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to patent them. "The best example is theVCR," he explained. But when told of the peril, citizens' first concern was still whether and how to buy one. The hardware of home piracy came out of Japan, of course, perhaps by appropriation from California (nobody recalled the German origin of tape). But so, it was implied, did its historical role. It threatened what was otherwise the last remaining bastion of American supremacy, and the one field of the economy that could not be beaten by geopolitical piracy: the business of culture. It made the homeowner not only a producer, but a producer of "cheap copies"-another stereotyped Japanese trait. Indeed, between the two Supreme Court arguments Senators Robert Dole and Lloyd Bentsen had tried to resolve the Betamax case by treating it as a matter of trade. Theywrote to MITI suggesting a compromise in the style of recent U.S. Japanese deals covering car imports. This crisis for Hollywood posed "a potentially serious threat to US Japanese trade relations," they pointed out, and if Congress were to step in it would surely do so "in the context of a large Japanese trade surplus." Hearings on U.S. Japanese economic relations did actually take place alongside those on home taping. Only the likelihood of a Sony court victory dissuaded MITI from taking up the senators' idea.42

FIGURE 15.3. Samurai in the den. D. Sherbo, "Video Wars." Washington Post, May 2, 1982, fr. © The Washington Post. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this material without express written permission is prohibited.

Sony's victory in the Betamax case proved pyrrhic, of course. Betamax was soon overtaken by the rival VHS standard. Reflecting on the failure, Sony came to a momentous decision. It decided that it resulted from a basic rift between technology and "content" in the electronics and culture industries. That is, in an emerging information age the divide between industrial and creative properties could be fatal. Implicit in the Betamax experience, therefore, was a message about how international capitalism and creativity intersected-or failed to. It was on this reasoning that Sony launched what became the largestJapanese acquisition of all. It first bought CBS Records for $2 billion. Then, in September 1989, it moved to buy Columbia Pictures, priced at the time at $3.4 billion ($5.6 billion including debt). The rationale was to connect together intellectual properties in technology and creativity.

Needless to say, the bid stirred up intense controversy, involving all the issues of the previous half-century of piracy debates: public responsibility, curatorship, canonicity, and nationalism. Columbia's huge backlist of classic films represented something close to the American "soul," it was said. What did it mean for a nation to sell its soul? Moreover, the deal happened to come to fruition at a moment of extraordinary global uncertainty. It culminated just as the Berlin wall fell. With the Soviet bloc in terminal disarray, a fundamental reconfiguration of global politics was in the offing. Washington's anxieties about the place ofJapan in that process found a focus in the Sony bid.43

What epitomized the fear was a pirated book. The original had been published in Japan back in January and swiftly sold five hundred thousand copies. It was entitled `No" to iern Nihon (TheJapan That Can Say No). Its authors were Akio Morita, Sony's chairman, and the novelist-cumpolitician Shintaro Ishihara. Morita's contributions were relatively sober. They voiced a critique of American capitalism that was, if not exactly welcome, at least familiar. Ishihara's, on the other hand, were intensely controversial. Then fifty-six, Ishihara's views were idiosyncratic but often extremely nationalist, and he was about to launch a maverick but startlingly strong bid to lead the LDP. Japan should feel free to flex its muscles, Ishihara exhorted, and could afford to do so. The United States' nuclear deterrent had become