Read The Enigma of Japanese Power Online
Authors: Karel van Wolferen
Tags: #Japan - Economic Policy - 1945-1989, #Japan - Politics and Government - 1945, #Japan, #Political Culture - Japan, #Political Culture, #Business & Economics, #International, #General, #Political Science, #International Relations, #Public Policy, #Economic Policy, #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Political culture—Japan, #Japan—Politics and government—1945–, #Japan—Economic policy—1945–
There is a fairly widespread notion that the Japanese nation in the late 1980s is engaged in a grand debate concerning the new policies required by its international predicament and by foreign expectations.
1
Columnists tell us that major changes are afoot and that by now those concerned are discussing not the desirability of such changes but how to fit them in with customary practices. We read that a debate rages about how to import more, and that the Japanese people are waking up to the need to assume international responsibilities in keeping with their economic power.
The notion that such debates take place is wrong. It is rooted apparently in a belief that the Japanese
ought
to be discussing these things, rather than in any evidence that they are. In fifteen years as a correspondent (an occupation conducive of sensitivity to phenomena such as ‘national debates’) I have discovered neither the ‘grand debate’ nor the smaller ones concerning imports and the more responsible role. The notion is no doubt fostered by administrators who must deal with the external world and are often desperate to suggest action in areas where they have promised results. It also accords with the general taste of the media for ‘Japan at the crossroads’ stories. What is mistaken for national soul-searching, however, amounts to no more than the rhetorical flourishes that top administrators add to their speeches, that newspapers habitually put into their editorials and that lard the comments of English-speaking ‘buffers’ at numerous international panel discussions and study meetings. But the platitudinous reiteration of the need for certain changes does not imply commitment or the ability to bring them about.
The notion of a national debate participated in by the Japanese people or their chosen representatives is harmful because it lulls the serious observer into a false sense that shared problems are being studied and solved on the Japanese side. It also constitutes an intellectual hindrance to grasping how the System operates; it gives the impression that Japanese are given a choice, whereas the ordinary Japanese has no idea what choosing among socio-political alternatives means.
The systematic deprivation of choice in practically all realms of life bearing on the political organisation of Japan is essential for keeping the System on an even keel. The Japanese have no choice with regard to political representation: they are stuck with the LDP. They have almost no choice in education: its major function is as a sorting mechanism for the salaryman employment market, and the only way to the top runs through the law department of the University of Tokyo. Once a middle-class Japanese male has been taken on by a company, he has as good as no alternative but to stay with that company. The Japanese have no choice with respect to Japanese sources of news and information: these come in the monotonous tones of a virtually fettered press, or processed by other reality managers such as Dentsu. The choices the market offers them as consumers do not include what the distribution
keiretsu
do not want to distribute.
The common view of the Japanese political process assumes the possibility of political choice. It sees rulers and ruled as engaged in continuous communication for the sake of an ever evolving ‘consensus’. Contributing to this consensus-forming process, it is suggested, are the multitude of interest groups, academic commentators, journalists, politicians and bureaucrats whose approval must be won for whatever is being decided. Japan’s power-holders have enthusiastically seized on this perspective, because it can be passed off as ‘democratic’, and because it fits in nicely with the all-important belief in the benevolence of the System.
Exhortations in the press and in statements by prominent administrators seem to afford constant evidence that the nation is preoccupied with certain issues. But continuous reference to the desirability of something does not constitute a debate. This becomes clear when one looks at it closely: everyone always seems heartily to agree with what is being said. When the evils of the
amakudari
system and ‘examination hell’ receive their annual airing in the press it is obvious that the routine exhortations have a cathartic function, substituting, as they do, for genuine remedial action. Discussions, such as can be found in European countries and the United States, with intellectuals and political representatives putting forward identifiable and conflicting opinions that result in a give and take, in education of the citizenry and above all in altered policies, are unknown in Japan, where nothing of substance is debated in the proper meaning of the term.
