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I hope you enjoy this second issue of International ReVisitor as much as the first--we've included reports from three of the programs held in the past year, and also tried to increase the U.S. perspective on the program, with pieces from Louise Crane, Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs at the U.S. Embassy, and from a representative of the Seattle World Affairs Council, which has hosted many Japanese IVs over the years.
I recently "revisited" the United States this summer, spending my yearly vacation, as I normally do, visiting friends and relatives. It was a good chance for me to see how Japan was perceived by ordinary Americans, and to see how the U.S. media were covering Japan--in a period that included the fall of the Hashimoto government and the installment of Prime Minister Obuchi. Many of you who visited the U.S. in the 1980s would be astounded, I believe, by the change of American attitudes toward Japan.
Viewed from the U.S., Japan's current economic predicament is unfathomable. People who had come to the conclusion, or were made to believe by the media, that Japan had supplanted the U.S. as an economic power were now finding it hard to understand Japan's struggles. They ask, "Is the situation as bad as it sounds?" or "Can Japan get its economy moving again?" These are not easy questions to answer, but to judge by Prime Minister Obuchi's visit to the U.S., and the September 2+2 talks in New York, they will continue to be asked.
It might be interesting for you to put yourself back into the shoes of the International Visitor and think about how you might answer these questions. What advice might you offer to a Japanese IV who is about to go to the U.S., meet Americans, and hear such questions? How can the IV best represent Japan and convey the sentiments of his countrymen, thereby establishing relationships that will last beyond the time of the visit? I invite you to relay freely any comments or advice to me I hope to get enough to have material for an article for next spring's issue.
"Not seeing the forest for the trees" is an old saying which means that you can know so much about a subject you miss its essence, its core. One of the things I gain from Japanese who have returned from a trip to the United States is a new perspective on my own country, a subject about which I probably know more than any other. Recently I had the chance to talk with someone who had just resumed from her very first trip to the United States. It is unusual to meet a Japanese who has never been to America so I was very curious to hear what this journalist's first impressions were. She had spent her entire two week vacation in New York City. No American I know would say this gave her a representative view of America which is an extraordinarily diverse country, both in terms of geography and population. New York also has the reputation of being the dirtiest, loudest, rudest city in America. So, it was with some trepidation that I asked her what was the biggest impression she had of America and Americans. I was absolutely amazed when she said she was surprised at how kind Americans were. New Yorkers? Kind? Yes, she said, the people she met every day, from bus drivers to doormen, from postmen to policemen went out of their way to be helpful. She told me of the incident on Fifth Avenue when she got on the bus and asked the driver how far it was to where she was going. "Get off at the next stop," he said, and then refused to let her pay the bus fare because it was such a short trip. Just this week I received an e-mail from another Japanese journalist who has moved to New York to work at the UN. She writes to me that New Yorkers are unfailingly kind and helpful to her. Well, it has taken two Japanese journalists to tell me something about my own country that I could not see. I couldn't see it because I knew too much.
This is what travel does and this is why the United States Government for many years has sent people from many countries to the United States under the international Visitor Program. American popular culture is pervasive--movies, television programs, music videos--and many foreigners' view of the United States is based on the image projected by this entertainment. We Americans know that America, just like Japan, is a far more complex country than the one seen on movies and television screens overseas. The International Visitor Program is designed to provide the foreign participants with a deeper, more complex knowledge of the united States. Hopefully, upon their return, they will be able to articulate a truer and more nuanced picture of the United. States to a broad audience.
I believe that the most you can say about one country as compared with another is that it is different You can't say one country is better than yours or worse than yours, or that yours is inferior or the other superior. All that you can say is that it is different. The International Visitor Program is abut understanding those differences. If we understand our differences, then perhaps we will be able to lessen the misunderstanding which leads to tension and conflict and impedes peace. That is a lofty goal. Perhaps it is impossible to realize it, but we must make the effort.
For over half a century, the United States Information Agency's International Visitor Program has been dedicated to enhancing international understanding and to strengthening cooperation among nations around the globe. The Program provides excellent opportunities for the distinguished leaders of the world to encounter and exchange ideas in the fields of their expertise. What makes this program so unique and outstanding is the strong partnerships between the public and private sectors. Such partnerships enable the program to involve and bring together different parts of America with the rest of the world.
