⛩️ #36 Bond to Bust: How 3 Sean Connery Films Explain Japan’s Economic Fall

The Headlines, This Week in Japanese History, and Much More

Members of Congress conduct an anti-Toshiba protest on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, 1987. Image: AFP

They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs. They knock the hell out of our companies.

First they take all our money with their consumer goods, then they put it back in buying all of Manhattan.

Donald Trump on Japan. 1987.

* * *

On Halloween 1989, Mitsubishi Real Estate announced they had struck a deal to take control of Manhattan's iconic Rockefeller Center.

It was the culmination of a Japanese economic boom which had led to increasingly hysterical American fears that their country would become a financial slave to Tokyo — and perhaps even be subjected to a second Pearl Harbor.

However, a few weeks later, the Japanese stock market began an extended decline, foreshadowing several decades (and counting) of economic stagnation.

Bizarrely, all you need to grasp the history of this economic clash of the titans — and the most exciting period in Japanese-American relations since World War II — is three movies starring Sean Connery.

Let'sh jump into the shtory together —

THE QUIZ

A picture any Japanese person will recognize instantly — do you?

Question: what’s going on here?

Answer at the foot of the mail.

THE HISTORY

Bond to Bust: How 3 Sean Connery Films Explain Japan’s Economic Fall

Sean Connery as Captain Marko Ramius (left), King Arthur (center) and Captain John Conner (right). Images: various

The Hunt for Red October, or, Did Toshiba Almost Win the Cold War for the Soviets?

In the 1990 film The Hunt for Red October, Sean Connery stars as Marko Ramius, the captain of a cutting-edge Russian submarine equipped with revolutionary propeller technology that renders it invisible to sonar.

Such a submarine would be able to loiter undetected in coastal waters for months at a time, cutting the warning time for a nuclear strike to mere minutes, crippling U.S. deterrence strategy, which depends on early detection to prepare for or prevent an incoming strike — and shift the Cold War in favor of the Soviets.

Luckily the film, based on Tom Clancy’s 1984 novel of the same name, describes an entirely fictional scenario.

Except it was actually true.

In fact, the Soviets had been trying to develop a silent propeller for their subs, but found their manufacturing industry inadequate to the task — so looked to world-leading Japan to provide the tech.

In the early 1980s, agents acting on behalf of the Soviet government through Tekmashimport — a KGB-linked trade organisation — headed to Tokyo to acquire the necessary high-performance milling machines, whose exports were prohibited through the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom).¹

They quickly found a subsidiary of tech giant Toshiba willing to help.²

Toshiba Machine supplied eight “machine tools” to the Soviet Union's Technical Machinery Import Corporation — of a type employees knew they couldn’t sell openly. A front company called Wako Trading was set up to create false permits, and off the milling equipment went to Moscow…

Members of Congress demolish a Toshiba boombox on the steps of the Capitol. Image: public domain

…The first the Americans knew about the deal was when Soviet subs suddenly went dark — just like Tom Clancy’s Hunt for Red October scenario (in fact, the author remarked in a 1986 interview, “When I met Navy Secretary John Lehman last year, the first thing he asked me about the book was, 'Who the hell cleared it?'”)³

The U.S. defense establishment was plunged into crisis: was this prelude to an nuclear first strike? And how exactly had the subs become near-undetectable?

Cue an informant at Wako Trading, the front corporation for the machine exports, who told the Americans what was going on. A Pentagon investigation quickly concluded the Toshiba equipment had indeed contributed to a sudden improvement in the Soviet subs’ stealthiness.

The Americans released the news to the world; within a month Japanese police had searched Toshiba Machine and arrested two execs for violating the Foreign Exchange Law, based on the false export forms.

Congressman Duncan Hunter severely criticized Toshiba for putting the lives of American servicepeople in danger, and argued that it would be necessary to invest $30 billion to build 30 new nuclear submarines within 10 years.

The import of all products of the Toshiba Group was promptly banned — leading to the photographs in this edition where members of Congress smashed up various Toshiba TVs and boomboxes on the steps of the Capitol.