While agreeing that some examples of true consensus can be found in Japan, I am struck by the relative lack of consensus compared with, say, the Netherlands or other Western countries with which I am familiar. Either way, ‘consensus’ does not enter into power relations between ordinary Japanese and the administrators. Theorists who allege that Japan has a ‘new middle mass’ that is politically fully in tune with what the System offers, thereby implying that the Japanese public has had the political means to express its preferences, have forgotten that no one ever told the Japanese people that they could set their own priorities. Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato summed up Japan’s political relations most succinctly when he said: ‘The government is the captain and the
zaikai
is the compass of the ship.’
2
At no time have the chosen representatives of the people tried to bring bureaucrats or business federation leaders into line. On the contrary, it was the politicians themselves who were brought into line. The reform bureaucrat Uemura Kogoro, who played a crucial part in this effort, left no doubt as to how politicians were expected to behave when he explained that the establishment of a strong national economy would be out of the question without the merger of ‘conservative forces’.
3
The industrial expansion that was achieved at the cost of the living environment and of housing and welfare policies and has resulted in the highest land prices in the world – all this without bringing amenities taken for granted in much of Europe and North America – was not the offspring of any kind of agreement on what is good for the people. The fateful political manoeuvring that established it as the overriding national priority was not monitored by the press. The public was not asked to participate in the formulation of policies – was never even aware that a choice existed.
It is difficult to argue with success, and Japan’s post-war economic success has drawn much admiration from the rest of the world. I do not mean to detract from the admirable accomplishments of the Japanese people and the guarantees these have brought of a relatively safe society that can feed everyone, and has only a few thousand homeless. But this book is about how the Japanese are governed. And in this last chapter I must conclude that the overall picture is rather bleak and fraught with danger.
In the eyes of the world, Japan has established itself as a rich country; yet, ironically, most Japanese think of themselves as relatively poor. The discrepancy in perception was never so strong as in the late 1980s, when currency revaluation had raised the per capita national income above that of any other country, leaving the buying power of Japanese salaries among the lowest in the advanced industrialised nations. As a Japanese professor teaching in New York summed it up:
behind a robust façade of a growing economy that is fueled by rampant speculation, about 80% of the people are bearing the burden of heavy taxes and exorbitant prices for housing, land, food, clothing and other products and services whose markets are shielded from foreign competition. The average Japanese earns about the same income as his or her American counterpart. But the Japanese must work almost five times as long to buy half a kilogram offish, five times as long for half a kilogram of rice, nine times as long to buy half a kilogram of beef, and three times as long for four liters of gasoline.
4
He could have added, among other things, that the privilege of using congested expressways costs a fortune, that telephone and utility rates are the most expensive in the world, that the exorbitantly priced living quarters are minuscule and that urban infrastructural problems cause as much discomfort as they did in the 1960s. Life for the average Japanese in 1988 was filled with more gadgets and much more ‘fashion’, but was not in any way more comfortable or rewarding or cheaper than it was in 1968, with the one exception that the expensive yen bought many more Japanese a cheap foreign holiday. In some ways, for instance with regard to the prospect of ever owning a place to live, life looked decidedly less promising. And these are merely the material results of how Japanese power is exercised.
The general character and emphases of Japanese education, together with what amounts to indoctrination via the media and the corporations, hamper the development of liberated citizens. The System stultifies where it should stimulate; it actively prevents the self-realisation of the individual. A ‘value-free’ judgement from the cultural-relativist perspective would leave undecided whether this is a good or a bad thing. But I don’t think that such an approach is helpful to the Japanese, useful for Westerners or even possible in the long run. If a horticulturist succeeded in creating a chemical potion that prevented rosebuds from growing into roses, and his garden were filled with buds that never opened and ended their existence by merely shrivelling away, we would have no hesitation in saying that there was something wrong with that garden.
Thus, while the System undoubtedly provides sustenance and a large measure of security to nearly all Japanese, as a form of government it is not a satisfactory substitute for a modern constitutionalist ‘state’ with a centre of accountability, and with provisions for the non-intimidatory management of political conflict. The System cannot abide independent citizens with a developed sense of political responsibility,
5
which is a further reason why there are no real debates, with a bearing on political reality, in which the ordinary intelligent and talented Japanese individual can participate. This is ineluctably, if not obviously, a general problem for Japan’s administrators as well as representatives of the outside world.
