The Japanese tourist survival guide: Undead tropes of the Pacific War in contemporary New Zealand literature

Abstract

During the 1980s Japanese corporations acquired a strong foothold in the American market, prompting media commentators to speculate that American society was being undermined by an encroaching Japanese “takeover”. Employing a comparative approach, I place New Zealand source material in conversation with an American cultural context in order to expose the mobility and malleability of Japanophobic discourses. New Zealand culture provides a basis for comparison in that the nation contained no hi-tech or car manufacturing industries, and yet writers there took issue with the presence of Japanese tourists and their increasing purchasing power. Writers Keri Hulme and Vivienne Plumb portrayed the Japanese as vampires and body-snatchers, while Ian Middleton suggested that the Japanese were seeking an escape from modern culture into an “untouched”, pre-modern environment. These features set New Zealand writing apart from the thriller genre adopted by Michael Crichton, Steven Schlossstein, and Tom Clancy. But in spite of these differences, a crosscurrent runs through both the New Zealand and American sources, making them more alike than not — that is, they all hark back to the wartime tropes of the Pacific War, which were reinstated within the context of the 1980s.

The period of Japan’s rise to the status of economic giant (circa late 1970s to 1994), and the news coverage that accompanied it, has receded somewhat as a topic of humanities scholarship. As China continues to “shake the world”, the idea of Japan as “Number One” increasingly takes on the characteristics of a preface, less interesting in itself than as a harbinger to the more “momentous” changes now ensuing. This near-total eclipse follows on the attention devoted by economists and historians of economics to such matters as the industrial production facilities, global trade flows, and market economy of mainland China — topics that, by all rights, need hardly be conjoined to research conducted in Anglophone or comparative literature studies, but which nonetheless enact an interpellation through the ubiquity of the discourses surrounding them. To those scholars who take an interest in the redeployment during the 1980s of propaganda images hitherto associated with the Pacific War, the marginalization of “Japan Inc.” as an area of study appears premature, in large part because there has been little accompanying recognition outside the world of academic publications — in the wider communities of fiction writing and journalism, more especially — of the provenance or effect of the tropes that came to bear upon Japanese nationals, as well as Asian American communities, during the period in question. The rise of China and increasingly vocal “China watchers”, the latter with their own set of tropes and images just as deserving of study, has inadvertently brought about the vivisepulture of Japanophobic discourses within the world of fiction writing — the live burial, in other words, of a host of representations before a full confrontation and leave-taking could take place.

In what follows, I shall revisit the theme of “Japanese invasion” as it arose within New Zealand national culture during the 1980s, the source material of which has received scant attention compared to that of the United States. Academic studies that put these two national cultures in conversation are likewise hard to come by, and yet the basis for comparison is no less sound than — indeed, in nowise different from — taking British author Sax Rohmer’s portrayals of Chinese to better illustrate the ways in which turn-of-the-twentieth-century American writers such as Jack London figured the “yellow peril” (Sohn, 2008: 5). Such comparisons, by now quite routine, go some way toward internationalizing the body of Sinophobic literatures upon which scholars may draw but also reinforce a transatlantic modality that leaves transpacific studies employing Australasian contexts looking somehow “marginal”. The insights to be gleaned from an American–Australasian “exchange” will, I trust, be evident once this article draws to a close, though a dedicated reflection on the potential of Australasian sources to advance or complicate an understanding of American material must await a future occasion.

The 1980s was an anxious decade for many business and labour union communities in the United States who felt, rightly or wrongly, that the heft and clout of Japanese corporations, measured both in purchasing power and product quality, would raise unemployment levels and outcompete domestic industries. In the world of literature, tales of American industries falling prey to Japanese acquisitions were informed by real-life instances of “takeover” by Japanese multinational corporations, Sony’s 1989 purchase of Columbia Pictures Entertainment for $3.4 billion being a case in point, and also by the increasing popularity of Japanese motor vehicles such as the iconic Honda Accord (Ingrassia, 2012: 191−2). Writers of paperback thrillers, such as Michael Crichton, Steven Schlossstein, Clive Custler, and Tom Clancy, noted with alarm the rising market share of Japanese products in the United States (McKay, 2013b). Their publications served as rallying cries that invested heavily in the image of Americans as sleepwalkers headed toward disaster (coded as the industrial, financial, political, and moral bankruptcy of the United States) (Buruma, 2001; Hicks, 2009: 149). But one did not have to reside in an industrial economy to see the ever-present “Made in Japan” product labels and corporate logos as menacing declarations of a de-facto “takeover” (Schodt, 1994: 59). Far-flung, underpopulated, and predominantly pastoral, New Zealand was not the sort of place where Japanese corporations were likely to inspire envy among the general population, and yet, as I shall shortly reveal, Japanese nationals became subject to a “poetics of exclusion” much as they did in the United States (McNeill, 2009).