* * *

The Hunt for Red October scenario and its fall out was not the only sign of the anti-Japanese feeling which had thoroughly permeated the American cultural landscape by the 1990s. Along with furious newspaper editorials, thinktank pieces, and learnéd discourse, a deluge of novels hit the shelves, portraying Japan as an economic adversary and cultural threat.

One of those novels provided the raw material for another Sean Connery movie…

Rising Sun, or, The New Yellow Peril

An X user’s edit of all Sean Connery’s Japanese lines in Rising Sun. Perfect if you ever wanted to hear James Bond explain sempai/kouhai dynamics, or shout “OUT OF CONTROL GAIJIN!!”

While Americans were wigging out over Toshiba propellers, Mitsubishi buying Rockefeller Center and other desecrations of their culture like Nintendo corrupting children with game consoles plus infiltrating the national pastime by investing in the Seattle Mariners baseball team, Michael Crichton sat down to write his follow up to Jurassic Park.

The book was called Rising Sun.

Ostensibly it’s a mystery, but basically consists of pages upon pages of the writer complaining about how unfair Japanese business practices are, as opposed to any characters or drama, but that’s par for the course for Crichton, who loved displaying his research and has thus basically been superseded at this point by Wikipedia.

But it did contain one character Hollywood calls “castable”: Armani-clad Zen cop Capt. John Connor (no relation to Terminators).

The novel was so hot the rights were sold for $1m⁴ and the movie rushed into theaters within 18 months.

Sean Connery plays Connor, a retired cop with deep knowledge of Japanese culture, called to assist a murder investigation when a young woman is found dead at a Los Angeles office of a powerful Japanese corporation.

He and his partner spend time arguing whether Japanese culture is bad or just misguided, then bust a Tokyo exec for the croak-job — but it’s revealed that he was acting to protect even higher-ranking executives involved in a forthcoming merger deal!!

Today the movie is sometimes a hard watch — director Phillip Kaufman excised the worst of Crichton’s anti-Japanese bashing, but couldn’t resist adding some ripe bullshit of his own, in the form of a Japanese playboy eating sushi off a nude blonde, and a couple of martial-arts punch-ups.

He also decided, on the basis of rough footage from the then-unreleased White Men Can’t Jump, to cast Wesley Snipes as the other cop, leading to an entirely different black/Asian racial dynamic, as opposed to the straight-ahead white vs Asian clash of the Crichton original.

In hindsight, the Snipes factor makes the movie more digestible — while also leaving us with the, ahem, memorable scene where he and Connery escape a car full of yakuza by driving into an L.A. ghetto, to the sudden blaring of rap music on the soundtrack. Gangbangers quickly surround the yaks and show them some African-American hostility, from which the Japanese flee in terror. Snipes is given the zinger: “Rough neighborhoods may be America’s last advantage.”

The film’s release was decently controversial: a few protests, a bomb threat or two, and this, from veteran Asian actor Mako: “There aren’t enough Japanese elements in Rising Sun to lead to any sort of enlightenment about Japanese culture or corporate structure. What you see is a superficial glimpse.”⁵

He should know: he was in it, playing Yoshida, the (inevitably) tight-lipped Japanese CEO.

By the time Rising Sun was released, the apex of anti-Japanese feeling in America had been reached— and soon it would be on the decline, in lockstep with the Tokyo stock market.

And as the tide went out on Japan’s ostentatious investments in the United States, it revealed that over-confidence had led some egregious blunders to be made.

One such mistake was going to cost Sony Corporation at least $3.2bn — a disaster which another movie starring Sean Connery couldn’t help them recover from.

First Knight, or, “Those people at Sony have to be the dumbest bastards that ever lived!”

Hollywood exists by constantly finding the next sucker.

The early studios were financed by parent companies out East; the moguls would wire back to New York for cash, pleading poverty while living high off the Tinseltown hog.

Then large corporations got involved — conglomerates like Gulf+Western, which took control of Paramount Pictures in 1966 without realizing how the slick LA operators were going to bleed them for cash by exploiting the legalized fraud known as “Hollywood accounting”.

The 1970s saw the foreign presale market explode, with trash like The Towering Inferno paid for in advance by distributors in Europe desperate for anything starring Steve McQueen or Paul Newman or Burt Reynolds — and with the cash already secured there was no need to bother with trifles like making sure the script was up to scratch.

