When China Rules the World (12 page)

This picture of Japanese distinctiveness should not come as any great surprise. Even a relatively casual acquaintance with Japanese society conveys this impression.
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As the accompanying tables and charts illustrate, Japanese attitudes and values remain strikingly different from those of Western societies, notwithstanding the fact that they share roughly the same level of development.
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The first reason for this hardly needs restating: cultural differences have an extraordinary endurance, with Japan’s rooted in a very different kind of civilization.
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The second is historical: because the Meiji Restoration was a relatively recent event, Japan is still strongly marked by the proximity of its feudal past.
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Furthermore, the post-1868 ruling elite consciously and deliberately set out to retain as much of the past as possible. The fact that the
samurai
formed the core of the new ruling group, moreover, meant that they carried some of the long-established values of their class into Meiji Japan and onwards through subsequent history. Post war Japan - like post-Restoration Japan - has been governed by an administrative class who are the direct descendants of the
samurai
: they, rather than entrepreneurs, run the large companies; they dominate the ruling Liberal Democratic Party; former administrators tend to be preponderant in the cabinet; and, by definition, of course, they constitute the bureaucracy, a central institution in Japanese governance.
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Even the nature of governance still strongly bears the imprint of the past. Throughout most of Japan’s recorded history, power has been divided between two or more centres, and that remains true today. The emperor is now of ceremonial and symbolic significance. The diet - the Japanese parliament - enjoys little real authority. The prime minister is far weaker than any other prime minister of a major developed nation, normally enjoying only a relatively brief tenure in office before being replaced by another member of the ruling Liberal Democrats. Cabinet meetings are largely ceremonial, lasting less than a quarter of an hour. Although formally Japan has a multi-party system, the Liberal Democrats have been in office almost continuously since the mid fifties and the factions within this party are in practice of much greater importance than the other parties. Power is therefore dispersed across a range of different institutions, with the bureaucracy, in traditional Confucian style, being the single most important.
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Since the end of the American occupation, Japan has been regarded by the West as a democracy, but in reality it works very differently from any Western democracy: indeed, its modus operandi is so different that it is doubtful whether the term is very meaningful.
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Japan may have changed hugely since 1868, but the influence of the past is remarkably persistent.

Following the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s mission was to close the gap with the West, to behave like the West, to achieve the respect of the West and ultimately to become, at least in terms of the level of development, like the West. Benchmarking and catch-up were the new lodestars.
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Before 1939 this primarily meant Europe, but after 1945 Europe was replaced in the Japanese mind by an overwhelming preoccupation with the United States. In this context, the key objective was economic growth, but Japan’s colonial expansion, which started within six years of the Meiji Restoration, also owed much to a desire to emulate Europe: to be a modern power, Japan needed to have its own complement of colonies. These territorial ambitions eventually brought Japan to its knees in the Second World War, culminating in its defeat and surrender. It was a humiliating moment: the very purpose of the Meiji Restoration - to prevent the domination of the country by the West - had been undermined. The post-1868 trajectory had resulted in the country’s occupation, its desire to emulate the West in disaster.

Nevertheless, the war was to prove the prelude to the most spectacular period of economic growth in Japan’s history. In 1952, Japan’s GDP was smaller than colonial Malaya’s. Within a generation the country had moved from a primarily agrarian to a fully-fledged industrial nation, achieving an annual per capita growth rate of 8.4 per cent between 1950 and 1970, far greater than achieved elsewhere and historically unprecedented up to that time. By the 1980s, Japan had overtaken both the United States and Europe in terms of GDP per head and emerged as an industrial and financial powerhouse.
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It was an extraordinary transformation, but it was not to be sustained. At the end of the 1980s, Japan’s bubble economy burst and for the following fifteen years it barely grew at all. Meanwhile, the United States found a new lease of economic life, displaying considerable dynamism across a range of new industries and technologies, most notably in computing and the internet. Japan’s response to this sharp downturn in its fortunes was highly instructive - both in terms of what it said about Japan and about the inherent difficulties entailed in the process of catch-up for all non-Western societies.