The accusations levelled against the Japanese, dubbed “Japan Panic” by some scholars (Robins & Morley, 1991), found purchase in both national cultures but were also finely tuned to the localism of each country. In the United States, arguments that decried Japanese business practices were to some extent counterbalanced by attempts to draw lessons for the future (Minchin, 2012), though the tone in any event reflected a profound shock that the former enemy of the Second World War should have nurtured its private sector so successfully. The salient point was that, in the wake of the Pacific War, American commentators had expected Japanese industrialists to market their products abroad — but only in the sphere of Japan’s former colonial possessions. ¹ As the anthropologist Ruth Benedict put it immediately after the war, “Japan, if she does not include militarization in her budget, can, if she will, provide for her own prosperity before many years, and she could make herself indispensable in the commerce of the East” (Benedict, 1989/1946: 314). The war generation was entirely unprepared for the possibility of a Japanese “comeback” that would make itself felt in their domestic market. ² When the moment dawned it was numerated as the transition of the United States from creditor to debtor nation and brought with it a crisis of faith: suddenly the bedrock of U.S. national identity, in economic terms at least, no longer appeared especially unique, or even proficient. ³ The writer James A. Michener, stunned at Japan’s rise as an export-driven industrial economy, confessed his incredulity in terms that echoed the sentiments of many fellow Americans:

I am ashamed to confess that I witnessed an economic miracle in Japan but failed at the time to appreciate its significance. When I landed there after the war, taxicabs were Rube Goldberg affairs at which we Americans laughed: crude, beat-up bundles of junk carrying a load of charcoal in the back and a small round stove in which to burn it so that the gases would propel the taxi. Later there were the famous sixty-yen cabs (basic fare sixteen cents), which were no bigger than a child’s pram. Made by Toyota, they were called Toyopets and were both dangerous and ridiculous.

But as soon as practicable after the war Toyota produced a car — mostly tin, it seemed — that did provide space and run smoothly, but had someone told me then: “Jim, in a few years these Toyotas are going to drive Detroit right into the ground,” I would have had him certified as a nut. I failed to anticipate the economic miracle that the Japanese automobile industry was about to create. I had not fully realized that hard work, inventive genius and skilled management could produce reliable products that all the world would want to purchase. (Michener, 1992: 306–7)

Culturally speaking, the question had become a matter of where to locate the foundations of U.S. national (and global) power when a foreign (and non-Western) nation appeared to be surpassing the United States under the banner of capitalism (Morley & Robins, 1995: 160).

In New Zealand’s case, the rising number of Japanese tourists and “salarymen” was the first time that most civilians had experienced their might-have-been-conquerors of the Second World War as approachable subjects (though about forty Japanese women had gone to New Zealand as brides of Korean War servicemen). Some artists, among them two short story writers, Keri Hulme and Vivienne Plumb, responded with a gothic mode of representation, literalizing the threat of a “takeover” in individual encounters. Under their pens, the Japanese tourist emerges as a protean subject that ebbs and flows, shifting between the visible and the invisible, and squeezing New Zealanders out of their very bodies in the process. Around the same time too, another New Zealand author, Ian Middleton, took note of the increased visibility of Japanese tourists and responded somewhat differently. Middleton preferred to write onto the Japanese a “travel” mentality — that is, one of self-education — that countered the notion of tourists as bestial. In his novel, Reiko (1990), the presence of an inquisitive rather than acquisitive drive in Japanese travellers returned a sense of “self-possession” to New Zealanders, since it implied that theirs was a country with something of value that could intrigue, charm, or beguile the newcomer while remaining safely and tantalizingly “out of reach”. Just what New Zealand possessed that could command such interest was, at first glance, admittedly hard to see, a quandary that led Middleton to alchemize deficit into asset: decidedly underdeveloped by Japanese standards, New Zealand was to become a safe-haven of anti-modernism (Wilcox, 1985).

