China's Turn at Garden Diplomacy

TO ASIAN culture buffs, a tranquil Japanese garden built two decades ago in Houston is in the Daimyo strolling style. Economic historians, an unromantic bunch, see a peace-offering to a rattled American superpower, presented at a moment when Japan’s rise inspired something like panic. Today the garden is a shady oasis, thronged at weekends by Hispanic families filming themselves by its carp-filled pond. But its origins were tangled up with a tense economic summit for G7 nations, held in Houston in 1990. Japan’s prime minister announced a gift of a precious teahouse during that meeting; work on the garden began the next year. Not long before, Japanese buyers had snapped up the Rockefeller Centre and Pebble Beach golf course. Both proved poor investments, but many people at the time saw them as evidence that Japan was overtaking America. (A 1993 film, “Rising Sun”, marked the peak of Japanophobia, mixing sex and murder with dollops of self-doubt: “catch-up” is our national game, mutters an American cop chasing Japanese villains.)

Houston was not Japan’s first go at garden diplomacy. As trade tensions built in the 1970s, Japanese authorities helped to build a fine garden in Missouri and—to mark America’s bicentenary in 1976—sent scores of priceless bonsai to the National Arboretum, a park and research station in Washington, DC. The gift deftly combined generosity, reminders of Japan’s long history and subtle jabs (the tiny trees included a four-centuries-old pine that had survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima). The bonsai won warm headlines. It was an early display of soft power: a term coined by Joseph Nye of Harvard for a country’s ability to inspire and sway others without using force.

Now it is China’s turn.

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