Since 1999, Andrew Horvat has been the Japan representative of The Asia Foundation. Before that, he spent 35 years as a journalist, 28 of which he has spent in Japan. In his long career, he has worked for such newspapers such as The Mainichi Daily News, Associated Press Tokyo, Asia correspondent of Southam News of Canada, covering all of Asia for 17 large and small regional papers throughout Canada, Tokyo-based reporter for The Los Angeles Times covering Japan and Korea; correspondent of The Independent (UK), and Northeast Asia Bureau Chief of “Marketplace” Radio (USA). He has also contributed as a stringer to The Washington Post, the Times of London, the International Herald Tribune, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and Der Spiegel.

He has also had a separate career writing and broadcasting in Japanese, contributing to Bungei Shunju, Shokun, the Asahi Shinbun, the Mainichi Shinbun, AERA, and taking turns with Lucy Craft and other Tokyo-based reporters as a bilingual news commentator on NHK BS-1’s “ABC News in English.”

In addition to numerous articles, Mr. Hovat is the author of “Overcoming the Negative Legacy of the Past: Why Europe is a Positive Example for East Asia,” Brown Journal of World Affairs, Summer-Fall 2004; Sharing the Burden of the Past: Legacies of War in Europe, America and Asia, (co-edited with Gebhard Hielscher) joint publication of The Asia Foundation and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Tokyo, 2003, “Moving Forward Into the Past,” Literary Review of Canada, July-August 2004; Open Up Japan, dual-language book of essays on contemporary Japan, written in both English and Japanese published by Kodansha International, 1999.

Mr. Horvat has a B.A. and M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia; one year spent as undergraduate at Keio University and has also studied at University of Michigan, the David Lam Centre for International Communication, Simon Fraser University, Canada (1990), Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies (1994-95) and six months at the National Foreign Language Center, Washington DC (1997).

A Canadian born in Budapest, Hungary, Mr. Horvat speaks fluent Japanese. He speaks Hungarian and studied Korean, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Latin, and dabbled informally with Portuguese.

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Interview: January 31, 2005

We ask this question to everyone because every answer is different: what brought you to Japan?

Several reasons: Growing up in Hungary, I had never come into contact with anyone from Asia. The first time I ever saw anyone with Asian features was in Edmonton on a street when I was ten years old. My father and I got off the refugee train that was taking us to Vancouver and I still remember suddenly becoming aware that there were people who looked quite different from me. I had never seen anyone who was not a “Caucasian” until then.

As an immigrant, I had to attend ESL school (although it had the euphemistic name of “English for new Canadians) and there too I came into contact with immigrants from Asia, mostly China since it was difficult for Japanese to get into Canada until the early 1960s. My education in Canada was patriotically Anglo-Saxon. I recall the principal of Cecil Rhodes Elementary School (named after the colonizer of Rhodesia) giving us sixth grade students a special lecture on the “English race” and why young English girls all have rosy cheeks. I can’t quite remember now why, but he seemed to think the cheeks of English girls were pinker than the cheeks of any other girls and that this was significant enough to share with us 12-year olds.

In high school, we were taught in our Canadian history class that even though the white man had brought alcohol, guns and diseases to North America, decimating native populations, the blessings of the Christian religion more than made up for these scourges. I recall taking issue with this sentence in our textbook in class and finding myself in a minority.

Canada is now the land of multiculturalism and people tend to forget how lonely it could be in the 1950s and even the early 1960s. To argue that there was rampant and open discrimination in Canada back then would be wrong. But to suggest there was curiosity about the rest of the world would be wrong too. The Japanese and Chinese language courses of the Asian Studies Department of the University of British Columbia—unlike today—were hardly oversubscribed.

My faculty advisor, Malcolm MacGregor, who wore his academic robes to the Latin and Greek classes he taught, informed me that I could not enroll in first year Japanese in my first year because “first year Japanese is for second year students.” When I did get to take Japanese in second year I finished at the top of my class and qualified for an exchange program with Keio University. That is how I got to spend a year in Japan in 1966.

What made the fascination with Japan more or less permanent came from the stimulus of living astride a cultural and linguistic divide. That, and what psychologists call intermittent reinforcement—the random pattern of success and failure in communicating in Japanese with Japanese are what have kept me here. When a monkey gets a banana every time he pushes the right button, he loses interest. It is when the banana doesn’t come even when the monkey pushes the right button that he stays in front of the machine and keeps pushing.

Can you tell us a little about your role at the Asia Foundation as well as its mission?

The mission of The Asia Foundation is laid out in pretty straightforward fashion on two websites: the home office site at www.asiafoundation.org and the site of the Japan office, which I am proud to say I helped launch in 1999, and which can be accessed at www.ajiazaidan.org.