Mr. Moto “does” New Zealand

The most alarmist American rhetoric restaged old arguments about Japanese expansionism, drawing upon the icon of Pearl Harbor to assert that the spate of corporate acquisitions amounted to another “sneak attack”, albeit shifted onto the plane of economics (Moeller, 1996: 36). Part and parcel with this was the racial profiling of the enemy in animal terms, suggesting that the deep-rooted instinctive artifice epitomized in Pearl Harbor was ineradicably and irrepressibly representative of the Japanese people as a whole (Rosenberg, 2003: 54). That New Zealand armed forces had not been a victim of the original “day of infamy” did not necessarily render the rhetoric inoperable “Down Under”, as a legacy of borrowings from North American newspaper cartoons attests to the capacity of anti-Asian sentiments to bridge continents (Ip & Murphy, 2005). But to fully deploy the Pearl Harbor referent, one had to imagine New Zealand as imminent or recurrent victim, and herein a nagging caveat remained: to wit, what targets did the country have to warrant such an attack? Up until 1973, the United Kingdom had guaranteed a market for New Zealand exports, these being dairy, agricultural, and forest products in the main, and although British accession to the EEC forced New Zealand to diversify its customer base, this did not translate into a shift from agribusiness to the high technology and/or entertainment industries so desirable to the Japanese. Farms remained the chief source of tradable goods, which effectively meant that New Zealand possessed few objects likely to attract Japanese attention, and likewise suggested that the introduction of competitively priced Japanese imports would not force New Zealand businesses into bankruptcy. ⁴ As it turned out, there were noticeable benefits to the increasing economic ties with Japan, not the least of which were affordable and reliable second-hand cars, offloaded from container ships, that swiftly consigned the previous generation to an overdue retirement. ⁵ So popular did the new cars become that one New Zealand hard rock band changed its name from the Trinkets to the Datsuns, a relatively transparent sign of the recognition value attached to Japanese marques.

In the United States, Japanese products similarly acquired reputation, but there the mood was less festive, largely because anyone who purchased a Honda, a Mitsubishi, or a Toyota had made the decision not to purchase a Buick, Chrysler, or Ford. That added up to job losses on the assembly line, and the grudges people nurtured manifested in June 1982 when two unemployed workers beat a Chinese American to death, in part because they thought him Japanese and linked him to the decline of the Detroit auto industry (Iino, 1994; Yu & Ngai, 2002). Given the disparity between these case studies, one a harmless makeover, the other a murder, it is tempting to plot social responses on a line graph featuring a sliding scale of acquiescence pegged against the health of domestic industries. But although the correlation undoubtedly stands, it does not suffice to explain away less neighbourly New Zealand responses to the Japanese. ⁶

In Australia, as in the United States, novelists drew upon specific examples of business trends, leaving no doubt as to the author’s stance in respect to them (Kato, 2008: 169). ⁷ But one did not require a cache of ready-to-order leitmotifs to feed the engine of alarmism; New Zealand writers would prove that the fact of Japanese power was sufficient in itself, particularly when melancholy eyes looked back at the self-enclosed socio-economic environment of pre-1973. Patrick Evans has identified in this moment a key turning-point in New Zealand’s approach to the world:

Now, suddenly, the country was being defrosted, its citizens socially, psychologically and economically exposed to the air, abandoned by the mother country to an indifferent and newly challenging world in which its competitors were unfamiliar nations from outside the old colonial matrix. (Evans, 2007: 16)

