Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [265]
The Japan jeremiads mattered because they professed to explain Tokyo's inevitable victory in terms of culture. The peculiarlyJapanese institution of the keiretsu was a favorite explanatory device. Laissez-faire was obsolescent, the argument went, and would be replaced by a social model embracing keiretsu-like characteristics of cooperation, cartelism, and vertical integration. The United States had hitherto been able to hold its own only because its individualist culture favored innovation. But the Japanese had now obviated this advantage by piracy-by helping themselves to Western scientific and technological advances. (The irony of this claim in light of earlierAmerican appropriations of European technology was not widely appreciated.) MITI, allegedly the mastermind of the strategy, was reputed to focus on robotics, computing, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology. In a case that enjoyed enormous exposure and was seen as proving the point, Fujitsu was caught trying to purloin IBM's innovations. Drucker even maintained that the Japanese grand strategy was itself an imitation of an American invention-the industrial research pioneered byAT&T and Bell Labs in the 1920 s. A hoary representation ofAsian culture as essentially imitative took on new force here, and publishers' complaints about the piracy of engineering textbooks found a new and receptive federal audience. The same senator who legislated for home taping also sponsored legislation to strengthen patent laws against supposedJapanese pirates. Washington, he proclaimed, must help companies "protect themselves from the foreign manufacturers which steal American-owned technology"40
The analyses of keiretsu and the like that appeared in these works were of course only ostensibly about Japan. They were really about the United States itself. They redeployed tropes from cultural anthropology (sometimes quite dated ones) to articulate by contrast a series of anxieties about American social and economic culture. Thus, for instance, Japan's alleged culture of farsighted planning furnished a contrast to domestic capitalism's self-defeating short-termism. Harmony stood in opposition to social disintegration. Today it may seem that the keiretsu were never more than a "myth"- albeit one in which Japanese themselves believed. But in the i 98 o s American politics needed them.41
Home piracy thus metastasized into an element in a narrative of national malaise and cultural difference. In every little act of "home piracy," on this account, Japan's ascent was furthered one more step. Newspaper cartoons again drove home the point, as ferocious samurai did battle on the home front (fig. 15.3). Nobody had ever tried to convey the dangers of Phillips's audiocassettes by publishing caricatures of threatening Dutch burghers, but suddenly lurid images cropped up everywhere of warriors menacing the living room. Such images rendered the putative link between the domestic and the geopolitical starkly evident. And Reagan Commerce Department official Clyde Prestowitz made explicit the identification between home video, the appropriation of science, and the end ofAmerican economics. MIT, the very model of academic /industrial science, now had nine chairs funded byJapanese corporations that "tapped directly into the scientific source." Prestowitz claimed that "thejapanese" stood ready to expropriate newAmerican technologies while shortsighted U .S. corporations declined