Although, the foundation office in Japan works in a number of fields including migration issues, the social, economic and gender consequences of population aging, the one program area I am really proud to have been associated with is historical reconciliation. Gebhard Hielscher, Tokyo representative of the German Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and I have co-convened several major programs on such issues as high school history textbooks (and how they deal with Japan’s negative past), forced labor during World War II in Germany and Japan, and most recently, a weekend workshop and symposium on “Tainted Treasures,” dealing with the controversial transfer of some 300,000 cultural artifacts from Korea to Japan during colonial and pre-colonial times.

Do you think reporting on Japan has changed? If so, how?

Reporting on Japan has both improved and deteriorated. The ability of journalists to gather facts has improved tremendously. For one thing, a large number of journalists are now bilingual. This has made a huge difference in both the speed and the quality of information exchange. What has made reporting worse is that it has declined in quantity and variety.

The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times are now full of news on Japan, but if you want to find out about civil society movements, the phenomenal growth of which have altered the lives of millions of Japanese, you have to track down Jeff Kingston’s Japan's Quiet Transformation, which you will have to order on the Internet and which you will have to find out about, again, probably on the Internet.

The assumption that Japan is uninteresting—an incorrect view held by the majority of leaders and readers around the world these days—is the result of too much financial coverage of Japan and too little of much else. Japan has indeed suffered from a “lost decade” if you put your money in equities in 1989, but if you were looking at gender relations, you probably would think that the nineties were a time of significant gains for Japanese women, especially those in the upper strata of the work force. (Feminist critics would argue that Japanese women are still suffering from serious discrimination in wages and promotion but the gender gap for workers in their 20s has been virtually closed indicating that enormous progress has been achieved. For older workers, the opposite has been true. Many unskilled, older women suffer, but then so do older men, whose record number of suicides have actually brought down Japan’s much vaunted life expectancy figures for the first time since the end of World War II.)

What are your thoughts on kisha clubs?

If you are covering breaking news, the kisha clubs can be a real bother. I have been on the receiving end of discriminatory treatment and I was furious. There is also something inherently wrong about news cartels, but that is something Japanese citizens are going to have to get together to change.

Do you think your ideas on Japan and/or how you perceive Japan have changed since your days as a cub reporter?

I should hope so. I’m now older and tend to get angry less than before but that may not be a good thing because reporting is not scholarship. A reporter should be angered by the sight of Kurdish refugees seeking asylum and being given refugee status by the UNHCR being deported to Turkey by Japanese authorities. At the same time, however, there is no reason to get hot under the collar about trade imbalances.

It seems to us that in recent mainstream American newspapers (and to some extent British newspapers) the quirky and bizarre are considered more “newsworthy” than hard news. One interesting book that came out was written by a group of Japanese nationals living in New York City, Japan: Made in U.S.A. (Zipangu 1998); it was in reaction to mainstream coverage of Japan in the New York Times, especially the coverage of foreign correspondent, Nicholas D. Kristof. Do you think that they had a legitimate complaint?

I did not follow Kristof’s writings very closely but the piece I read by him about Japanese women speaking in unnaturally high-pitched voices I found to be superficial, and, I suppose if I were a Japanese, offensive. In the West, we pay huge sums to hear coloratura sopranos. I don’t believe they suffer because of their physical contortions. I found Kristof’s article judgmental and moralistic. I think readers should expect a somewhat more dispassionate approach.

Moreover, it is more entertaining to read something written with a detached attitude. It is true that the status of Japanese women declined during the high growth era of the 60s and 70s. The fact that Kristof found such high pitched voices irritating is one thing; if, on the other hand, such high pitched voices represented an accentuation of traditional views of femininity, what other evidence do we have for tendencies toward excessive femininity among Japanese women. There was, for example the burikko phenomenon. If Kristof had taken the trouble to analyze the changes in women’s ideal images, he might have found that exaggeration of feminine traits is probably in decline in Japan since the bursting of the bubble and the trend is now toward more gender equality in the work force.

Of course, as a Canadian, I am quite used to the US media distorting the image of foreign countries. I still remember the report on a US news show about the brave rescue of an American scientist in the Antarctic who was suffering from cancer. The US network focused on the great work of the rescuers, never once mentioning that they were Canadians. Hollywood movies constantly write Canada out of scripts because of the assumption that it would complicate the story for US audiences. I suppose Belgians feel the same irritation with the French media, and New Zealanders with the Australians. British journalism, too, is famous for laughing at others.

