it? The schools should spend a little less time turning out dedicated employees and a little more turning out responsible family members. If they don’t, we’ll end up with a generation that isn’t properly socialized— not in my definition of the term.”

  “And what is your definition?” he asked curiously.

  The indignation of her earlier remarks evaporated as she frowned over the problem of translating her concept into an idiom comprehensible to a foreigner.

  “The child has to understand that he’s part of a web that is connected to everyone with whom he has a social relationship,” she said slowly. “Sometimes he gives to that web and sometimes he takes from it, but his actions always have to maintain the web. He can’t rush off to gratify his own wishes when it means ripping the web to pieces.”

  Silently Thatcher wondered how her own extraordinary marriage fitted into these precepts, but all he said was:

  “It’s the ideal at which the individual should arrive, but it can take decades to get there.”

  “It does if he’s left to figure it out for himself,” she rejoined tartly. “But isn’t that the whole point of raising children? In America it sometimes seems as if each infant is expected to start from scratch. That’s an awful waste of experience.”

  Nobody could possibly quarrel with this conclusion, and the young couple had lost their appetite for jousting with Haru. Dinner ended with a catalog of the surprising services offered by the Scarsdale Public Libra
ry.

  Driving down from Westchester, Fleming reiterated his intention to hurry back to Tokyo.

  “Yes, I’m afraid you’ll have to curtail your vacation,” Thatcher said. “But you’ll be doing your work in England.”

  Haru was delighted to retain her London holiday, but Gene wanted details.

  “Ever since MITI accepted Kruger’s date for the Birmingham demonstration, the creditors have been in an uproar,” Thatcher said. “They’re afraid of a chain reaction too. Solletti couldn’t calm them down until I agreed to monitor what Lackawanna is up to. If I’m there keeping an eye on Kruger, I’ll need you to watch the others.”

  Chapter 17

  The Carl Kruger that America saw over its coffee and cornflakes was the Carl Kruger it had come to know and love— sturdily optimistic no matter what the problem.

  “You’ve got to realize that these are complicated situations, Helen,” he was saying to the program’s hostess. “There were reasons why some Japanese would favor our proposal and reasons why others would oppose it. We knew all that, and we expected a dogfight, but that was no excuse to back off. Where would Lackawanna be today if we folded whenever the going got tough?”

  “You may have expected a fight, but did you expect bribery and murder?” the hostess pressed, bringing them down to earth.

  “Of course not. Who would? And we didn’t like being thrown out of the country on the grounds that we were the ones responsible. When you set off for a business negotiation, you don’t think you’re being set up for a murder rap.”

  Bennet Alderman, following one of the monitors offstage, nodded approvingly. Carl was not only getting his message across; he was making it look as if Helen had forced it out of him.

  The previous day, Alderman had spent over two hours on the phone with one of the program’s researchers, whose function was to prime Helen about Kruger’s background, personal style, and newsworthiness. This exchange was an opportunity to skew the program in a favorable direction. But Alderman knew perfectly well that the final result depended on Carl Kruger’s performance, and Carl was doing a brilliant job.