Oliver Stone should make the movie of “Rising Sun.” Stone’s “JFK” preached that if you pierce the veil of reality, you will unmask a mighty conspiracy controlling America. But Stone sees a made-in-America conspiracy. Crichton is selling an import. Listen to Crichton’s fictional hero, an American initiated into the mysteries of Japanness: “You must understand, there is a shadow world here in Los Angeles, in Honolulu, in New York. We live in our regular American world, walking through our American streets, and we never notice that right alongside our world is a second world. Very discreet, very private. Perhaps in New York you will see Japanese businessmen walk through an unmarked door, and catch a glimpse of a club behind. Perhaps you will hear of a small sushi bar in Los Angeles that charges twelve hundred dollars a person, Tokyo prices … They are part of the shadow world, available only to the Japanese.”
All that is missing from Crichton’s nightmare is a Japanese version of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The dark heart of the matter is that “Rising Sun” is not a harmless cartoon. We have seen such stuff before, with Jews treated as the Japanese now are. In The New York Review of Books Ian Buruma demonstrates striking similarities between " Rising Sun" and the Nazis’ infamous film “Jew Suss.” The film’s attitude toward Jews is an ugly alloy of awe and rage: Jews-all of them; there is no individuality-are an inscrutable, clever, devious, dominating, inhumanly patient and implacably secretive people. They wield power behind impenetrable mists of subterfuge, manipulating the media and financial institutions and controlling, like marionettes on strings of money, corrupted politicians and pliable intellectuals.
This description fits Crichton’s maniacally disciplined Japanese who exercise a Merlin-like mastery of the minutest details of their blueprint for domination. Crichton, speaking through his fictional wise man, drains his description of disapproval by adopting the languid relativism of sophomore sophisticates who say cultures can not be good or bad, they just are. But Crichton is not bashful about one judgment: he despises contemporary America. “Rising Sun” fits the Zeitgeist because it is part of the literature of victimhood: But it portrays an America that deserves to be victimized, a nation sliding into Third World decrepitude because Americans are lazy incompetents.
Crichton’s hero says Americans “don’t make things anymore.” Tell that to Boeing, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and thousands of other manufacturers (manufacturing is as large a percentage of GNP as it was 20 years ago) responsible for American exports surging much faster than Japan’s. Crichton’s hero says Americans “don’t work very hard.” Oh? In the 1980s population increased 10 percent but the number of people employed increased 20 percent, to a labor force participation rate never exceeded, not even during World War II.
In his cavalier assertions Crichton resembles Stone, the high priest of painfully earnest, oh-so-public-spirited paranoia. “JFK” is full of falsehoods that Stone’s apologists deem justified for the Higher Good of awakening America from fatal slumber. Crichton says he wrote his novel “to make America wake up.” It may work. No one can slumber while laughing at statements like these in the novel:
" I guess by now they have seventy, seventy-five percent of downtown Los Angeles." “Hell, they own Hawaii, ninety percent of Honolulu. . .” (Wrong numbers and nouns. Japanese own 45 percent of prime commercial space in central Los Angeles and 90 percent of luxury-hotel properties in Honolulu. The British - perfidious Albion - own more in America than Japanese do, and foreign investment-which is not a bad thing-may have been proportionally as large a part of the nation’s economy 80 years ago.) It is just not true that “the Japanese spend half a billion a year in Washington”; or that “nobody in Japan will buy American beef. If Americans send beef it will rot on the docks”; or that “most expensive American stores” would “go out of business without visitors from Tokyo”; or that “if a Japanese bought an American car, he got audited by the government”; or that “America has done nothing” in 20 years to lower the energy cost of finished goods; or that Japanese own “100 percent of Hawaii’s Kona Coast”; or that America is “a poor country”; or that “the American economy is collapsing”; and so on and on and on. Didactic fiction is usually tiresome; this is insufferable.
Crichton’s hero says he has been over into the future and it works: “Everything works in Japan.” Crichton’s problem is less that he is silly about Japan than that he is wrong about human arrangements generally. He should write less fiction until he has read more history. No society ever has been or will be the marvel that Crichton says Japan is. As for his wholesale extrapolation into the future of Japan’s recent successes: Someone–Orwell, I think-said that intellectuals tend to assume that trends will go on forever, but that is like saying Rommel got to El Alamein so he will get to Cairo. He never got to Cairo.
“Rising Sun,” an intended thriller, is intensely boring because its RoboVillain - an entire race, caricatured lacks humanity and hence lacks human interest. Today, as Japan’s economy sags and its stock market crashes, the strongest American feeling about Japan is not fear but Schadenfreude. What Crichton and other swooners about Japan admire so inordinately is orderliness, but it is the tidiness of life lived within an old and homogenous tribe. The Japanese are an old people but a novice nation. They have an ancient culture but are new to, and not at ease with, the essentials of modernity-individualism, pluralism, heterogeneity. Much of the messiness of American life is not mere inefficiency, it is yeastiness. It is creative fermentation, part of the fecundity of freedom. For 216 years that has made America what it remains-the rising sun.