The lack of a national debate has direct consequences for other nations. The theory of a forever evolving consensus suggests that the system is dirigible, that it is capable of producing essential policy changes. Yet the great irony of contemporary Japan is that the administrators, driven by their fear of disorder, have through a myriad successful controls nurtured a political economy that is essentially out of control; the System as a whole is rudderless.
As we saw in Chapter 1, a major fiction impeding international understanding of Japan is that its government is capable of making and implementing the kind of decisions associated with sovereignty and international agreements that are routine in other countries. A number of Japanese administrators are fully aware of the immensity of this problem in the context of Japan’s international relations. A significant minority among them are pessimistic about its possible consequences, and a few even have catastrophic visions of what might happen to Japan. Yet no one in Japan is directly responsible, so no one lies awake at night worrying about it.
There have been a number of unsuccessful attempts to steer Japan towards new priorities. The one that attracted most international publicity in the late 1980s was the formation of an advisory committee under the chairmanship of the internationalist former governor of the Bank of Japan, Maekawa Haruo. The then prime minister, Nakasone, ordered the committee to present guidelines for a major restructuring of the Japanese economy that would make it less dependent on exports for its growth. What happened subsequently illustrates my point about the absence of Japanese leadership.
In the course of numerous meetings, the members of the committee, most of whom represented ministerial and other interests, picked the Maekawa Report clean of all its concrete proposals. When Nakasone saw the report produced by the committee, he angrily ordered it rewritten because, in his words, it did not reflect awareness of the dire international situation the Japanese economy had got into. The final version, published in April 1986, was no improvement, but Nakasone was powerless.
If all the recommendations of the Maekawa Report had been carried out, they would still have amounted to no more than a very feeble attempt to shift priorities. But even this was not to be, as many administrators were honest enough to make clear. At almost the very moment that Nakasone was in Washington presenting the report as a token of Japanese good faith, LDP politicians said that they could not accept it. Top bureaucrats leaked their ‘concern’ that Nakasone was misleading President Reagan. The
Nihon Keizai Shimbun
(comparable to the
Wall Street Journal
) tore the report to pieces, and the
Asahi Shimbun
said in an editorial: ‘Every time a political leader says one thing abroad and something else at home, distrust of Japan in the world community grows. It is ironic that Nakasone, who is proud of his diplomatic prowess, now repeats the same mistake.’
6
Finally, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs weighed in with a statement that the report did not represent Japanese policy.
The case of the Maekawa Report also illustrates the confusion of tongues that often accompanies a Japanese action. Even as Nakasone’s compatriots were pulling the rug from under him. President Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, the New York Times and others were praising the ‘breakthrough’ in Japanese decision-making. Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Alan Wallis went so far as to call it a watershed in Japanese post-war economic thinking. The US administration, of course, desperately wanted to show the bilateral relationship in a positive light, and to demonstrate that its approach to Japan bore results. But even non-governmental commentators and academicians continued to refer to the Maekawa Report as a major statement of Japanese government intentions. In the meantime Japanese officials such as MITI vice-minister Kuroda Makoto were asserting that almost all the recommendations had already been carried out, while some members of the Maekawa Committee were leaking their feelings of frustration that nothing was being done. Maekawa himself was reported to me as being disgusted with the lack of concrete action.
7
Two years after publication of the report, only a couple of points had been implemented; they were minor, and had in any case been part of earlier bureaucratic plans.
The Maekawa Committee represented one more failure to steer the System. The outside world, however, wanting to believe that Japan had a government after all, and believing that it was high time for a major restructuring, showed enthusiasm. This was seized on by the bureaucrats, who actually launched a ‘second Maekawa Report’ in May 1987 because the first had made such a good impression abroad! Indeed, the chief success of the Maekawa Report has been the reaction to it abroad; in Japan it got no more than lip-service.
8
In 1988 the notion became widespread that circumstances such as the doubling of the value of the yen had achieved in practice what the Maekawa Report intended. But this view stemmed more from wishful thinking than from any evidence of the structural changes envisioned by the report.