I’m glad that the Zipangu people voiced their dissatisfaction. I am not sure I would agree that journalism should always be sensitive. It should be fun and journalists should be allowed to make mistakes. If they are too careful, they will err on the side of caution and that may do more damage than an occasional gaffe. But, when journalists consistently write about what they perceive to be the inadequacies of an entire people, they can influence the perception of their readers about another country. Since we now live in an era of public diplomacy, such writings need to be contested and impressions corrected. Zipangu did this the right way, and they did succeed in getting a lot of publicity for their views.

You once wrote a book entitled Japanese Beyond Words: How to Walk and Talk Like a Native Speaker. At what point are you really and truly speaking “like a native”? Is speaking “like a native” the same thing as “acceptance”?

Actually, the part of the title about becoming like a native speaker was something I very much regret having agreed to. The original title was something like “a guide to verbal and non-verbal communication in Japan.”

I failed to realize just how sophisticated the average consumer of Japan-related language books had become. I was correctly criticized for suggesting in the title that speaking like a native is an appropriate goal. Of course, if a reader bothers to go through the book, especially the interview with the late Ron Walton (On becoming an ideal foreigner), it will become clear that the whole book is about “being accepted as a foreigner” and not “melting into the crowd,” which would in any case be difficult for many foreign students of Japanese.

You bring up a number of examples of cultural miscommunication. Whose responsibility is it to understand the “other”? Presumably both, but why isn’t it happening as evidenced by the need to publish your book? Related to this, at what point can you say that a given cultural viewpoint/mannerism/gesture is indicative of a culture? How much is a given quirk just mere personality? And can such things be quantified?

Linguists make the above distinctions very clear by distinguishing between a “dialect” and an “idiolect.” The former is a speech trait typical of a distinct group of people while the latter a trait that is idiosyncratic, i.e. belonging to an individual. If you are focusing on the resistance many foreign speakers of Japanese (non-Asians) encounter in being understood in Japanese (when speaking natural Japanese, or rather, especially when speaking natural Japanese) to certain native speakers of Japanese, this is not an idiosyncratic trait.

This is a case of cognitive dissonance, which is not unique to Japanese people. I heard not long ago about a Japanese speaker of Yiddish encountering similar problems in Israel with a Yiddish-speaking Jew who could not accept the fact that he had been speaking in Yiddish: it ought not to be happening so it is not happening. This response is universal among human beings.

There are, of course, many Japanese who simply do not like speaking Japanese with foreigners. This is not a problem if they speak some other mutually understandable language well. If they do not handle another language well, or handle another language and insist on speaking that, well, then this is a kind of idiosyncratic behavior. It is unpleasant but hardly exists in epidemic proportions. Then, of course, there are just plain difficult people, and one would not expect to be able to communicate with such people in any language.

In your review of James Fallows’ book, Looking at the Sun: the Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System, you argue that many of the author’s inaccuracies and exaggerations are just a much the result of a “visceral hostility toward [Japan]” as it was “plain carelessness” (“America, Take Off Your Sunglasses,” Los Angeles Times, Book Review, Sunday, August 7, 1994, pg. 12) Is “visceral hostility” the same thing as “Japan bashing”? Why or why not?

As a reporter, I recall becoming very passionate about the sufferings of Koreans under Japanese rule. I remember making a visit to Korea and hearing stories of appalling atrocities committed by Japanese marines after the uprising of March 1, 1919, only to find out virtually the same day that the brother-in-law of my Korean teacher had been invited to Hiroshima to take part in a high school reunion. His trip was being arranged by his former classmates, all of whom were Japanese.

Fallows is a passionate writer and I think he writes well and generally accurately about issues with which he is familiar. I think he would have written very differently about Japan if he had stayed longer and had a chance to meet people who might have contradicted his very strong first impressions of Japan. Fallows was already very famous by the time he came to Japan, so most people he met either agreed with him or kept quiet.

Yes, visceral writing can lead to inaccuracies because when you write you really hope that your adversary is truly wicked. Unfortunately for the visceral writer, it is rather rare that we come across people who are thoroughly evil. Usually, they contain all the human failings including arrogance and hubris, faults for which Japanese are now paying a very high price.

You wrote this review 10 years ago, do you think such attitudes and analyses as Fallows’ was prevalent at the time? A number of economic recessions later, do you think it is still prevalent today?

I would say not at all. But I would agree with Charles Burress that the dusting off of old images of Japan did give new life to the stereotypes of the unpredictable Japanese, or in fact, of inscrutable foreigners in general. And since I am by religion and background, someone whose not too distant ancestors were all too convenient heretics for whatever orthodoxy was around, I found the revisionist period to be personally abhorrent.