Rather unfortunately, this “defrost cycle” coincided with the increased visibility of Japanese tourists and “salarymen”, whose bulging wallets made them the bitter personification of a nation on a far surer economic footing. Also relevant was the complete absence of a generation of prewar Japanese immigrants or their descendants living in New Zealand, whose presence might have gone some way toward “cushioning” the social encounters during the period in question. In the aftermath of Commodore Perry’s opening of Japan in 1853–1854, Japanese sojourners and immigrants had mainly looked to the United States as a prospective destination, giving some thought to Brazil as an alternative but hardly any to New Zealand (McNeil, 1997). When war broke out between the United States and the Empire of Japan, the U.S. government set up the War Relocation Authority in order to place people of Japanese ancestry in a series of internment camps. But to speak of an “equivalent” episode in New Zealand is difficult because internment there took place on a far smaller scale and mainly involved Japanese nationals who had been resident on Fiji and Tonga. No historical study or novelization of this episode emerged during the 1970s or 1980s, nor were there any ethnic Japanese members of the war generation or their descendants living in New Zealand to speak of it, and thus the arrival of Japanese tourists and “salarymen” would have struck their hosts as an altogether fresh social encounter (McKay, 2013a). Responding to the presence of Japanese tourists, New Zealand writers eschewed corporations as sites of contestation and infestation, preferring instead the human-to-human relations of the body politic as a terrain in which the weaker (New Zealand) vessel falls into the hands of an all-consuming foreign agent.

Exemplary among these gothic “possessions” is Keri Hulme’s short story, “Kaibutsu-San”, the title of which (“Mr. Monster”) suggests that the formal titles of everyday life are but a pose, behind which lie innate aggressions or regressions known to both predator and prey, yet only dominant under certain conditions. Described as someone who “bows like a pocket knife folding” (a diminutive reference to size but suggestive of cutting ability, concealment, and perhaps an outwardly respectable manner), the Japanese tourist occupies a steadily engulfing textual space as the story progresses (Hulme, 1985: 460). ⁸ Undergoing the opposite process are two Māori larrikins who become literally miniaturized by the end, but start out in a position of confidence, expecting to enrich themselves at the drunken tourist’s expense with an easy game of cards. As the card game progresses, their plan bears fruit: the man steadily loses his money, all the while appearing too inebriated to comprehend his position, until only his briefcase remains as collateral. One might read into the exchange a microcosm of how international trade and business agreements play out when the Japanese are involved — that is, as a succession of incentives leading up to an impoverished adjournment — but Hulme is more concerned with the nature of her creation than with ties to current affairs. We see the monster’s purpose at the end when he quickly wins the game, having goaded his hapless opponents into gambling everything they have, including their bodies and selves:

“Keep the money,” he says. His face is becoming leaner. “Keep your patches and gear.” He has stopped sweating. “You can even keep the glasses.” He points the handle of his bag at us. We are sitting stunned, mouths O, Mi’s hands limp as though the life has gone from them. “I only want everything from you.” Somehow his teeth are more pointed than before. There is a flash and click like someone took a photograph. Immediately I feel something essential, vital, drain out of my belly, and Mi feels it too because he screams and the cards spray out of his hands.

[…]

The Teeth smiles suavely, one last time.

“So sorry,” he says, and is back among the Friday night crowd and lost. (1985: 463−4)

In this passage, the Japanese tourist is reduced to the three principal icons of briefcase−camera−teeth, each one of which comprises a means to absorb or contain, thereby signalling that the roles of predator and prey have undergone a reversal. ⁹ But the meaning of these images stretches outside the narrative, triggering associative values and interlinking with historical nodal points. That the camera, beloved of tourist groups especially, should act as trapdoor to a portable prison suggests a tourist gaze in operation, one that captures people’s “essence” and leaves a hollow shell in its wake. John Urry intended “the gaze” as a term that gets to the bottom of what forces, social, cultural, economic, or otherwise, impel societies to examine others and how this reflects upon society back home, but Hulme’s text figures New Zealanders as objects, not practitioners of the gaze (Urry, 2001: 2). Thus we cannot approach the text as a means to understand New Zealand society in any comprehensive sense, and the tourist gaze stands only for the acknowledgement that host societies undergo alterations at the behest of those who approach them as objects of consumption.

Hulme’s story manifests an awareness of this trend and conjoins it to a set of images with a long bloodline, foremost among them being the portrayal of Japanese as vampires, a publicly-endorsed trope during the Pacific War, as evidenced in the “Tokio Kid” series of American posters, each one of which featured a Japanese face sporting incisors and pointed ears. The tourist-vampire’s highly ironic apology is also a throwback to the conniving, smooth-tongued, frequently bespectacled Japanese villain-figures of monochrome Hollywood cinema, and more specifically to the Mr. Moto series created by American author John P. Marquand. ¹⁰ What emerges, “disinterred”, as it were, from the vault of undead wartime stereotypes is therefore nothing more than a means to dehumanize the Japanese, and indeed the story could sit just as well in a 1940s context (Hollinger, 1989). ¹¹ Only a persistent strain of anti-tourist sentiment saves Hulme’s work from a charge of anachronistic pastiche, if barely, since it covers the vitriol of her Japanophobia with a veneer of genteel distaste for tourist behaviour as a whole, allowing readers to give her the benefit of the doubt, should they so wish. ¹²

