Over the past twenty and more years the campaign against racism has reached fever pitch, sometimes going to the quite extraordinary and hysterical lengths of purging golliwogs from jam jars and banning children’s nursery rhymes. Nevertheless, as the recent Gulf War proved, anti-Arab racism is still very much acceptable in Western society provided it is cloaked in a shroud of jingoistic rhetoric. There is though, unfortunately, another and even more virulent form of racial bigotry, (the genocide of Iraqis withstanding), this is the very obvious hatred displayed by certain elements in the West towards the Japanese.
Although it has been out for some time, The Japanese Conspiracy has only recently come to the current writer’s attention. A more appropriate title for this book would be The Protocols of Nippon, for its theme is that there exists in the heart of the Japanese bureaucracy a sinister conspiracy to dominate world trade by the even more sinister practice of subsidising their exports while “protecting” their home markets from cheap imports.
The instigators of this evil conspiracy are not the Learned Elders of Nippon but MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry which has created a fascade of laissez faire to surround its hidden cartels. The Japanese, who now have the world’s largest trade surplus, are portrayed as scheming, double talking, collectivist-minded automata who seek only to further the aims of the group at all costs. They have stolen most of their technology from the West, improved it minimally by reverse engineering then flogged it straight back to us.
The whole of Japanese society is seen as either on the take or the complient victims of the MITI machine, which rolls on unencumbered by Western ideas of decency, morality and fair play. But if this is both paranoid and unfair, the Japanese are, ironically, condemned for their racism. They are not a pure race even though they think they are, and all foreigners, particularly Westerners are looked down upon - after all, how can America be a nation when it is made up of such an ethnic hotch potch? How indeed?
The book’s equally paranoid author does not suggest that Japan open its floodgates to the masses of the Third World, (which would undoubtedly have the same disastrous effects for them as it has had for us) but he does suggest that the Japanese should stop trying to dominate the world and open their markets to imports. Personally I am of the opinion that if the Japanese want to keep selling us their subsidised goods they should be encouraged to do so; but instead of subsidising them by 10 or 20 percent they should be compelled to subsidise them by 100 percent, that way we will get them for nothing!
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