The Enigma of Japanese Power (51 page)

Japan’s administrators, of course, do not see themselves as hatching questionable schemes, out of questionable motives, to increase their hold over the ordinary citizen. The Japanese bureaucratic tradition has conditioned them to believe that society will be undermined if they relax their guard; the idea of citizens who have the political right to decide for themselves remains alien to them.

While there is no unambiguous evidence that Japan’s bureaucrats plan restrictive measures far into the future, they gratefully exploit circumstances in the interests of what can be called long-range control. Japanese women, for instance, have no ready access to pharmaceutical birth-control devices. The official reason for this is the allegedly deleterious side-effects of this ‘new’ drug. Yet in 1986 alone the health bureaucrats permitted the sale of almost half the four dozen genuinely new drugs introduced world-wide that year, the majority of which were of Japanese origin and had been tested only in Japan. The common explanation for keeping efficient birth control out of reach of Japanese is that it would undermine the very lucrative abortion industry (of between one and two million abortions a year),
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and it is true that the Japan Medical Association has used its once formidable powers to keep ‘the Pill’ off the Japanese market (except for the purpose of regulating the menstrual cycle, for which a strong-action variant is used – thus vindicating the allegation of negative side-effects). Whether the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Health and Welfare (a remnant of the Naimusho) actively conspired to bring about this control, or whether they merely welcomed the pressure from the doctors as furthering their own ends, its effectiveness in keeping Japanese women where the administrators want them is the same. Japanese officialdom is aware that emancipated female citizens are likely to disturb the domestic labour system, and the ban on the contraceptive pill has deprived most Japanese women of what in Western societies has been the single most important factor in their social emancipation.

The common argument that the present Japanese political system is more competitive and pluralistic than the pre-war order is not, of course, totally groundless.
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A greater variety of voices participate in the administrative adjustments that must be made to keep the pubic peace. The administrators are certainly more worried about ‘popular opinion’ than they were before 1945; in this respect the Japan of the 1980s is more ‘democratic’ than that of the 1930s.

Yet the decades before the Manchurian Incident saw a far more dramatic competition for power among the various élite bodies. The fledgling political parties dating from the Meiji period had by then, despite systematic obstruction, come sufficiently into their own to compete for power. They had linked up with big business and together they counterbalanced the military. There has been much argument over how potentially democratic Taisho democracy was before the military-bureaucratic alliance brought it to a halt, but the parties did at least compete for the opportunity to form governments or participate in coalitions, and they did challenge the influence of the military and the bureaucracy.
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Around the time when prime minister Hara Kei formed his cabinet in 1918, the two major parties, the Minseito and the Seiyukai, were also influencing the bureaucrats they were absorbing, and local officials were often replaced when these parties rotated cabinets.
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Also, big business, the partner of the politicians, bore a closer resemblance to Western businesses than it does today, both in the structure of corporate relationships and in motivation. Managers unequivocally belonging to the administrator class and closely linked with the national bureaucratic apparatus had not yet taken over totally from the entrepreneurs.

Taisho democracy thus constituted an embryonic form of pluralist party politics not unlike that of the immediate post-war years. The struggle among the parties and other political forces, though veiled by the
kokutai
mythology, carried a potential for an alternative course of political development that appears to be no longer present today.

The political order in the first three decades of this century was less stable than that in the 1980s because of the greater degree of open competition within it. It underwent much more vehement disturbances than the System does today. This was a thorn in the flesh of many Japanese in high positions, who were acutely aware of the discrepancy between the real situation and the ideology of family-like national unity under the protection of the emperor. In the 1920s endemic conflict became more and more open and threatened to become accepted as a normal state of affairs, thus totally contradicting the harmonious essence of
kokutai
. Pluralism within parliamentary processes, together with open competition for power outside them, spelt disorder: anathema to those who saw themselves as guardians of Japan’s sacred order.

