Japan: Coming On Strong

?A Japanese real estate developer with an interest in yachting and a keen eye for the cutting edge recently offered to pay millions to ship about 20 racing boats from Newport, R.T., to a fishing community called Miura, about 70 miles south of Tokyo, for a regatta he wants to host in his home waters. "We want to have the 50-foot boat race in Japan because we think it is more exciting than the America's Cup," a spokesman for businessman Masotoshi Morita told The New York Times . "We feel it is the future." The last Japanese who said that was Sony chairman Akio Morita, a sports enthusiast who had his engineers develop a small portable cassette player so that he could listen to music while playing tennis and golf.

?At the Keeneland (Ky.) Yearling Sales last month, Zenya Yoshida, owner of Japan's largest thoroughbred breeding farm, paid $2.8 million for the last colt by aged supersire Northern Dancer to be offered at public auction.

?On Formula One auto racing circuits around the world, engines made by Honda have won an astonishing 22 of the last 26 races. Honda has established a virtual stranglehold on Grand Prix racing (page 58).

? Toyota has signed a $130 million contract that designates it as one of the two major automobile sponsors when CBS Sports begins its coverage of the national pastime—ours and theirs—in 1990.

?Last year, to prevent the NHL's Quebec Nordiques from moving to another city, the local subsidiary of Japan's Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Co. purchased an 18% interest in the team. The move was interpreted as a gesture of goodwill to the community, although as one team official later pointed out, "They wanted to do something that would sell their name quickly, and in 24 hours Daishowa became a well-known and easily pronounced name in Quebec."

?In what surely would have been the most shocking deal in sports since the Dodgers left Brooklyn, a Japanese investor came breathtakingly close last winter to buying America's Team, the Dallas Cowboys, before Arkansas oilman Jerral W. Jones stepped in at the last minute with the reported winning bid of $140 million. "I can't say the Japanese investor forced Mr. Jones to act quickly," says Jack Veatch of Salomon Brothers, the investment firm that conducted the negotiations for the franchise. "But I would say it had something to do with it. He [the Japanese investor] was about to make an offer."

Being label-conscious, the Japanese would much rather buy a team like the Cowboys after their worst season than one like the Cincinnati Bengals after their best, for they attach enormous importance—as well as equally enormous sums of money—to prestigious names. Los Angeles Realtors say they can sell Japanese buyers practically anything with a Beverly Hills address, but almost nothing in nearby Bel Air. In the sports market, just as in real estate, the Japanese have confined themselves almost exclusively to the so-called trophy purchases that confer great honor upon the buyer, no matter how badly he may have overpaid.

In order to understand the Japanese phenomenon in sports, it's essential to understand a little of the Japanese culture. For instance, it is no surprise that their buying spree has consisted primarily of golf courses and ski resorts—real estate—given the fact that Japan, an archipelago of slightly less land mass than California but with nearly five times the people, is one of the most densely populated nations in the world. So much to do, and so little space.

Many of the 10 million Japanese tourists expected to go abroad this year will leave at two peak times, in August and at New Year's, creating what has become a semiannual panic at the nation's airports. Where they travel and how they travel is often dictated by the special nature of Japanese society. Travel brochures in Japan rarely depict deserted beaches or lonely mountaintops, not because they don't exist, but because most Japanese would consider a vacation cut off from their countrymen to be a bitterly lonely business. The Japanese derive enormous satisfaction from being part of a national group. It is the group that sets the rules to which the individual willingly submits. And nowhere is the role of the group more powerfully felt than in Japan's corporate world, where business and golf have become twin secular shrines.

The average Japanese salariman (wage earner) drives the engine of one of the great economic miracles of the century. Men like Toshinori Komatsu, the salesman from Chiba, have built a $95 billion annual trade surplus for their country by working almost an hour a day more than their counterparts in such Western industrial powers as Great Britain, the U.S. and West Germany. And yet the salariman huddles with his family in a living space much smaller than that of his counterpart in the West, and he usually spends hours each day on a train because he cannot afford to live anywhere near his office. A plot of land in the residential neighborhoods of Tokyo sells for about 100 times the cost of a comparable lot in Los Angeles.