Then, in the 80s and 90s Japan was awash with cash — so Hollywood starting plotting how best to extract it.

In Tokyo and New York, those with vested interests made sure “synergy” was the new buzzword, and hardware manufacturers started to snap up content producers in an attempt to build end-to-end entertainment businesses.

Sony came to believe their own lack of synergy between hardware and content had led to their Betamax product losing out to VHS in the fight to become the world-standard video recorder format.

Sony CEO Akio Morita — who had been on the receiving end of some harsh American criticism after co-writing a book titled The Japan That Can Say No with Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, arguing that Japan should assert itself more independently on the world stage, particularly in relation to the United States — started casting around Hollywood to find a suitable candidate for acquisition, quickly coming up with Columbia Pictures Entertainment, formally the domain of uber-producer “King” Harry Cohn, now 80% owned by Coca-Cola.

Despite hits like Ghostbusters and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Coke shareholders had long been nervous about the volatility of the movie biz, feeling, rightly, that they were merely the current suckers being manipulated by the Hollywood slicks.

They leapt at the chance to sell to Sony — who agreed to a $4.7-billion purchase price (including debt assumption), while also making the truly terrible decision to bring in two producers called Jon Peters and Peter Guber to run the studio on their behalf.

Peters, who started out as Barbara Streisand’s hairdresser before becoming her lover and producing partner, had a distinct personality quirk: insisting his writers read their scripts aloud to him (as explained here hilariously by Kevin Smith), allegedly because he was illiterate.

He was also the kind of deep thinker who, when meeting Dustin Hoffman on the set of Rain Man, asked “are you playing the retard or the other guy?”

(Such is his Hollywood notoriety that he was played — as a vain moron — by Bradley Cooper in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, and we don’t mean a thinly-veiled version; he announces his name is Jon Peters and he is dating Barbara Streisand).

Guber in contrast was a slick operator, always ready to sign a new deal while extracting the maximum possible personal value.

As part of the deal, Sony also agreed to pay $200m to buy out their own company Peters-Guber Entertainment — without realizing they were already locked in a deal with Time-Warner, whose boss Steve Ross then forced Sony to pony up another billion or so in cash and real estate so Warner would set Guber and Peters free.

This expense looked even worse after Peters and Guber took over and proceeded to treat Columbia as their own personal fiefdom, spending Sony money like it was water.

How bad did it get? Well, the book is called HIT AND RUN: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood.

It’s a wild ride, but we’ll keep it to a couple of choice quotes: “Those people at Sony have to be the dumbest bastards that ever lived!”, and “Pearl Harbor Revenged”.⁶

Within five years Sony declared a loss of an additional $3.2 billion, over and above the purchase price for Columbia.

Peters and Guber were finally ejected in the typical Hollywood fashion, that is, by giving them mega-rich producing deals that further filled their pockets.

By 1995, the fiscal health of the studio was slowly improving — only for Sony to receive another blow as their big summer movie proved to be a severe box office disappointment: First Knight, a retelling of the King Arthur legend, starring Sean Connery.

Postscript

• Sony founder Akio Morita resigned as chairman less than two weeks after the $3.2bn financial write-off. He was removed from the board and stripped of all formal power. The company denied is was due to the disastrous Peters/Guber rule over Columbia Pictures.

• Sony vandals Jon Peters and Peter Guber faced zero consequences for their mismanagement, and went on to blow many more millions other people’s dollars on a huge array of entertainment projects.

• They also still appear regularly in the press to this day:

• In 2020 incorrigible ladies man Peters married Pamela Anderson. They divorced 12 days later. Sample quote from interview after the swift demise of their relationship: “I will always love Pamela, always in my heart. As a matter of fact, I left her $10 million in my will. And she doesn't even know that. Nobody knows that.”

• Amongst a web of other business interests, Peter Guber now co-owns mega successful NBA basketball team the Golden State Warriors, which alone pushes his net worth into billionaire territory.

• Hollywood continues to look for new suckers to finance its movies.

• The Hunt for Red October author Tom Clancy released his own anti-Japan novel in 1994, Debt of Honor, in which a secret cabal of Japanese industrialists seize control of their country's government and wage war on the United States — including a scenario where a disgruntled Japanese airline pilot crashes a Boeing 747 into the U.S. Capitol dome during an address by the President to a joint session of Congress, killing the President and most of Congress (!!)