Somewhat less vindictive is Vivienne Plumb’s “The Wife Who Spoke Japanese in her Sleep” (1993), which likewise involves a “takeover bid”, albeit of an epidemiological rather than a technological turn. Here the possession is voluntary and gradual rather than swift and coerced, and examines the “other within” (domestically and psychologically) rather than a soul-gathering confidence-man without. Addressing the improbability of gothic themes situated within New Zealand houses, film researcher Misha Kavka asserts that the gothic can be brought home here, too, in any number of Kiwi visual and literary tropes where an undead history meets unsuccessful efforts at its repression. Indeed, however short our past, it seems curiously prone to gothic metaphorisation; however short our history, it seems particularly undead. (Kavka, 2006: 57)

As with most allusions to dark histories in the Gothic NZ (2006) volume, Kavka is concerned with Māori-Pākehā relations in colonial times, but her observation as to the failure of Kiwi households to repress history does as well for the leftover relics of Pacific War propaganda and, in Plumb’s case, the exhumation of an early trope of Cold War fiction, namely the covert alien parasite whose unstoppable reproduction stands analogously for assumptions underpinning the Red Scare in the United States. The “body snatchers” of Jack Finney’s 1955 novel infiltrated their new environs in gradual, measured steps, ensuring that those who underwent the compulsory metamorphosis resembled their original selves almost perfectly. Textually, this “brainwashing” process takes place with only minimal reference to supernatural powers, it being important to retain the human dimension as much as possible, the better to convince readers of the plausibility of the scenario. Life remains quiet and predictable, features that make clear how ill-prepared communities are to cope with the opening of an alien frontier in their own backyards. ¹³

Plumb’s short story is a condensed version of the same state of affairs, coalescing around the figure of Honey, a bland and vacuous housewife, who discovers that she harbours another self, that of a Japanese matriarch whose nocturnal skills take the form of prophetic conversations. Each self is content to remain in the Kiwi household, which becomes a context that measures the course of the changes and their effect upon Honey’s husband, Howard:

• “Did I do it?” she asks.

• “Yes,” says Howard. His voice is low. “They were very pleased. You were very successful. Miss Florica thinks you could help even more people.”

• “I see,” says Honey. “Tell her she can have thirty percent.”

• She turns and goes back to the bedroom. Howard comes inside. He’s surprised. Honey seems so different, so business-minded, it’s not like her. He frowns at the lock, pulls the chain across and slips it into its tiny slot. Tomorrow he’ll ring Miss Florica and make her an offer. (1993: 32–3)

Unlike the body snatchers, whose “snatching” brings with it a declining work ethic, Honey becomes enhanced, supercharged we might say, by her takeover. She is more productive, useful, and certainly more interesting, but, like the body snatchers, the process flushes her out emotionally and renders human relationships purely functional. Howard is the casualty here, representing as he does the unsophisticated Kiwi “bloke” who, bewildered but curious, lets events take their course. The forces that power Honey’s changes are never revealed, but whether they involve pathology, reincarnation, or alien intervention matters less than the discord that arises when the alter ego assumes dominance. As with “Kaibutsu-San”, cash flow serves as a digestive aid, facilitating the consumption of the New Zealand “vessel” until it all but disappears from view, and again the ending takes on a grim aspect when Howard, no longer cost-effective, is buried beneath the foundations of a Japanese garden. Though the results are various, the Japanese component thereby overlays itself upon both characters, consigning them to the rubbish bin of history. ¹⁴

