Rationality, morality and free trade: U.S.-Japan trade relations in anthropological perspective

Dialectical Anthropology

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 1-30

  Applbaum, Kalman ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002038271     PISSN: 03044092     EISSN: 15730786     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1006993926398     Document Type: Review

References (97)

1. See Arjun Appadurai ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
2. Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch eds., Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
3. Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh Jones eds., Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992);
4. Roy Dilley ed., Contesting Markets. Analyses of Ideology, Discourse and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992).
5. Also see reviews by James Ferguson, "Cultural Exchange: New Developments in the Anthropology of Commodities." Cultural Anthropology 3(4) (1988), pp. 488-513,
6. and George E. Marcus, "Once More Into the Breach between Economic and Cultural Analysis," in Roger Friedland and A. F. Robertson, eds., Beyond the Marketplace. Rethinking Economy and Society (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994) pp. 331-352.
7. See, for instance, Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1991);
8. Stephen Hugh-Jones, "Yesterday's luxuries, tomorrow's necessities: business and barter in northwest Amazonia," in Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones, eds. Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 42-74;
9. Jerome M. Levi, "Commoditizmg the Vessels of Identity: Transnational Trade and the Reconstruction of Raramuri Ethnicity," Museum Anthropology 16 (1992), pp. 7-24;
10. Christopher B. Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);
11. Frederick K. Errington, and Deborah B. Gewertz Articulating Change in the "Last Unknown" (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).
12. For example, Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
13. For example, Marshall Sahlins, "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of 'The World System," in Nicholas B. Dirks et al. eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) pp. 372-411.
14. In a widely read and controversial denunciation of Japan's trade practices, James Fallows wrule: "Unless Japan is contained, therefore, several things that matter to America will be jeopardized: America's own authority to carry out its foreign policy and advance its ideals, American citizens' future prospects within the world's most powerful business firms, and also the very system of free trade that America has helped sustain since the Second World War." James Fallows, "Containing Japan," Atlantic Monthly, 263(5) (1989), pp. 40-54.
15. Stanley J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 150.
16. James Ferguson, "De-moralizing Economies: African Socialism, Scientific Capitalism and the Moral Politics of 'Structural Adjustment,'" In Sally Falk Moore ed., Moralizing States and the Ethnography of the Present (American Ethnological Series Number 5 (1993).
17. Dilley, Contesting Markets: Analyses of Ideology, Discourse and Practice.
18. Tomitaro Kitami, "A New Approach to Resolve the United States-Japan Trade Imbalance: From the Perspective of Economic Integration in the Asia-Pacific Region," World Competition: Law and Economic Review 19(1) (1995), p. 26.
19. Clyde Prestowitz, Trading Places: How America Allowed Japan to Take the Lead (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 391.
20. See Paul Krugman ed., Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986);
21. and Winfried Ruigrock, "Paradigm Crisis in International Trade Theory," Journal of World Trade 25(1) (1991), pp. 77-89.
22. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that this point is "made all the more striking since two industries-autos and auto parts-still account for the vast majority of the imbalance."
23. Bernadette Lanciaux, "Ethnocentrism in US/Japanese Trade Policy Negotiations." Journal of Economic Issues 25(2) (1991), pp. 569-580.
24. Paul Krugman, "Is the Japan Problem Over?" In R. Sato and P. Wachtel eds., Trade Friction and Economic Policy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 18.
25. This debate has extended on some occasions to other Asian economies that have developed according to the Japanese model, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand.
26. USTR stands for both the office and the individual.
27. Michael Mastanduno, "Framing the Japan Problem: The Bush Administration and the Structural Impediments Initiative." International Journal (48) (1992), p. 251.
28. Michael Mastanduno, "Framing the Japan Problem: The Bush Administration and the Structural Impediments Initiative." International Journal (Ibid., p. 244.
29. Keiretsu has been loosely translated as "cartel" or group enterprise. Two types of keiretsu referred to are production (or manufacturer') and distribution keiretsu. See Robert Cutts, "Capitalism in Japan: Cartels and Keiretsu," Harvard Business Review, July-August (1992), pp. 48-55.
30. See Arieh Goldman, "Japan's Distribution System: Institutional Structure, Internal Political Economy and Modernization," Journal of Retailing 67(2) (1991), pp. 154-183;
