Putting the Brakes on the Orient Express
Fallows, James
PUTTING THE BRAKES ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS Hope for American industrial recovery can be seen in Halberstam's vivid depiction of our economic decline by James Fallows B y the time Ronald Reagan...
...After the war, these "Whiz Kids" descended on American industry and were embraced with particular fervor at Ford...
...It suggests, after a while, that we're learning more about Halberstam's grand-mythic view of life than about the subjects themselves...
...There, individuals will, within reason, sacrifice for the good of all...
...But the blur at the end of The Reckoning leads us to the book's, and the author's, most important weakness...
...With child-labor laws—and anti-pollution laws, and product safety laws—companies are forced to behave differently from what pure profitmaximization would require...
...Halberstam describes, step by step, Nissan's gradual climb back to confidence—the first cars it could sell to postwar Japanese, the first it dared to show outsiders, the clunky version its men took to California and tested against other models on the freeways to check its weaknesses and fix its bugs...
...Everything conspires to push Japan up and Detroit down...
...Ford...
...Because the book is so richly detailed, so complete in its coverage, and so readable page-by-page and anecdote-by-anecdote, the complaints about it, which will come, need to take second place to its virtues...
...An odd, reclusive figure named J. Edward Lundy, padrone of the Whiz Kids, wielded tremendous power against the manufacturing men...
...doesn't have these advantages...
...Even on the basis of Halberstam's account, there's reason to hope...
...The arguments were often with the product men, who usually wanted to spend money that McNamara wanted to save...
...It's amusing for outsiders to watch the Japanese agonize over the supposed weakening of these work-oriented virtues, since compared to any place on earth except Korea, they still seem so strong...
...Taking the leap and using the story is finally worth the risk, if you've done your best...
...The Whiz Kids had been to college, had received graduate degrees, and might even have taught at great universities...
...He willfully insulated himself and his superiors from the realities, and he led first a car company and then a nation step by rational step toward disaster...
...This was not just a business but a science, he implied ." It's conceivable that Halberstam is overselling his case...
...In addition to their mystical racial bond, which allows them to think they all share their brothers' fate, the Japanese also have their stillpowerful sense of duty and deference, and their chronic fear that they're about to be destroyed by earthquake or frozen by oil boycott, and a hundred other social and psychological forces that keep selfishness under control...
...The most important element of Halberstam's cultural analysis of America's economic condition concerns the nation's inherent difficulty in competing against Japan...
...Let's start with its basic building-blocks, the minibiographies and revealing anecdotes that fill every page...
...On the flight from San Francisco to Washington, I counted seven dark-suited managerial types reading In Search of Excellence...
...Perhaps Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Robert Novak, and other cheerleaders thought this approach would really work...
...Indeed, one of its major problems is Stockman's trouble in explaining just why deficits really matter to ordinary people...
...Based on everything you've heard and all the triangulations you can make, do you think the story is true...
...This has been the story of America since its beginning...
...it helps add flesh, blood, and juice to the skeleton of truth...
...Richard Nixon had taken the dollar off the gold standard in 1971...
...It is written with the edge that only long-nursed hatred can produce...
...Now, if both Shaiken and Amaya are correct, Halberstam needs to help us understand how their seemingly-opposite views can be reconciled...
...When stock-holders invest for maximum return, how can we keep companies from concentrating on the next quarter's results...
...There are problems with this book, similar to the problems with all his previous works...
...When nursing or child-care pay so badly, how can we expect any but saints to devote their lives...
...He presents these two different perspectives on world economics with equal portent and equally impressive personal credentials...
...The American industry suffered, he tells us, because it was smug and arrogant, and because the country was complacent about cheap gas, and because the proud men of Detroit underestimated the funny little tonguetied Japanese...
...The fortunes of the players change: Ford recovers, Nissan falls farther behind Toyota...
...You'll hear that one big shot told another to go to hell, or laughed at him because he mispronounced a word and revealed that he grew up on the wrong side of the tracks...
...The travails of the American car makers are not exactly fresh news...
...In my experience, such stories usually have a catch...
...Why not change SEC rules so that companies report financial data one time a year, instead of four...
...But it would be fairer to give the reader some idea of the deduction, interpretation, and yes, guesswork that lie behind the stories...
...He can use his best powers of analysis to conclude they're probably true, but he wasn't there, he didn't see it, he doesn't know...