As a result, the 1930s brought a new interest in programmes to promote solidarity among the élite and arouse public enthusiasm for policies aimed at bringing out the greatness of Japan. The reform bureaucrats and their associates in various areas of Japanese society, regardless of whether they were initially influenced by Marxist, Nazi or Italian fascist theories, believed that these aims ‘could be obtained only with the formation of a single, totalitarian mass-based political party, closely linked to the government, just like in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy’.
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After the Konoe Fumimaro cabinet came to power in 1937, the New National Structure (or New Order) Movement described above began to emphasise the Japaneseness and sacredness of such an inclusive political organisation.
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The final product of the reformists’ proposals, the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA) that Konoe Fumimaro helped establish in 1940, fell far short of the earlier grandiose plans. The actual IRAA functioned less as a colossal body uniting all Japanese energies in giving its international assertion a common direction than as a massive propaganda apparatus fostering further support for the already widely agreed-upon expansionist aims of the government. Its original intentions were never realised because the various groups of power-holders stopped co-operating the moment they grasped that a stronger centre would mean a relative diminishing of their own powers. The Naimusho, the right wing, several military factions and the judicial bureaucrats under Hiranuma were opposed to a centrally organised state led by Konoe. They feared the rise of a dictatorship that would undermine their own power; and when the Army took the lead in efforts to systematise a ‘new order’ of truly totalitarian quality, the industrialists and groups of bureaucrats as well as rival military cliques lined up in effective opposition.
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As Japan enters what its bureaucrats,
shingikai
reports and the press like to call the ‘information age’ or the ‘post-industrial society’, it seems as if the political economy of Japan is gradually coming to resemble very closely the vision reflected in the blueprint for the IRAA. Between 1945 and 1955 the constellation of political party forces resembled the situation in the 1930s.
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Then came the merger of the ‘conservative’ parties that Uemura Kogoro and other ex-bureaucrat business federation leaders worked so hard to bring about. While this merger did not bring peace to the ranks of the LDP politicians, it did bring significant order to the political world by depositing formal government permanently in the hands of one single organisation. This arrangement, complete with an ideologically inspired party in innocuous opposition, is commonly referred to, as we saw in Chapter 12, as ‘the 1955 system’. It is an arrangement that seems almost to have realised what the reformists of the 1930s advocated.

The one-party system preserves the continuity of an administrator-controlled political system untroubled by such unpredictable political factors as genuine entrepreneurs and genuine politicians. Japan today maintains a socio-political ‘order’ such as it has not experienced since the Tokugawa period. With the salaryman hierarchy providing the flesh and bones of the System, the corporate administrators, together with the officials, keep the workers and the middle-class office clerks in check. The activities of the agrarian administrators in the
nokyo
and the Ministry of Agriculture, together with incessant construction directed more by political considerations than by necessity, keep rural Japan in check. The teachers have been contained. The doctors are paid off. The gangsters continue to help ensure that crime itself is ‘administered’. And now even the remnants of an activist labour movement and ideologically inspired opposition are being welcomed within the folds of the System.

A crucial difference between the 1930s and the 1980s is that in the 1930s the visions embodied in the concept of a ‘national defence state’ and in the New National Structure Movement that inspired the formation of the IRAA were spelled out, and were intended to reshape an existing constellation of élite circles. Some of the latter naturally felt threatened. By contrast, the structure of the post-war System and its goal of unlimited industrial expansion were never packaged in a master-plan that could be attacked. But the objectives of all the post-war élite groups are attuned to the System’s structure and goal. Since the interests of the various administrator groups are accommodated, none is eager for changes in the nature of the System; and thus, unlike their pre-war predecessors, the current administrators appear to have solved the problem of domestic political peace.

An article in the New Year 1982 issue of the LDP party magazine offers a revealing glimpse of how some of the administrators view their own role in the context of the above discussion.
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A collective product of the editorial board, the article gives a fascinating account of how LDP ideologues interpret history, and how they predict the future of their organisation against that background.