31. Arieh Goldman, "Evaluating the Performance of the Japanese Distribution System," Journal of Retailing 68(1) (1992), p. 11-39;
32. Takatoshi Ito and Masayoshi Murayama, "Is the Japanese Distribution System Really Inefficient?" in Paul Krugman ed., Trade with Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), pp. 1-19 173;
33. Motoshige Itoh, "The Japanese Distribution System and Access to the Japanese Market," in Krugman ed., Trade with Japan, pp. 175-189.
34. See Krugman, Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics;
35. Klaus Stegemann, "Policy Rivalry Among Industrial States: What Can We Learn from Models of Strategic Trade Policy?" International Organization 43(1) (1989), pp. 73-100;
36. and Ruigrock, "Paradigm Crisis in International Trade Theory."
37. See James Fallows, "Japan's Latest Trade War Is With Its Own Consumers," Business Month (1988) December, pp. 21-22;
38. James Fallows, "Playing by Different Rules," The Atlantic, (1989) September, pp. 22-32;
39. James Fallows, "Containing Japan," Prestowitz, Trading Places: How America Allowed Japan to Take the Lead.
40. The improvements suggested by the prefixes hyper- and supra- demonstrate that the Japanese application of anti-logic brings with it as well moral and pragmatic benefits.
41. N. Craig Smith and John A. Quelch, Ethics in Marketing (Homewood: Irwin, 1993).
42. Ruigrock, "Paradigm Crisis in International Trade Theory."
43. Karen I. Vaughn, "Invisible Hand," In John Eatwell, et al. eds., The Invisible Hand (New York: Norton, 1987), pp. 168-173.
44. Stegemann, "Policy Rivalry Among Industrial States"; Ruigrock, "Paradigm Crisis in International Trade Theory."
45. Prestowitz argues that economists on the Council of Economic Advisors are more adamantly doctrinaire than trade representatives, in their support of free trade (Prestowitz, Trading Places: How America Allowed Japan to Take the Lead, p. 395).
46. Ferguson, "De-moralizing Economies," p. 87.
47. Jerold Adams, "The Law of United States-Japan Trade Relations," Journal of World Trade 24(2) (1990) pp. 37-65.
48. Mastanduno, "Framing the Japan Problem," p. 239.
49. Adams, "The Law of United States-Japan Trade Relations."
50. By consumerism, I shall mean the cultural orientation towards consumption, as Featherstone has discussed, with the "salience of leisure and consumption activities" at the sociological, cultural, and perhaps psychological core of a mass of production and marketing activities in modern capitalist societies, in Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1991).
51. David Dreier, "Open Sashimi: The Case for Free Trade with Japan," Policy Review (64) (1993), p. 78.
52. That Dreier skids over this figure is interesting in itself, since it is consistent with the poorly publicized fact that Japan is actually the U.S.'s second largest trading partner, after Canada. Moreover, in 1994, 60 percent of the U.S.-Japan trade imbalance was attributable to the automotive sector alone.
53. Fallows, "Japan's Latest Trade War Is With Its Own Consumers," p. 21.
54. Philip Kotler, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control Seventh edition, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1991), pp. 513-20.
55. Theodore Levitt, "The Globalization of Markets," Harvard Business Review, (May/June) (1983), p. 105.
56. Ken'ichi Ohmae, "The Global Logic of Strategic Alliances," in Global Strategies (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Book, 1994), p. 111.
57. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 389.
58. A point curiously ignored in these reports is that the consumers are also producers and, therefore, for many, the outright elimination of structural impediments such as the Large Scale Retail Stores Law would also mean elimination of their current employment.
59. Paul Herbig and Frederick A. Palumbo, "Japanese Consumer Protection," Journal of Consumer Marketing 11(1) (1994), p. 13.
60. John Clammer, "Aesthetics of the Self: Shopping and Social Being in Contemporary Urban Japan," in Robert Shields ed., Lifestyle Shopping (London: Kegau Paul International, 1992), p. 204.
61. Supported by Johnny K. Johansson, "Japanese Consumers: What Foreign Marketers Should Know," International Marketing Review (Summer) (1986), pp. 37-43;
62. Joseph J. Tobia, "Introduction: Domesticating the West," in Joseph J. Tobin ed., Re-Made in Japan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 1-41;
63. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities Through Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
64. Theodore Bestor, "Tokyo Mom and Pop," Wilson Quarterly 14(4) (1990), pp. 27-33;
65. Theodore Bestor, "A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Large Impact of Japan's Small Businesses," Japan Society Newsletter: (July 1991), pp. 2-4.
66. James Fallows, by contrast, says: "Japan penalizes every consumer in the country, through grotesquely inflated prices for food and land." Nevertheless, "what makes it so intriguing is that there is almost no complaint from the victims," in Fallows, "Japan's Latest Trade War Is With Its Own Consumers," p. 23.
67. Tobin "Introduction," p. 20.
68. Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in Appadurai ed., The Social Life of Things, pp. 64-94.
69. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods. (New York. W. W. Norton, 1979).
70. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 1967).
71. Clammer, "Aesthetics of the Self," p. 207.
72. Millie R. Creighton, "The Depaato: Merchandising the West while Selling Japaneseness," in Tobin, ed. Re-Made in Japan, p. 45.
73. Mauss, The Gift, p.63.
74. Rice remained inalienable, according to Ohnuki-Tierney, insofar as it was intentionally not used as a medium of exchange with non-Japanese (Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self, p. 70).
75. Joy Hendry, "The Ritual of the Revolving Towel," in Jan van Bremen ed., Ceremony and Ritual in Japan (London:Kegan Paul International, 1995), p. 212
76. Parry and Bloch, Money and the Morality of Exchange, p. 9.
77. It is called "White Day" because women return white chocolate for the brown chocolate they received two weeks earlier on Valentine's Day.
78. Brian Moeran and Lise Skov, "Cindarella Christmas: Kitsch, Consumerism, and Youth in Japan," in Daniel Miller ed., Unwrapping Christmas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 123.
79. Millie R. Creighton, "'Edutaining' Children: Consumer and Gender Socialization in Japanese Marketing," Ethnology 33(1) (1994), p. 47.
80. Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 45.
81. Paul Noguchi, Delayed Departures, Overdue Arrivals: Industrial Famialism and the Japanese National Railways (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990).
82. Nelson Graburn, "To Pray, Pay and Play: The Cultural Structure of Japanese Domestic Tourism," (Series B no. 26. Aix-en-Provence, 1983).
83. Jennifer Robertson, Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 33-38.
84. Brian Moeran, Lost Innocence: Folk Craft Potters of Onta, Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
85. Scott Clark, "The Japanese Bath: Extraordinarily Ordinary," in Tobin ed., Re-Made in Japan, pp. 89-105.
86. Theodore Bestor, "Rediscovering Shitamachi: Subculture, Class, and Tokyo's 'Traditional' Urbanism," in R. Rotenberg and G. McDonogh eds., The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space (Westport: Bergen and Garvey, 1993), pp. 47-60.
87. Kalman Applbaum, "Marriage with the Proper Stranger: Arranged Marriage in Metropolitan Japan," Ethnology 34(1) (1995), pp. 37-51.
88. This is to be distinguished from the expression ethical marketing, which is when a company promotes a positive image for itself by publicizing its "ethical" activities, for example, protecting the environment or donating a fixed percentage of profits to charity.
89. Fallows, "Containing Japan."
90. Prestowitz, Trading Places.
91. Herbig and Palumbo, "Japanese Consumer Protection," p. 12
92. John F. Sherry, Mary Ann McGrath, and Sidney J. Levy "Monadic Giving: Anatomy of Gifts Given to the Self," In John F. Sherry ed., Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995).
93. Ronald P. Dore, 1983 "Goodwill and the Spirit of Market Capitalism," British Journal of Sociology (34) (1983), p. 470.
94. With regard even to imports, the inaccurateness of this perception has been strengthened by David Vogel, who has shown that Japanese consumer groups themselves are at the forefront of opposition to imports. (David Vogel, "Consumer Protection and Protectionism in Japan," Journal of Japanese Studies 18(1) (1992), p. 119-154.
95. Parsons, Talcott "An Approach to the Sociology of Knowledge," Transactions of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology (1959), p. 25-49.
96. Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self, p. 139.
97. A path not taken in this paper, to probably a similar set of conclusions, is an investigation of how foreign goods are received in Japan. Much has been written on this topic. This theme has theoretical interest because the assignment of meanings to foreign objects also makes visible the designation of meanings to objects within the local categories. Foreign goods are sequestered, enclaved, and sometimes consecrated for particular uses in Japan into the moral market, or just the exotic market, the two, in a classificatory sense, being analogous. Creighton goes so far as to suggest that department stores, "in their parallel offerings of Western and Japanese goods and services [are providing] the contrast through which Japanese define their cultural identity" (Creighton, "The Depaato). This theme of the Japanese defining self in reference to the "transcendental other" as Ohnuki-Tierney puts it, has been developed in Japanese studies regarding a much wider range of topics than merely consumer goods and services, but the suggestion is intriguing indeed. It suggests that in Japan, too, though the Economy can not, as yet, as Sahlins ("Cosmulogies of Capitalism") and Marcus ("Once More Into the Breach between Economic and Cultural Analysis,")described for the West, be "the major space ... for the valorization of universal reason, systemic order, and formal knowledge," nevertheless, integration of Japanese marketers and consumers into the global marketplace, through unavoidable competition and the broadcasting of foreign images of prosperity, will have its cultural consequences.