...that was the only kind of road the Japanese knew...
...This is why the crackdown on insider-trading is so encouraging...
...The crucial illustration of this problem occurs in two chapters near the very end: One chapter describes the work of Harley Shaiken, whom Halberstam introduces in typical bigger-than-life style...
...If we recognize what greed has done to us— and what even greater adaptability can do for us—some future Halberstam will write a Reckoning describing our resurgence against Japan...
...The classic illustration of arrogant inattention to market, incredible but still true, is that even in 1987, American manufacturers ship cars to Japan with their steering wheels on the American, or "wrong," side...
...Does the tyranny of quarterly reports distort American management...
...McNamara's credulity-straining excuse was that his memory has gone bad...
...After all, for many in industry "competitiveness" is not just a campaign slogan...
...But sometime, before it's too late, he might deign to make a public explanation of his view of the Vietnam war...
...Halberstam concentrates on the number-two manufacturer in each country, Nissan in Japan and Ford in the U.S., rather than the giants, Toyota and GM...
...Halberstam offers a wonderful, withering, Best and the Brightest style profile of Lundy, showing how he taught his boys to reduce everything to numbers and use those numbers to pulverize the opposition...
...Halberstam's sentences and paragraphs have a don't-fence-mein quality...
...When entrepreneurs can make a fortune by taking their companies public, how can we tell them not to...
...David Stockman's Triumph of Politics is an important description of what went wrong in Washington, but it is an inside story, for insiders...
...Then you use the story or you don't, according to your judgment about whether it helps convey the full emotional and human truth, as best you understand that truth...
...We can recognize that racism is not simply wrong but wasteful, since it squanders human talents we can't afford to lose...
...One is to rein in the greed that is always a part of human nature but that has been totally unleashed in the last few years...
...It may seem weird to complain about over-ambitiousness, when so many writers are afraid to tackle big complicated subjects, but Halberstam's omnivorous approach blurs the book's focus, especially in its last 200 pages...
...Vistors from more settled societies have always found it vulgar and undisciplined, but it's had a vitality few other societies can match...
...All these things conspire to make us more complacent than the Japanese...
...McNamara was devastating in intramural arguments, so sure of his own facts that he seemed without bias, the ultimate rational man wanting only the rational decision...
...Of this Halberstam tell us nothing at all...
...The Reckoning's importance is in helping to shake us out of our complacency...
...But Halberstam doesn't argue with either of them...
...Their cars were not very good—in fact, they were graceless cars of questionable performance...
...But the one thing they were—and had to be, given how bad the roads were in Japan— was durable...
...Halberstam's evidence about this period is rich and often spellbinding, and it covers both sides...
...doesn't seem to have found nearly enough of the same anxious energy...
...His instinct is to pick one exceptional man as a vehicle for a certain point of view...
...No one can denigrate Halberstam's perseverance and energy in collecting all the stories he re-tells...
...Because they were so much better with charts and figures and words, the finance men usually had their way...
...One suggests that the future looks dark for America...
...So should we just recognize our limitations, give up the fight with the Japanese, and enjoy the cheap imports while our dollars are still worth enough to buy them...
...Halberstam has been a patron to me, which makes it awkward either to praise or criticize him...
...Then you finally track down one of the principals, and he chuckles and says that you've got it all wrong...
...The SEC could also put tighter limits on "golden parachute" deals that protect the privileged at the expense of everyone else...
...The message has to do with contrasting cultures, and it remains relevant despite the recent twists in the fortunes of Ford and Nissan...
...Halberstam argues that McNamara knew all the facts but none of the truth...
...It's a shame that Halberstam gets himself tangled up this way, because the first two-thirds of his book does have a clear and important message, and one that is perfectly attuned to his narrative style...
...Also, as Halberstam points out, Japanese managers worked hard to crush a militant form of unionism 30 years ago...
...The remarkable success of immigrants shows us that people without fancy educations can succeed (and enrich us all), as long as no one's told them they're doomed to fail...
...But reading about one titanic figure after another is like listening to music with the volume turned all the way up...
...That is, we've lived better than we'd be able to if we were paying our own way and producing what we consumed...
...Instead, just ten pages later, he gives us another heroic profile of another big thinker who has a very different idea...