Hulme and Plumb are both concerned with the passage of bodies, symbolically associated with the health of the nation, into depersonalized, excommunicated realms that render normal lines of communication unrecoverable. The “alien” Japanese body controls this mutation process, benefiting from the final “possession”, and conducting business with an efficiency that leaves no question as to its jurisdiction. Only the deployment of an alternative system of knowledge, negating or going beyond the monster–alien’s mastery over commerce and possession, offered a way for Kiwi “hosts” to survive the encounter. ¹⁵ Such was the route that Auckland-based author Ian Middleton adopted in Reiko (1990), a novel that stands as a companion to two prior publications, Faces of Hachiko (1984) and Sunflower (1986), each of which examines the lives of white expatriates in Japan, though Reiko stands apart in that it balances the journey of a New Zealander to Japan with a Japanese honeymoon couple going the opposite way. Middleton has the distinction of being the first New Zealand writer to take Japan as both topic and setting, and despite a few telltale weaknesses common to expatriates who mistakenly assume that cultural differences offer sufficient creative inspiration in themselves (Richie, 1997; Marrouchi, 2013: 2), his novel avoids overt expressions of Japanophobia. It also manages to complicate portrayals of Japanese tourists by matching the stereotypes associated with them to another set of stereotypes associated with New Zealand.

In the novel’s Japan-based section, Middleton initiates this process by portraying the Japanese as victims rather than beneficiaries of their nation’s work ethic, which leaves them lost in a built environment whose hold over them supersedes human relations. Thus Satomi, a disaffected housewife, confesses an outright fear of the Tokyo landscape; Kazuo, a student, sees only a dizzying speed about him; and Reiko’s mother holds up the hope of “normal” marriage for her son as the one remaining point of stability in her life. The balm to this chaotic world is Andrew Spellman, a New Zealander who, as his name suggests, possesses a magic that the corporate world lacks (Ireland, 1990: 9). Not a spell-caster so much as a lifter of spells, he sees through the façade of Japanese capitalism and disturbs the people he meets with his endearing “naturalness”. Middleton matches this figure with Reiko, a woman of impulsive, emotive qualities, latently in touch with her instinctive self, and the continuous cross-referencing between the natural and the sexual that underpins their romance has the effect of conflating these qualities, so that the invocation of one automatically implies the other. Through this strategy, romance becomes a path that leads to a critique of the modern, as we see when Spellman finds himself alienated by the Tokyo landscape: On the other side, as Andrew took the narrow street toward Shibuya, his thoughts turned to Reiko, unchanging Reiko […] Her image banished in a flash the tensions, the crowding steel and concrete, the emissions. He felt flesh and blood again, alert. He moved on freely down the narrow street. (1990: 55)

Built into such passages is a dualism that contrasts work/urbanization/absence with romance/pastoralism/attendance, a rigid structure that has led at least one scholar to dismiss the work as too predictable (Jones, 1994: 71). The dualistic component is indeed likely to disappoint, particularly if one hopes to find in Spellman something besides a conceited valorization of New Zealand identity. We have seen, however, that the economic muscle of Japan and the confidence with which its corporations acquired overseas assets brought increased attention from the American media, and New Zealanders also turned to Japan, fearfully, as in Hulme and Plumb’s portrayals, but also with anticipation that the encounter could provide important business models (Campbell, 1987). The novel’s dualism is steeped in — or rather, resistant to — the corporate discourse of its time, and is less a manifestation of New Zealand triumphalism than a hurried retreat to familiar cultural ground in the face of unattainable economic ideals. This is an offshoot of, or perhaps a deviation from, what literary scholar Christopher Connery has termed “Pacific Rim Discourse”, the content of which allowed Americans to accept the rise of a third power in a hitherto bipolar world through imagining a spatially abstract, nonlinear “Rim” that transcended teleological definitions of socio-economic development. As Connery puts it: “The Rim was a perfect image for a centeredness with no central power” (Connery, 1994: 34). That Japan and the United States were modern nations was never in dispute, but the degree to which the development of one surpassed the other led to the need for Pacific Rim Discourse as an ideological panacea. In New Zealand’s case, by contrast, comparative economic or industrial measurement led to a sense of laggardly, even embarrassing underperformance. Kazuo bluntly advances this conclusion: “Your country is sleeping. It lets the rest of the world pass it by. I never saw so many old cars on the roads, so many people moving about so slowly” (Middleton, 1990: 62). Rather than situating New Zealand society alongside Japan’s, which would necessitate a retort, Middleton imagines a condition of satisfactory underdevelopment within New Zealand and has fun with the oxymoron this presents to Kazuo. This depiction, then, is not anti-teleological in the way that Pacific Rim Discourse is, but rather anti-modern — that is, it does not harness two or more countries together as frontrunners, instead preferring to grant Japanese society its lead position while questioning the benefits to such an extent that the poles within the teleology become reversed.

