Blindside CL

``Sometimes it seems as if Americans see Washington as the Vatican of world capitalism and Tokyo as merely another diocese,'' writes Fingleton, Asia editor of Euromoney magazine, but ``for the Japanese a more appropriate metaphor is the secular one of corporate competition. Tokyo is playing Microsoft to Washington's IBM.'' And Fingleton, closely examining Japan's economic thrust and its cultural traditions, finds it the inevitable winner. He compares favorably Japan's managed economy with the U.S. drive for free trade; discusses the pragmatic Confucian attitudes toward hierarchy, both for individuals and nations, versus the ``American rhetoric'' about democracy; and asserts that not only has America been poorly served for decades by its economists, politicians, media and elite, but it has been ``blindsided'' by Japan's misleading habits of apparent deference and its own ``semireligious'' view of economics. Although Japan is not on an ideological crusade to take over the world economically, its power structure gives it a flexibility that can make it the next global leader, asserts the author. This provocative and informed analysis is an antidote to the recent flurry of critiques that see Japan's current economic troubles as the same old omens of decline. (Mar.)