...But he's not the only journalist to have come across delicious anecdotes...
...Without belaboring the obvious, it hasn't...
...Anytime he and his disciples wanted to, they could make a product man feel inadequate, make him feel he had failed . . . . In those years McNamara always seemed to be saying that yes, there were not merely answers to every question but right answers to every question...
...And at the end of this process you're not sure exactly what you've got—and can use...
...It became harder and harder to figure out what "Japanese" and "American" cars really meant, since there was so much subcontracting and international investment...
...In one way or another the best-sellers of the Reagan era have been about the cultural and human factors that make businesses rise and fall: Theory Z, In Search of Excellence, Japan as Number One, even Iacocca...
...How far would the Japanese have gotten in America if they had pushed cars designed for driving in the left lane...
...The Reagan administration had a plan for getting the economy back in shape...
...Halberstam is very good at writing about people, cultures, and institutions...
...Their world could not have been more different from that of the manufacturing men" The split between the groups mattered, because each tried to pull the company in a different direction...
...Its themes will be familiar to anyone who's read the other books (or more than an issue or two of this magazine), but his narrative approach can make even shop-worn concepts seem vivid and urgent...
...One concerns the rise of financiers within American manufacturing companies...
...We've been reading about them for 15 years...
...Ford lost its edge because the balance of managerial power swung away from men who knew cars and design and manufacturing and toward men who knew only balance sheets...
...But Halberstam keeps following the story, with less detail and without really integrating it with the earlier saga, through the late seventies and early eighties...
...I can best approach this problem by connecting it to the most obvious feature of Halberstam's books: their enormous length...
...Yes, some people really are extraordinary, and the quirks of their personalities sometimes determine how large institutions behave...
...The Japanese even refuse to buy high-quality, low-cost rice from overseas, because that would disrupt their own precious farmers...
...Most of the trends it describes started before Ronald Reagan became president or even governor of California, but their importance has become urgent and obvious...
...It was quite possible that Nissan could enter the competition and do well...
...In 1982, I was in California, interviewing people in the computer industry...
...We can take one leaf from the Japanese educational model—a faith that everyone can learn, not simply those who do well on the IQ tests—while rejecting the rigidity and rote-learning that typify the Japanese system...
...Whether it is considered sentence by sentence or as a narrative whole, The Reckoning is much too long...
...They were elemental men, physical in any confrontation, often heavy drinkers after hours...
...Last year Ford had a bigger profit than GM for the first time ever...
...If The Reckoning were reduced to "executive summary" form, like an article in a business journal, it would hardly seem to justify being read by anybody who'd kept up with the business news...
...But we do have something that those tightlyorganized societies lack: the ability to respond, adapt, change, and take advantage of the wildly varying talents of people who think they can do something new...
...Whenever the "factory men" and "car guys" asked for investments in new models or new manufacturing techniques, the finance men could prove that it was too expensive, or would depress quarterly earnings, or would scare off investors on Wall Street...
...More important, the superabundance of anecdotes brings up the Deadly Gambits problem once again...
...The Japanese have answers to these questions...
...The system stops working so well when individual opportunity turns into raw selfcentered greed, but our society contains few builtin barriers to keep self-interest within useful bounds...
...Something has gone wrong somewhere at the heart of America's productive system...
...This is of Naohiro Amaya, a truly impressive (to me) Japanese official who argues that the U.S...
...Other rule-changes could make a healthy difference...
...Still, in large ways and small his book fleshes out and confirms the recent conventional wisdom, rather than challenging or revising it...
...As everyone knows, The Reckoning is about the rise of the Japanese auto industry and the simultaneous decline of Detroit...
...If you've compared Japanese and American factories making similar products, you can't help but see the contrast...
...With his obvious intelligence and his worn-on-the-sleeve moral righteousness he led a major manufacturer away from a focus on manufacturing—and then legitimized our escalation in Vietnam, which in retrospect looks like America's most damaging episode since the Civil War...
...the other, that there's lots of hope ahead...
...They were the vanguard of the new meritocratic American middle class that, in America's postwar affluence, was ascending to become the upper middle class...
...I think The Reckoning is a more useful description of what's gone wrong in the Reagan years...
...The Australian rally would be over rough, rocky, often muddy roads...
...That was why Strobe Talbott was right to use so many anecdotes about the "two Richards," Perle and Burt, in Deadly Gambits and why Halberstam is right to use the stories here...