At Seattle's Center for International Visitors (CIV), the staff members and volunteers are working to assist over 500 foreign nationals to meet and confer with their professional counterparts in the region and to experience firsthand the fascinating life the Pacific Northwest has to offer.
The Pacific Northwest, largely due to its geographic location, has historically had strong connections with Pacific Rim countries, especially with Japan in economic cooperation as well as cultural exchanges. From America's leading exporter--Boeing--to America's leading software developer--Microsoft--Washington, the state at the far northwest corner of the continental United States, has become a national trend-setter. An unusual environment and human creativity have combined to produce these achievements. Today, Washington, as a commonwealth of 5.5 million, is economically booming and blessed by its physical environment. Washington shares similar physical characteristics with its neighbors on the other side of the Pacific Rim--vast numbers of people squeezed into small margins of level land between steeply rising volcanic mountains and the sea, or tucked into valleys. The inhabitants of these pockets of the Pacific Rim have, in recent decades, produced more economic growth than anywhere else in the world.
We, as a local CIV, are all excited to introduce our proud land to the world. It is our hope that encounters through USIA's IV Program will enrich all of the participants' personal and professional lives.
Typhoon #7 was no match for Tokai-Hokuriku Economic Seminar #19, held by Nagoya American Center on September 22. Thirty-five attendees braved strong winds and driving rains to hear presentations on "Regional Economic Development: A Look at U.S. Initiatives," by Robert Meeder, president of Pittsburgh Gateways Corporation, and Osamu Aizawa, Nagoya branch chief of the Japan Development Bank. The speakers looked at strategies for encouraging business development in a sector-small and medium-sized enterprises which have driven economic and job growth in the U.S. over the last 20 years.
Saying that business incubators "must be more than a real estate project," Dr. Meeder detailed his firm's approach to providing crucial services to venture start-ups, to help them reach the point where they can thrive in the post-incubation stages of their development. These services include writing business plans and putting together financing for new companies. What is necessary, argued Meeder, was giving companies the expertise, experience, and connections to make their products and services profitable. What is emphatically not necessary, asserted Meeder, was reduced rent in incubators, which eliminates incentives to develop and keeps many new businesses in the infancy stage.
A strong component of all business incubation efforts in the U.S. is close cooperation between universities and the business-finance world. Mr. Aizawa noted the strength of U.S. universities in regard, stressing a few key points. Among them: a greater reliance on grants to scholars for university research funds, and a greater ability for university professors to patent and commercialize their discoveries. This greater freedom, despite holding of patent rights by universities, has allowed universities to become well-springs of commercial ventures and entire technology R&D facilities. Commenting on the possibility of expanding such opportunities for researchers in Japanese universities, Dr. Meeder noted that Japanese researchers in the U.S. are prolific patenters, and that deregulation in Japanese universities could free up myriad opportunities for commercial development of technology in Japan.
With that in mind, it is easy to see that Japan has many of the prerequisites for economic development based on business incubation: talented researchers, financial resources, and a large market. The biggest question, therefore, is how to bring these resources together to build successful enterprises. One answer is to change mentalities, in order to get investors to put money into new ventures based on ideas rather than product or real estate collateral. Another is deregulation allowing university researchers to earn money from commercializing their discoveries. But most importantly, contended Meeder, is the work the goes into building a business through incubators. And for Meeder, the answer to that problem is "business clusters."
Pittsburgh Gateways Corporation has developed the idea of clusters-working with companies in selected fields-in order to accumulate expertise in specific sectors, appeal more to potential investors, increase its ability to serve more start-up businesses, and even find application for the developed services, say in distribution, for companies outside the incubator. The key is to select clusters that fit the local environment-in Pittsburgh that has meant development in such areas as biomedical technology, even the arts, and perhaps more interestingly, a mini-revival of steel production in a region which lost much of its smokestack industries in the recession of the 1980s.
Residents of Chubu will no doubt see some of their own characteristics when studying the experiences of Pittsburgh and its surrounding region: a dedication to manufacturing excellence and a base of traditional industries-for Pittsburgh, glass, iron, and petrochemicals; for Chubu, ceramics, textiles, and automobiles. As was easy to tell from this year's Tokai-Hokuriku Economic Seminar, regional economic revival can be stimulated with new approaches, yet built on the traditional strengths of a region and its people.