If countries find working with Japan ‘impossible’ it is because, though government officials throughout the world can get used to many things in dealing with other governments, there is one thing they can never bring themselves to believe: that there is no one to deal with on the other side. How serious a conceptual problem – not to say a practical one – this presents can be appreciated from the fact that perfectly normal, and widely used, terms of reference concerning international relations automatically lead one astray when applied to Japan. Even those political observers, editorial writers and foreign government officials who have realised in theory that there is no centre of responsibility often continue from force of habit to assert that ‘Japan’ should begin to understand this, that or the other, and that ‘Japan’ ought to take such-and-such action. The habit of referring to a country in anthropomorphic terms takes major assumptions for granted: that there is a core to its identity; that this core enables it to contemplate its future, arrive at decisions and act accordingly; and that through this core it can be held accountable. The assumption is that all countries have the capacity to operate as individual persons with a sense of responsibility towards themselves at least, if not to outsiders.
The United States government especially has been brought to the realisation, in dealing with a succession of Japanese prime ministers including Nakasone, that in the case of Japan one cannot effectively deal with its formal head of government, or anyone else. And various foreign powers have discovered throughout this century that one cannot effectively deal with Japanese negotiators either. Japanese negotiators cannot, in fact, negotiate, because of the constant potential of opposition at home against anything they might do.
9
This difficulty helped determine, to a large degree, Western attitudes towards Japan before the war. As a specialist on Japanese diplomatic history sums it up:
Never has a nation been so obsessed with securing international trust and yet been so universally mistrusted as Japan in the prewar period. Although horrified by the thought of negotiating failure, Japanese leaders and negotiators nonetheless adopted positions so close to their minimum and so inflexibly conceived that criticism was almost preordained. . . . In every case, leaders and diplomats consciously tried to escape the errors of the past only to fall into the same pitfalls time and time again.
10
One of the most telling episodes came in the spring of 1984, when relations between the United States and Japan threatened to sour considerably because of the Agriculture Ministry’s intransigence over allowing a few more shiploads a year of beef and oranges into Japan, and Nakasone sent his minister of agriculture to Washington to rescue the stalled negotiations. At first Minister Yamamura did not want to go, feeling he had no choice but to show absolute loyalty to his ministry, which in turn was demonstrating its ‘sincerity’ as defender of the
nokyo
. Once in Washington, he ignored direct instructions from Nakasone, who finally had to plead with him not to abandon the talks altogether. Nakasone repeatedly told his cabinet that Japan had arrived at the point in its international relations where only tangible measures were meaningful, and that not to take them would affect the destiny of the nation. Yet he was castigated for his ‘flamboyant demeanour and rosy promises aimed at enhancing his overseas reputation’. Nakasone’s reminders that Japan had international obligations led one typical commentator to the conclusion that ‘he has used his international pledges as a weapon to suppress all opposition from his critics at home’.
11
The impossibility of finding any person or institution to negotiate successfully with has, of course, not passed unnoticed by governments that have tried to make agreements with Japan. Foreigners are frequently asked to remain patient while the alleged grand national debate is in progress, and to wait for the general consensus to emerge. A commonly added assurance is that, although the national debate process moves excruciatingly slowly, it will be splendidly effective once a consensus is reached.
One of the most recent pseudo-debates concerns
kokusaika
, ‘internationalisation’. Throughout the 1980s the need for ‘internationalisation’ has been routinely stressed in thousands of newspaper editorials and tens of thousands of speeches. Numerous committees and study groups have been set up to promote it. But in practice ‘internationalisation’ tends to serve a resurgent nationalism. Within corporations it is generally interpreted as the need for an improved ability to defend Japanese commercial interests abroad. Verbal commitment to a certain cause, or the assertion of a need for it, is in Japan often mistaken for concrete steps, and thus is assumed to have changed the situation substantially. But while the constant repetition of the term
kokusaika
creates a sense that Japan’s administrators are taking action to correct the supposed absence of an internationalist disposition among ordinary Japanese people, the last thing they want to encourage is an awareness that genuine internationalisation presupposes a willingness to consider the arguments and wishes of foreigners.