...is better on those counts than Japan, despite our well-known current troubles with manufacturing...
...The contrast is between the Japanese culture, which has never taken even survival for granted and has arranged itself to cooperate for mutual good, and the American culture that became so rich after World War II that it forgot many of the original sources of its success...
...The book loses energy as the thematic connections grow less distinct...
...Halberstam's writing is tighter than in some of his previous books, but he still indulges himself in several annoying narrative habits that are tolerable in short bursts but really get on a reader's nerves after 700 pages...
...But in the last section the facts are confused, and so is the book's direction...
...Our society has always been based on the "pursuit of happiness" and the chance for individuals to make better lives for themselves...
...Halberstam can't be blamed for the complexity of modern manufacturing...
...he needs a lot of room to operate...
...Beyond the way he tells his stories, there is a problem with the stories Halberstam has chosen to tell...
...Practically everybody in this book is "extraordinarily" something or other: smart (usually), insightful, powerful, instinctive, brilliant, or whatever...
...It's possible that Shaiken is right, but it's not obvious that he is...
...The book is also too long because Halberstam tries to tell too much...
...We have to find ways to keep the black underclass from believing it's doomed—and everyone else from believing that if you didn't go to the right prep school or college, you're not any good...
...Halberstam even accomplishes the usually overwhelming task of making individual Japanese protagonists vivid and memorable to American readers—including two figures with names easily confused by westerners, Kawamata and Katayama...
...During the Second World War, in an attempt to coordinate the gargantuan logistics of the Allied force, the American military had spawned bright, young specialists in statistics and scientific management...
...This book is full of them: Lee Iacocca and Henry Ford yelling at each other at Ford, one big-shot at Nissan secretly waging war on another, people being fired and snubbed and promoted in ways that make larger points about their institutions and cultures...
...Halberstam's diminish the force of his argument, as the repetitious anecdotes and overblown writing diminished The Best and the Brightest...
...In the long run . .well, it was a different story...
...But your decision is inevitably judgment, not "truth ." You can't really be sure, in the way you can be sure about things you've seen yourself...
...The factory men typically were blue-collar men who had risen by dint of energy, zeal, and shrewdness...
...Few of them had finished high school...
...His special ability was using numbers to tilt a decision in the direction he One of the delights of the book is seeing Halberstam work over Robert McNamara once again...
...Detroit and American manufacturing in general suffered because stock market speculators cared only about the next quarter's results, and because unions were greedy, and because managers were greedier still, and because everyone involved viewed the factories as pies to carve up and eat...
...Through the first two-thirds of the book, the ideas are in synch and Halberstam doesn't need to serve as analyst...
...In general, Halberstam tells us what we already know...
...If he can't do that, he might even, for once, say he was wrong and is sorry...
...The Whiz Kids knew everything about statistics...
...Japanese auto construction, Katayama knew, was not very sophisticated, not very original, but it was very solid...
...Shaiken, an expert on technology, had gained exceptional insight into the dramatic changes taking place in the American workplace, in part because of his formidable intellect and in part because of the years he spent, before finding his place in academia, as a worker on the GM line...
...Against them, how did the Japanese have a chance...
...How could Jimmy Carter have dreamed of reelection, with the prime rate hitting 21 percent in an election year...
...The stories make the book, but they also create several difficulties...
...The book took six years as is...
...But in the middle of 1986 there seemed little awareness of this, let alone concern about it...
...The U.S...
...The more you look into them, the less clear-cut and hard-edged they tend to become...
...Shaiken has advanced the view that today's automation is fundamentally different than anything that's happened before...
...Halberstam didn't need to get into this thicket, but if he's going to introduce the issues he should provide some of the evidence on each side, so we'll have an idea which is likelier to be true...
...But laws, company policies, and public values also have helped minimize the gap between classes...
...In some cases, we can constrict the operation of greed by changing laws and rules...
...We are rich, diverse, not threatened by much...
...And even though Caspar Weinberger rarely explained the defense budget just this way, the big military buildup was also supposed to help the economy by creating new demand for high-tech goods...
...The natural focus of his story is what went on between the end of the war and the oil boycotts of the early seventies, the period when the Japanese pulled themselves up from nothing and Detroit grew too complacent and lazy to respond...
