Turning the Tables

In Turning the Tables, bestselling author Daniel Burstein has written a book that could totally reshape our thinking about U.S.-Japan relations. Until very recently, Americans felt out-competed and defeated by Japan, Inc. Then, suddenly, the Tokyo stock market crashed and the Japanese economic bubble burst. American fear of Japan subsided. Indeed, it has even become fashionable to dismiss the Japanese competitive threat. But in Turning the Tables Burstein warns that if Americans ignore Japan, we do so only at our peril. Japan will be back - leaner, meaner, and more competitive than ever before. Even now, despite the stock market crash, Japanese industry leads the world in ten "core competencies" critical to economic growth and the development of new global industries in the next century. Before we know it, the Japanese advances in robotics and "flexible manufacturing" will be the new gauntlets thrown down to American business, in the way that "quality" suddenly emerged as an issue in the 1980s. Burstein reveals the real story behind the Japanese financial bubble, explaining how Tokyo's authorities consciously chose to burst it - at great cost - in order to reinvent a new and still more successful Japan. Yet the full re-emergence of Japanese strength may take up to five years. In the meantime, an extraordinary window of opportunity has opened up for American companies to wrest global market share from their Japanese competitors. Now Washington also has a chance to develop an intelligent new Japan strategy. Burstein shows that Americans must move quickly to take maximum advantage of this situation before the window closes. Challenging the "rote" thinking that confuses problems withsolutions, Burstein argues that it is time to stop treating Japan as America's economic enemy, and instead approach it as a potential partner in rebuilding the American economy. The best way to launch the desperately needed process of American economic renewal is not by "getting tough" but by "getting strategic". That means encouraging new Japanese investment in America, especially the transfer of high quality manufacturing jobs, advanced research, and new technology from Japan to the U.S. At a time when politicians on both sides of the Pacific are sorely lacking in vision, Burstein makes a path-breaking proposal that is as controversial as it is thought-provoking: the creation of a Trans-Pacific economic community capable of harnessing Japan's economic strengths on terms favorable to the United States. Turning the Tables illuminates a road toward long-term solutions to the conflicts in U.S.-Japan relations. It shows how to synergize the great and often opposite strengths of both societies. It offers a blueprint for stimulating new economic growth, raising productivity, and creating jobs. Most important, Burstein demonstrates how a partnership with Japan can be a vehicle for catapulting the United States back into a position of global leadership in the borderless economy of the twenty-first century.