After establishing the fact that the chances of an opposition coalition government have all but disappeared, the article predicts the end of the 1955 system, just as we saw Nakasone doing earlier. It relates this to what it considers the two main characteristics of the political course of events since the Meiji Restoration: the fact that anti-governmental groups in Japan were never suppressed, but that governments always listened to them; and that since 1866 a major change in the political system has occurred once every thirty years or so. The interesting fact about the thirty-year cycles, so the article explains, is that somewhere in mid-course there always occurs a political movement led by groups without access to the political process, and that the cyclical change occurs as a result of the government’s accommodation of these movements.

Conveniently jumping over the Pacific War and the United States occupation, the article lists the last two changes as occurring in 1924 and 1955. The movement that followed the cyclical change of 1924 – that led, in other words, to the cyclical change in 1955 – is none other than the New National Structure Movement of the reform bureaucrats. The LDP ideologues explain this as engendered by popular dissatisfaction with the way two political parties were taking turns in forming governments, ‘because this was inviting corruption and business control over polities’. The Imperial Rule Assistance Association was formed to cope with this problem. And under a similar programme – the article continues – business firms formed the industrial patriotic associations (Sangyo Hokokukai) in which labour and management allegedly co-operated in running their enterprises.

The LDP authors are more than a little wide of the mark in presenting the New Order Movement as having emanated from the people. Although it attracted groups seeking a greater say in political decision-making, it was dominated by established political cliques, each of which aimed at strengthening its own position within the élite. The LDP spokesmen ignore the imperialist war and the occupation as if they were unimportant sideshows; but it is interesting to see how they accommodate the wartime political institutions. The Sangyo Hokokukai, according to the article, gave workers a voice in the management of their companies. And the IRAA, ‘although negatively evaluated today for its militarism and “hawkishness”’, also did much to return politics to ordinary people. The striking conclusion of the LDP ideologues is that these aspects were inherited by the 1955 system; just as they had been in the IRAA, the political parties were bundled together in the LDP, while the foundations laid by the Sangyo Hokokukai made possible the emergence of a highly desirable enterprise union system.

In short, the authors proudly concede that two of the major characteristics of the System throughout the three decades of high economic growth after 1955 – an unchallenged ruling party and docile unions – are direct descendants of institutions established with the aim of strengthening a country at war. Though quite correct, it is an odd admission; the LDP has not been in the habit of praising these wartime arrangements for the rest of the world to hear.

What of the future? According to the LDP’s unusually articulate spokesmen, the middle of the 1980s saw another transformation occurring between two thirty-year cycles. The crucial movements leading up to the ‘1985 system’ were two: the
kakushin jichitai undo
, a campaign to increase the number of mayors and other municipal authorities from among opposition parties, and the
chiiki jumin undo
, local citizens’ movements in the big cities aimed at furthering consumer interests. Both movements have died a quiet death (see Chapter 3) – not, the article assures us, because they were ignored but because their demands were accepted and their wishes realised.

Such developments, the LDP authors conclude, clearly indicate the kind of accommodations the party must make to reality; the LDP must also become a political haven for the urban salarymen and their wives, and must gain the support of the labour unions.

One of the central messages of the article is the impending demise of leftist unionism. The mid-1980s did indeed, as will be remembered, see a major development in this context: the break-up of the Japan National Railways, whose public-sector unions, once relatively activist, had formed the backbone of the leftist Sohyo. Already in the 1986 elections several labour unions were delivering votes to LDP candidates. In several regions local JSP politicians have established working coalitions with strong LDP parliamentarians for the realisation of development projects.
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Once the new national labour federation, Zenmin Roren, has settled down into a routine existence, the inescapable embrace will be almost complete.

There has always been room in the hearts of the power-holders for organised labour, as long as it was organised on their own terms; after all, the social bureau of the Naimusho promoted labour laws in the inter-war years, and post-war administrators have consistently welcomed ‘realistic’, i.e. conformist, trade unions.
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This consolidation of a process that the LDP ideologues correctly described as beginning with the manager-worker councils of the patriotic industrial associations signifies a historical milestone, considering that Christian- and later Marxist-inspired unions have, from the turn of the century, been the only major social groups in persistent conflict with the System.