I am delighted to say that Ian Buruma, upon seeing the movie “Rising Sun” felt exactly the same way as I did. In that movie, all one had to do was substitute the word Japanese for Jew and one would have had pure Nazi propaganda. Yes, this was a very frightening period, and no, we probably did not learn enough from it.

For the sake of our readers who were never following the debate, what is Japan revisionism?

In very simple terms, revisionism meant coming to terms with the shock that Japan was “not like us.” During the Cold War, we (the Western camp under the leadership of the US) had decided that during the 1930s the good, decent, democracy-yearning Japanese people had been hijacked by a group of evil thugs known collectively as “the militarists” and who used a xenophobic hate cult called “Emperor-worship” to delude their citizens from the true path of democracy, freedom and all the things we believe to be good.

Shortly after WWII, we discovered that the Japanese, thanks to the policies of the Occupation had become 100 percent educated in democracy and were ready to take their place in the international community as members of the democratic Western camp. Revisionism consisted of the discovery that the above Cold War vision of Japan was flawed.

Unfortunately, the early stages of revisionism were full of bitterness toward Japan for not having become the country we so desperately wished it to be. Revisionist writers discovered that Japan was not quite as democratic as we thought; it had been ruled by the same party since 1955.

We also found out that the Japanese domestic market was not quite as free as we thought either. There were cartels, and powerful bureaucrats who didn’t think that Adam Smith was right at all about the market being inherently just, and who could engage in arbitrary action to intervene often on behalf of local corporations so they could compete more effectively against foreign corporations. We looked inside Japan closely, and found not only that the Japanese were not like us, but that there was not much room for us. Moreover, they were doing better than us, and—or so it seemed—had succeeded by other rules. So, we took a hard look at Japan, and began to criticize it totally, forgetting that just a few decades earlier we had praised it just as totally.

Oh yes, back then, we needed Japan as an ally against international communism.

In your essay, “Reviewing Revisionism: Judging the legacy of an era of US-Japan acrimony” (The Asia Foundation, 2000), you summarize both the positive and negative interpretations of revisionism as exemplified by two panelists: MIT professor Richard Samuels (positive) and San Francisco Chronicle journalist, Charles Burress (negative). Samuels argued that “revisionism served the positive purpose of inspiring a new generation of American social scientists to focus their research on business, the economy, and public policy issues.” Burress, on the other hand, “countered that revisionism had opened a Pandora’s Box from which unflattering media images of Japan continue to follow to the present day.” What we want to know: Who is really right? In your view, was revisionism ultimately a good thing or a bad thing? Can (and should) we separate its impact on academe from its impact on the media?

I think both Samuels and Burress were right. I explained above that I agreed with Burress about his Pandora’s Box image. But I also believe Samuels had a valid point and this had to do with the rather poor quality of public diplomacy practiced by Japan at that time.

The strand connecting Japanese and Americans was very thin and often the conduits between Japan and America were professional lobbyists, not true friends at all. Japanese lobbying was massive but most of the money went to a few people in Washington. Many Japanese in leadership positions felt that with “such powerful friends” they didn’t need to worry about public opinion.

Also, Japanese funding of Japanese studies was based on an old-fashioned view of Asian Studies: culture, arts and so on. Traveling kabuki plays are fun but they really don’t result in the promotion of better understanding of the other side’s business environment.

The revisionists, not surprisingly, were not generally Japan specialists. I think a lot has been done to address the conditions that considerably worsened US-Japan relations at the time of the trade dispute. Take for example the setting up of the Center for Global Partnership. This arm of the Japan Foundation concentrates almost entirely on funding joint research in the social sciences, business, and international relations. In 15 years, the CGP has spawned books, has nurtured a new generation of young Japan-literate experts who will be teaching and moving in and out of government positions in the US. The Japan Foundation has poured an enormous amount of money and effort into promoting the study of the Japanese language at the pre-collegiate level in the US. This is an extremely far-sighted policy aimed at increasing the breadth of contacts in US-Japan relations. I can’t say that we are seeing the dawning of a new era, but I hope that such sudden and dangerous shifts in perceptions of each other as occurred in the 80s will now be less likely to happen in the future. I don’t think we have eliminated all dangers.

In the same essay, you write that former MITI vice-minister Kuroda raised the issue that the first warning signs of coming difficulties in US-Japan relations can be seen in the American press treatments of Japan. The “press” were “harbingers of changes in policy.” Looking at the press coverage on Japan now, what signs of change do you see?

I’m not sure I agree with Kuroda. I think the press is generally quite late in grasping trends. If I see a corporation featured on the cover of a magazine, to me it’s time to sell the shares of that firm.