• When he began his quest for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump resurrected his 1980s Japan-bashing, designating it as a country where “we are getting absolutely crushed on trade”. The stale material — so at his speeches — until he blurted out the line “We can’t allow China to rape our country, and that’s what we’re doing,” inspiring an approving roar from the audience. Trump has built on the theme ever since.

• A few years ago, Toyota became the number one car maker in the USA. Hardly anyone noticed — and fewer cared.

• We couldn’t do Sean Connery and Japan without mentioning his turn in You Only Live Twice, the Bond film where he dons yellowface and — ahem — passes as Japanese. So there we go, we mentioned it. He passed away in 2020 at the age of 90. RIP.

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THE LANGUAGE

5 Beautiful Autumn Words

Many western writers have deployed autumn as a metaphor for aging and the passing of all things, but we’re with the Japanese writers who understand nature, and know it as a season of renewal after the long hot summer.

Here are 5 Japanese words we’re into this time of year:

1️⃣ 金木犀 (Kinmokusei)

That smell you smell that tells you it’s autumn — “fragrant olive” in English — kinmokusei is one of the cornerstones of the Japanese fall experience.

2️⃣ 霧 (Kiri)

Depending on the season, there are two different words for mist — the spring variety is kasumi (霞) while autumn is kiri (霧). We believe there’s nothing better than waking up on a chilly autumn morning and seeing the kiri clinging to the mountains surrounding Kyoto.

3️⃣ 来雁 (Raigan)

Another spring/autumn pair — 帰雁 (kigan) are wild geese returning north after wintering in warmer areas. 来雁 (raigan) refers to the geese arriving in autumn, marking the beginning of their migration south for the winter. Both are perennial features of the Japanese literary tradition.

4️⃣ 鱗雲 (Urokogumo)

A wonderfully euphonious word, whose literal meaning is “scale clouds”, as in fish scales — which the characteristic cirrocumulus clouds of autumn resemble.

5️⃣ 秋入梅 (Akitsuiri)

The type of autumn rain that batters down continuously, just like during the traditional rainy season of early summer, we’ve always found it somehow comforting and beautiful.

THE LINKS

3 things worth your time about Japan this week:

1. 6 tanka poems on autumn from the Kokinshū, translated by Ad Blankestijn

2. Sophisticated Criminals Recruit for Shady Part-time Work in Japan, by Mark Kennedy.

3. The miracle blue of Hiroshige by Jeffrey Streeter (via Gianni Simone)

THE ANSWER

Question: what’s going on here?

Answer: it’s a so-called black factory, where foreign workers are exploited by Japanese bosses. Labor shortages in Japan’s agriculture, nursing and retail industries caused by the aging population has led to the setting up of a “technical intern” scheme for South-East Asian workers, some of whom have found their wages withheld and passports confiscated.

This, along with a million other things, it what the “Japan is living in the future” content creators miss…

(Lawyer Shoichi Ibusuki became the second Japanese to be named a Trafficking in Persons Report Hero by the U.S. State Department for his long battle protecting the rights of foreign technical trainees in Japan — this after Ibusuki’s rather slow start in the law, having failed Japan’s annual bar examination for 17 successive years before finally passing at the age of 44).

Enjoy The Kyote this time? Check this out next: When Japanese Coup Plotters Tried to Assassinate Charlie Chaplin

We’ll see each other again next week,

The Kyote

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The Kyote is published in Kyoto, Japan every Sunday at 19:00 JST

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba%E2%80%93Kongsberg_scandal

2. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/the-toshiba-kongsberg-case

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/books/tom-clancy-best-selling-novelist-of-military-thrillers-dies-at-66.html#:~:text=Clancy%20said%2C%20%E2%80%9CWhen%20I%20met,'%20%E2%80%9D&text=No%20one%20did%2C%20Mr.,on%20military%20matters%2C%20he%20said.

4. https://variety.com/1993/film/news/exposure-generates-h-w-d-heat-103456/

5. https://ew.com/article/1993/08/06/rising-sun-stirs-controversy/

6. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-16-bk-15424-story.html