If anti-modernism comprises a counteractant sufficient to upend Japanese pretensions to superiority, its epicentre necessitated a stock of imagery outside the nexus of urban living and personal enrichment. Halfway through the novel Middleton alludes to this source with the fable of a Japanese child who, unable to speak properly, discovers his voice in a New Zealand forest, a place of magical curative properties (1990: 69–71). The idea of forest and wilderness standing against the conjoined worlds of urbanism and materialism is hardly unique to New Zealand, but perhaps only there is the dyad stretched to encompass an entire country (New Zealand as “untouched”), so that even city-dwellers can imagine their land as unspoiled (Bell, 1996: 34). Middleton shows some awareness of this fallacy, but is not averse to wielding it as a means to portray the Japanese as hopelessly tarnished, an idea that emerges when a honeymoon couple play out the rediscovery of their natural, earthbound selves within New Zealand forests. ¹⁶ New Zealand thereby becomes a site of restoration rather than possession and the ordinarily problematic tourists become refashioned as harmless nature lovers whose observations confirm Japan’s desperate position:

If a comparison could be made, Hisao thought, between the destinies of people in Japan and the farm animals in New Zealand, the main difference would be that in Japan when the workers were no longer of use they were pensioned off; the sheep on the other hand, at the end of their productive life, were consumed as food. Choice hardly entered the picture, so in either case it was much the same in the end. […] Standing there holding Mutsumi’s hand, Hisao felt the surge of the blood in his veins, the cold wet sand sucking at his feet. He looked again to the horizon, toward the place where this moment was born. He felt tiny, humble and, at the same instant, almost unbearably aware of the stripped-down self and its link with sea and sky. (1990: 144–6)

The spectacle of a solitary Japanese couple drawing wisdom from the New Zealand wilderness may appear somewhat peculiar when set beside Hulme’s vampire tourist, but in fact the landscape, traditionally a means by which settlers naturalized their place in an “empty” land, remains a sublime construction familiar through the earliest travel writing (Dyson, 1996: 57). The Japanese, in other words, see as (white) New Zealanders see, and even “go bush” (avoiding larger groups of tourists and venturing “off the beaten track”), following in the footsteps of another established tradition in New Zealand literature (Ross, 2008: 1). Rather than “capturing” land and people with cameras and prophecy, the honeymooners are themselves caught up in an established mode of perception that tames and personalizes them on terms preferential to New Zealand anti-modernism. Their comments on the landscape are one route toward this end, and another way emerges when they start belittling their fellow countrymen and snubbing their vulgar practices. Preferring to style themselves “travellers”, they deploy a longstanding dichotomy that emphasizes hard-won knowledge over the indulgent whimsy of tourism (Leed, 1991: 10). Hisao and Mutsumi are intent on learning something, and in the process they provide reassurance to readers that New Zealand’s national identity, stamped onto and drawn from the natural world, is sufficient to put the Japanese “in their place”. In short, the Japanese become complicit in propagating an ideology that reinforces New Zealand’s national self-image, and while the result is not Japanophobic in the strictest meaning of the word, the hoops Middleton makes his characters jump through arc around the same topic that Hulme and Plumb portrayed more directly.

Questions as to why Americans reacted so defensively to the acquisition of domestic industries during the 1980s have tended toward banal economic iterations: Japanese corporations bought too many high-profile U.S. companies or otherwise cornered too much of the market for motor vehicles, semiconductors, and hi-tech commodities. ¹⁷ Thus it stands to reason, so the thinking goes, that other foreign powers would have aroused just as much chagrin had they achieved equal or higher rates of success, and that cultural determinants — the raw fact, to put it bluntly, that the Japanese were the actors on this occasion — had little enough to do with the final picture. The simplest way of refuting this reductionism is to call attention to the greater investment made by European industries in the United States during the 1980s, and then ask why Japan in particular should have carried the burden of disdain (Locke, 2009: 83). As a former owner of both German and Japanese cars, John Updike’s recollections go some way toward illustrating the double standards that were common to the era:

