NEW YORK -- Americans love to learn and teach lessons. The Japanese love to seek and accept them.

The American propensity has been manifest, in recent months, in the reaction to what has now been abbreviated to "9-11" and in what the New York Times has called "the wave of corruption that seems to be engulfing much of corporate America." About the latter, in fact, the Times did a June 9 magazine special titled "The Long Hangover: Paying the Price for the Boom," with the parenthetical subtitle "What we learned -- and what we didn't."

That reminded me of the bewildering slew of Japanese attempts during the 1990s to learn from America.