WINNERS AND^479
ready past.^11 Japan's strength and weakness—both—are its sense of
national distinctiveness and superiority. This stimulates the Japanese to
high levels of performance, but it also makes it hard for them to work
with others as equal partners.* My own sense, however, is that the
Japanese will learn—as always.
Two caveats to this East Asian success story. The first concerns pro
motion from plantation industry to autonomous enterprise. Using
modern technology is much easier than inventing it. A handful of
countries are responsible for the vast bulk of industrial patents. These
rampageous comers, with their lusty infant industries, have yet to stand
on their own feet. Some of the hardest work still lies ahead.
Secondly, the faster the growth, the greater the negative side effects,
material and psychological (haste makes waste). Remedies require social
and political institutions capable of mastering the problems and under
taking solutions. These institutions may not be in place. Time marches
on; the remedies never catch up. Often it is simply a question of prior
ities: money matters; people are expendable; related costs can wait.
Take Thailand. The metropolitan area of Bangkok has both ex
ploded and imploded. Industry and trade have rushed in, drawing
throngs of job hunters after, and nominal household income has in
creased tenfold in twenty years.^12 Happy builders have filled every open
and underused space. Even canals, once lifeblood arteries, have been
cemented over to gain ground for construction. Rising income has
made cars proliferate, both for commerce and private use, and the traf
fic jams are monumental. When I visited Bangkok in 1979, the Amer
ican Embassy put a car and driver at my disposal. The car had a mobile
phone (in my innocence, I'd never seen one) to notify the embassy if
we were stuck in a jam; and I was told to make only two appointments
a day, one for A.M., one for P.M. Today, Bangkok has 10 million peo
ple (twenty times its population in 1900) and many of them prefer big
cars. Vehicles pour in every day from the suburbs and surrounding
countryside. Drivers need not only a mobile phone but a potty. Pow
erful people order motorcades, even for wife and children, but the ef
fect on the hundreds of vehicles blocked off and piled up may well be
imagined. In 1979,1 quickly learned not to walk in the streets during
- On the other hand, Chinese clannishness makes them in some places a designated
target for crime, the more so as they are richer than the majority population. This in
turn discourages them from investing locally: who knows when they may have to run?
Cf. Seth Mydans, "Kidnapping of Ethnic Chinese Rises in Philippines," N.T. Times, 17
March 1996, p. 3.