Years ago, at the height of the crisis in which Japanese imports were devouring our domestic market like sharks at the belly of a whale, I had vowed never to buy a Japanese car. But my wife’s sewing circle insisted that the only solution to our driveway problem was an all-wheel-drive Subaru. Every patriotic bone in my body screaming, I was dragged into the orbit of the rising sun. Our Subaru skimmed up the driveway just as my wife’s consultants had said it would, but otherwise it was as glamorous as a breadbox. The propaganda about Japanese cars proved true: they rarely needed repair. We replaced our third Audi with a Japanese version of (as the dealers delicately put it) “near-luxury,” an Infiniti; we have propped up the staggering Japanese economy and added several former Detroit assemblers to the welfare rolls. My fifty-year ride on rubber tires has become a guilt trip. (Updike, 2007: 90–1)

Rather than dwelling upon double standards, however, this article has taken a similarly interrogative but more hypothetical approach, arguing that antipathies toward Japan thrived irrespective of whether or not corporate acquisitions figured in the news of the day. One might frame this analysis in comparative dialogic terms. How would New Zealanders have responded had a corporation (say, on a scale comparable to that of CBS Records in 1988) been located in their country — of such size, that is, as to make the prospect of Japanese ownership a topic of national concern? Conversely, how would Americans have felt had their country possessed no large-scale industry at all, leaving only tourism as a likely mode of contact? The source material underpinning my analysis suggests that, whether the industrial base of the host society was agrarian or technological, Japanese visitors became the objects of a literary response that demonized them or, in the case of Ian Middleton’s writing, dressed them up as Europeanized adventurers in order to render their identity more acceptable. We can therefore respond to the foregoing questions with measured confidence and say that, in all probability, the New Zealand literary response would have differed little from that of the United States; nor would American reactions have deviated much from their New Zealand counterparts had their land been little more than sparsely populated prairies and virgin forest.

A separate consideration of the national cultures of the United States and New Zealand permits one to observe the formation and progression of Japanophobia, but its contours and particulars show up more vividly through comparison; and the 1980s comprises a suitable decade in which to situate a case study, for it was then that “Japan Panic” reached its zenith in both national cultures, “possessing” and tormenting fiction writers with images of a conquest that was always on the brink of taking place — until, that is, Japan’s economic “bubble” burst and the discourse of a new economic superpower of the future substituted China for Japan. ¹⁸ In the wake of these latter developments, the tropes and ideologies brought to bear upon “Japan Inc.” from Second World War propaganda underwent interment, leaving only the imagery of assembly-line “robot” personnel and other technocentric vocabularies for reanimation (Huang, 2008: 23–4). As for the literary productions left over from the preceding decade, most scholars are unlikely to lament the decline of a body of material so obviously didactic in nature, though one does encounter the occasional passage in which the politics and perspective of the author have not intruded too far into the text. As a closing example, here is an excerpt from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel A Pale View of the Hills (1982) in which the protagonist recalls a mediated exchange between a young Japanese schoolboy and schoolgirl:

• I asked: “What does Akira-San want to do when he grows up?”

• “Akira, tell the lady what you’re going to become.”

• “Head Director of Mitsubishi Corporation!”

• “His father’s firm,” his mother explained. “Akira’s already very determined.”

• “Yes, I see,” I said, smiling. “How wonderful.”

• “Who does your father work for?” the boy asked Mariko.

• “Now, Akira, don’t be too inquisitive, it’s not nice.” The woman turned to Sachiko again. “A lot of boys his age are still saying they want to be policemen or firemen. But Akira’s wanted to work for Mitsubishi since he was much younger.”

• “Who does your father work for?” the boy asked again. This time his mother, instead of intervening, looked towards Mariko expectantly.

• “He’s a zoo-keeper,” said Mariko.

• For a brief moment, no one spoke. Curiously, the answer seemed to humble the boy, and he sat back on his bench with a sulky expression. (1982: 116–7).

This quick-fire exchange might almost serve as an abstract of the cultural productions that emerged in the wake of “Japan Panic”. The requisite actors familiar to the period are both present, namely the obnoxious Japanese salaryman-in-the-making and, as a foil, the detached commentator who refuses to fall into deferential modes of behaviour. But Akira and Mariko are children whose exchange terminates quickly and without the need for an expatriate subjectivity in order to diversify. Instead of representing something “essentially” Japanese, therefore, the passage is merely a passing — possibly rather dismissive — nod on Ishiguro’s part to the discourses prevalent at the time of writing.