We could extend the question to, say, looking at the press coverage overall, what policy changes do you see toward Asia?

All I can say is that I hope our leaders are reading more than just newspapers and magazines. If they only know what I know, we are in trouble.

What gets your vote for best and worst book on Japan?

Ronald Dore’s Education in Tokugawa Japan (University of Michigan Press: 1992) helped liberate me from many of the fixed ideas I had about Japan, especially the notion that everything before 1868 was feudal and backward, and that somehow, modern Japan was created by a group of brilliant men who studied practices in Europe and America, and then built a successful capitalist nation state from scratch.

Granted, Edo Period Japan was feudal, and yes, some brilliant leaders did emerge in the period before and after then Meiji Revolution, but their brilliance would have come to naught had it not been for the intellectual infrastructure built up through the ages until 1868. Dore focused on the “terakoya” (Buddhist temple schools) to which a large number of Japanese families were sending their children since well before 1868. Japanese families knew that if their children went to the “terakoya” their lives would be brighter and more secure.

Appreciation for learning and knowledge existed in Japan prior to 1868; moreover, literacy rates in Japan at that time were considerably higher than in England, which at that time was the leading industrial power in the world. Dore not only taught me how to look at Japan with fresh eyes, but also to mistrust fixed ideas. This was the right attitude to have when embarking on a career as a journalist.

As for a worst book, there aren’t too many these days. It is truly remarkable how good the quality of writing on Japan has become. A new generation of scholars is writing wonderful books on Japan and East Asia in general.

What are you reading right now? In general, what do you like to read?

I read mostly for my work so right now I am wading through material on historical reconciliation, such as Funabashi Yôichi’s Ima rekishi mondai ni dô torikumu ka (Iwanami shoten 2001), and since I am writing an article on the role of civil society in historical reconciliation, I am also taking copious notes based on essays in The State of Civil Society in Japan, edited by Susan Pharr and Frank Schwartz (Cambridge, 2003).

I am reviewing Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (University of Hawaii Press: 2003) by Faye Yuan Kleeman and finding it nothing less than eye-opening. My Abe fellowship project was on Japanese as an international language. This book shows that during colonial times Taiwanese writers were writing in Japanese. As I am a jack of all trades, I have been following the very rich output of books and essays on aspects of the Japanese language written mostly in Japanese.

My favorite is without a doubt Shibata Takeshi’s (or as he would like me to write it Sibata Takesi’s) Nihongo wa omoshiroi. I borrowed liberally from Professor Shibata’s writings when I wrote a column on language for the Asahi Evening News until it merged with the International Herald Tribune. Ôta Yûzô’s Eigo to Nihonjin is full of fascinating information about such brilliant Japanese speakers of English as Nitobe Inazô (Bushido) and Okakura Tenshin (The Book of Tea). Ôta is meticulous in the compilation of humorous detail about Edo Period Japanese who suffered from the same dilettantish attitudes toward the study of Dutch as many of their descendants today display toward English.

Dutch merchants recall having to please their Japanese hosts by granting them Dutch names, much as today, truly enthusiastic Japanese students of business English insist on being called “Jack,” or “Suzie” or on occasion, “Dudley.”

Can you tell us a little more about your current projects? What are you working on now?

I’m working with Professor Fujisawa Fusatoshi of Tokyo Keizai University to set up an International Center for Historical Reconciliation. This year being the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, hopefully some people will take note of the fact that while Europe has come a long way in promoting a shared vision of the future through a thorough examination of the past, in East Asia, little progress has been made in either direction. The purpose of the Center is to encourage reconciliation and to help Japanese and other East Asians look for successful formulas in peace-building tried elsewhere.

What books needs to be written on Japan? Will you be writing it?

There is definitely a need for a book on 20th century intellectual history. Andrew Barshay is one of very few scholars in this field. We desperately need to see more Japanese essays translated and annotated so that non-Japan-specialists can access how Japanese perceive themselves and their place in the world.

I attempted to put together an edited volume on key essays from the end of World War II to the present and discovered that whatever had been translated was not easily available while major Japanese essays, such as Sakaguchi Ango’s Darakuron written immediately after Japan’s defeat in 1945 was not to be had in English. Monumental essays, which have articulated the mood not only of Japan’s intellectual world but also of the nation at certain key times in its history, are unavailable for study and discussion by interested non-specialist foreigners. This is not only a shame but a formula for future miscommunication.

A work I would like to write is about the challenges of historical reconciliation in East Asia, contrasting successive failures with successes in Europe. The issue is not that the Germans are good and the Japanese bad, but rather why one process has worked and the other has not.