Japanese and Jews: Intersection of Myths : Cultures: Attitudes and the gap between image and reality are explored in a new book by an Israeli professor.

In July, the weekly Shukan Post published an article entitled, “Japanese Corporations Are Dogged by the Stock Manipulations of Jewish Capital.” It was not the first and doubtless will not be the last time that anti-Semitism is openly expressed in Tokyo.

Yet most Japanese would be surprised to hear themselves called anti-Semitic, particularly since they usually cannot tell a Jewish foreigner from a Gentile. Many Japanese also profess to admire Jews for their intelligence, business acumen and strong ethnic loyalties. As Ben-Ami Shillony notes ruefully in his new book “The Jews and the Japanese,” with Japanese it’s often hard to know where philo-Semitism leaves off and anti-Semitism begins.

Shillony, a prominent Israeli professor of Japanese history, analyzes the history of contact between Jews and Japanese. But his book, subtitled “The Successful Outsiders,” also compares the two groups in terms of certain cultural attitudes. For example, Shillony points out that early in their histories, both regarded themselves as “chosen peoples,” and, he says, the gap between self-image and the reality of two “not very impressive countries on the fringes of the great empires of their time . . . created among both the Japanese and the Jews a tension that proved to be highly productive.”

Shillony, the son of a rabbi, is insightful about similarities between Judaism and Shinto. Both “are religions that affirm life and shun suffering and death. When it comes to Japanese attitudes toward Jews, Shillony makes a good case for these having been formed by Christian missionaries, the Bible, “The Merchant of Venice” (the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be translated and performed in Japan) and Japanese Christian sects. One of these--Makuya--calls for a return to the Hebrew origins of Christianity, takes the Jewish menorah rather than the cross as its chief symbol and conducts annual mass pilgrimages to Israel. It also counts among its converts Kozo Okamoto, the only terrorist to survive the 1972 massacre at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv.

Shillony shrewdly notes that “one reason that the idea of a common ancestry still fascinates segments from both societies is that it satisfies the Jewish desire for larger numbers and the Japanese yearning for deeper roots.” He also cites Masanori Miyazawa’s suggestion that for some Japanese, “identification with the Jews is a psychological defense against the West. Attracted by Christian morality but threatened by Western culture, these Japanese have attempted to identify with the ‘original Christians,’ i.e., the Jews.”

My own, somewhat harsher, assessment is that both Japanese and Jews--as successful outsiders--suffer from a “how-are-we-doing” complex. Both are charmed by favorable stereotypes: for example, the notions that Jews have produced more than their share of philosophers and Nobel-winning scientists and musicians; or that Japanese are more artistic, have a better sense of design and are better engineers. Unfortunately, this primitive sense of bonding--of “we” versus “others”--promotes not only positive but also negative stereotyping.

It is often said that the United States is not really a “melting pot” but more of a “salad bowl,” where ethnic groups have retained some of their cultural traits through generations. Ethnic slurs and jokes abound within the United States. But awareness of their diversity also makes Americans as a group wary of being stereotyped. Americans are . . . happy-go-lucky? Lazy? Open-hearted? Violence-prone? War-like? Some Americans, maybe. But Americans as a whole resist such labels. Would that Jews and Japanese also were more skeptical of both good and bad self-characterizations. But if solid research, insightful analysis and an engaging writing style can help dispel such myths, then Shillony’s book should do much good and deserves a wide audience.