...Nissan auto bodies were strong, and they had, whatever else, endurance...
...If we recognize that we are in trouble and that our adaptable vitality is our one crucial economic asset, we can take the steps necessary to keep the society as loose as it can be...
...To some degree the Japanese can agree to share because they see themselves as part of one racially- "pure" tribe...
...It is written with the edge that only longnursed hatred can produce...
...The closing words of the book are these: "No country, including America, was likely ever to be as rich as America had been from 1945 to 1975, and other nations were following the Japanese into middle class existence, which meant that life for most Americans was bound to become leaner...
...It might not win, but it could surprise some people...
...But despite their successes, the Japanese have not lost much of that desperate, produce-or-die energy that propelled them in the first place...
...Nissan had its first loss in years...
...US Steel...
...Ford, after all, began to pull itself toward prosperity last year, when Nissan suffered its first loss in years...
...The OPEC oil boycott came soon after that, and through the rest of the decade we limped along and learned about stagflation...
...While Reagan and Kemp were still proJames Fallows is an editor of The Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...The most important change would be to spend less money on defense, so there's more available for commerical investment, but that's a different subject...
...Changing a culture is never easy, but I think two adjustments are possible—and indispensable to our recovery as a sound, healthy society...
...Six years after the tax cuts that were celebrated as inaugurating the "Reagan Revolution," America's economy has proven resilient in many ways—absorbing throngs of new workers, radically reducing inflation—but it has done so only by borrowing like crazy from the rest of the world...
...There's room to argue with Amaya's ideas, as well as with Shaiken's...
...Halberstam has a few less-familiar points to make about the Japanese side of the industry, especially about the post-war union-busting struggles that prepared the way for today's "harmonious" labor relations...
...Americans buy high-priced domestic sugar, but that's because the sugar lobby forces us to do so though import quotas...
...Who can doubt that observation after watching managers hog huge benefits even when they're asking workers to cut back, perhaps the most destructive form of greed evident in American industry...
...In the short run, they were right...
...Still, if Halberstam's charges are even approximately correct, the two books add up to a case that McNamara was the man who ruined post-war America...
...But before we hope, we may have to fear, and in a healthy, bracing, Sunday-sermon way that is what The Reckoning helps us do...
...Few were discussing how best to adjust the nation to an age of somewhat diminished expectations, or how to marshal its abundant resources for survival in a harsh, unforgiving new world, or how to spread the inevitable sacrifices equitably...
...In Japan there's as much egalitarianism as industrial life permits, while in America it's a daily class war...
...By now, of course, the psychological positions of the two countries have reversed: when you're in Japan, it's easy to conclude that if the Japanese concentrate, they can make just about any manufactured product better than anyone else in the world...
...So what could be wrong with such a book...
...To some extent this is merely because of the author's idiosyncratic style...
...mising that lower marginal tax rates would suddenly cure America of what ailed it, businessmen were gobbling up books and articles about "corporate culture" and true competitive strategy...
...is culturally more fit than Japan for the next stage of economic struggle...
...The first was Japan's version of the finance man: a banker who muscled his way into controlling Nissan after the war, when the bank's loans were all that kept the company afloat...
...Then you ask someone else, and he doesn't remember it quite that way...
...The longer he goes on the more loose ends turn up...
...There is a vigorous argument about his contention, with evidence available to each side...
...as he tells the man's story he presents his idea, trying it out against different evidence and seeing whether it holds up...
...Halberstam has said that if he had descended into GM, he might never have come back up...
...They knew what they knew but seldom could articulate it except in the crudest way, with the aid of anger or obscenity...
...He convincingly conveys the total devastation of the country after the war, when proud people were reduced to eating scraps thrown out by plump GIs...
...The Japanese triumphed because they'd been chastened by war, and because their society stressed teamwork and shared sacrifice, and because they cared about building the right car for the market and designing it well...
...It helps us remember that some activities that are sanctioned by the market but harmful to society can be stopped, or at least outlawed...
...In fact, the familiarity of its themes and subject makes The Reckoning's success more impressive...
...Considering the closed-mouthedness of Japanese salarymen, it's remarkable that he tells these stories at all...
...Out of dozens of possibilities, let me mention only two illustrations of how Halberstam brings his themes to life...
...Halberstam says that McNamara declined to be interviewed...
...PUTTING THE BRAKES ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS Hope for American industrial recovery can be seen in Halberstam's vivid depiction of our economic decline by James Fallows B y the time Ronald Reagan took office, even he must have understood that America's economy was in trouble...
...For years, this magazine has been recommending that "capital gains" tax breaks be given only for new productive investment, not just for asset-shuffling or speculation...
...One of the Whiz Kids, Robert S. McNamara, eventually became the company's president...
...Although they were desperate to rebuild their industrial base (and fell into many unfair-trade practices that they've never given up), the Japanese were also abashed by the mere thought of competing against the mighty American firms...
...Some of the manufacturing jobs that went overseas in the sixties and seventies came back, as the Japanese built plants closer to their markets in the U.S...
...The restraining forces we have—religion, fellowfeeling, a sense of honor and community—are important but can often be overwhelmed, as they seem to have been in the eighties...
...Whereas all previous waves of automation have created more jobs in new industries than they have destroyed in old industries, today's "superautomation" is, according to Shaiken, really going to destroy American jobs and send them irretrievably all around the world...
...The second was Nissan's unsung hero of the American market, an un-typical Japanese freewheeler who loved California and made friends for the company all over the American West...
...When there's such good money in investment banking, how can we expect talented people to resist...
...David Halberstam's The Reckoning is a culmination of this literature of business culture, more valuable than most because it is such a thorough and engrossing case study...
...The plan began and, for practical purposes ended, with dramatic cuts in tax rates...
...But that book, despite its defects, remains readable and important 15 years after it was published, and I think The Reckoning is in the same league...
...All the other, extra-automotive forces he wants to describe had also kicked in by the seventies— the rise of financiers and lawyers, the erosion of the Depression-era work ethic, and so on...
...Most Japanese, by contrast, seem grateful to be sheltered from foreign rice...
...As in The Best and the Brightest he offers no on-the-other-hand material or rebuttal from McNamara himself...
...Although it took some time for businessmen to realize this, they were way ahead of the politicians...
...That is, adaptability and creativity are about to become more important, and the U.S...
...One of the delights of this section is seeing Halberstam work over Robert McNamara once again...
...No doubt McNamara is an earnest man who has done penance now for nearly 20 years, first at the World Bank and then through his work for arms control...
...He might explain why he thinks the attacks on him are unfair...
...The second illustration of Halberstam's narrative success is his portrayal of the disciplined, determined post-war Japanese...
...Without child labor laws, companies would be telling us it was their "duty" to hire nine-year-olds to work in the mills, otherwise they'd be letting the stockholders down...
...But the book is so much more than a summary or policy outline, so rich and engaging in the tales it tells, that it makes its mainly-familiar ideas seem entirely new...
...As he showed in The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam is the reigning champ of the delicious, emblematic, character-revealing (and unattributed) episode...
...wanted, which was almost surely the direction his superior wanted...
...From what I have seen during the last year in Asia, America can recover—and prevail—in competition against Japan, but only if we understand clearly what our cultural strengths and weaknesses are...
...The book is almost devoid of normal people with soft edges and hazy motivations and B-minus records in life...
...David Halberstam does not know that his stories about Iacocca and McNamara and Kawamata are really true...
...they knew nothing about cars and looked down on the lowgrade characters who made and sold them: "Between the factory men and the Whiz Kids lay a chasm of class...
...At that point you make a decision...
...He tells about Henry Ford's boyhood, Ralph Nader's suit against GM, MacArthur's record as post-war viceroy in Japan, the ethnic history of Detroit, the connection between Nasser's politics and the oil boycotts of the seventies...
...Moreover, the basic logic of our culture promotes greed in a way the Japanese culture does not...
...The other important cultural change comes from the realization that except in emergencies, America can't match Japan or Korea in teamwork or self-sacrifice: Those are small, mobilized, united societies, ever aware of the threats to their continued existence...
...it determines whether or not their companies can survive...
...Despite our failures, the U.S...
...The following fairly typical passage, describing Katayama's daring decision to enter an ugly-butrugged Nissan in a trans-Australia endurance race, is two or three sentences' worth of content occupying eight sentences of space: "The Japanese, [Katayama] thought, might just win a race like this...
...He is not so good at writing about ideas...
Vol. 19 • April 1987 • No. 3