The apogee of Japan’s post-1868 achievement - the moment that it finally drew level with and overtook the West during the 1980s
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- carried within it the seeds of crisis. Ever since 1868, Japan’s priority had been to catch up with the West: after 1945 this ambition had become overwhelmingly and narrowly economic. But what would happen when that aim had finally been achieved, when the benchmarking was more or less complete, when Japan had matched the most advanced countries of the West in most respects, and in others even opened up a considerable lead? When the Meiji purpose had been accomplished, what was next? Japan had no answer: the country was plunged into an existential crisis. It has been customary to explain Japan’s post-bubble crisis in purely economic terms, but there is also a deeper cultural and psychological explanation: the country and its institutions, including its companies, quite simply lost their sense of direction.
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Nor was the country endowed by its history with the ability or facility to change direction. Ever since 1868, through every historical twist and turn, it had displayed an extraordinary ability to retain its focus and maintain a tenacious commitment to its long-term objective. Japan might be described as single-path dependent, its institutions able to display a remarkable capacity to keep to their self-assigned path. This has generated a powerful degree of internal cohesion and enabled the country to be very effective at achieving long-term goals. By the same token, however, it also made changing paths, of which Japan has little experience, very difficult. The only major example was 1868 itself and that was in response to a huge external threat.
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The post-bubble crisis, which was followed by a long period of stagnation, led to much heart-searching and a deep sense of gloom. Some even went so far as to suggest that Japan had suffered two defeats: one in 1945 and another in the 1990s.
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The pessimism that engulfed the country revealed the underlying fragility of the contemporary Japanese psyche. Having finally achieved their goal, they were filled with doubt as to what to do next. As the United States regained its dynamism and Japan was becalmed, there was a widespread sense that its achievement was little more than a chimera, that it was always destined to live in the shadow of the West.
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Japan’s psychological fragility in the face of the post-bubble crisis is a stark reminder of how difficult the process of catch-up - in all its many aspects - is for non-Western countries. Here was a country whose historical achievement was remarkable by any standards; which had equalled or pulled ahead of the West by most measures and comfortably outstripped the great majority of European countries that it had originally sought to emulate; which had built world-class institutions, most obviously its major corporations, and become the second wealthiest country in the world - and yet, in its moment of glory, was consumed by self-doubt.

In this context, it is important to understand the nature of Japan’s self-perception. Unlike the European or American desire to be, and to imagine themselves as, universal, the Japanese have had a particularistic view of their country’s role, long defining themselves to be on the periphery of those major civilizations which, in their eyes, have established the universal norm. As we have seen, China and the West constituted the two significant others from which Japan has borrowed and adapted, and against which the Japanese have persistently affirmed their identity. ‘For the Japanese,’ argues Kosaku Yoshino, ‘learning from China and the West has been experienced as acquiring the “universal” civilization. The Japanese have thus had to stress their difference in order to differentiate themselves from the universal Chinese and Westerners.’
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This characteristic not only distinguishes Japan from the West, which has been
the
universalizing civilization of the last two centuries, but also from the Chinese, who have seen their own civilization, as we shall explore later, in universalistic terms for the best part of two millennia.

Japan’s post-1868 orientation towards the West was only one aspect of its new coordinates. The other was its attitude towards its own continent. Japan combined its embrace of the West with a rejection of Asia. The turn to the West saw the rise of many new popular writers, the most famous of whom was Fukuzawa Yukichi, who argued, in an essay entitled ‘On Leaving Asia’, published in 1885:

We do not have time to wait for the enlightenment of our neighbours so that we can work together towards the development of Asia. It is better for us to leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with civilized nations of the West. As for the way of dealing with China and Korea, no special treatment is necessary just because they happen to be our neighbours. We simply follow the manner of the Westerners in knowing how to treat them. Any person who cherishes a bad friend cannot escape his notoriety. We simply erase from our mind our bad friends in Asia.
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The Japanese did not wait long to put this new attitude into practice. In 1894-5 they defeated China, gaining control of Taiwan and effectively also Korea. In 1910 they annexed Korea. In 1931 they annexed north-west China, from 1936 occupied central parts of China, and between 1941 and 1945 took much of South-East Asia. Between 1868 and 1945, a period of seventy-seven years, Japan engaged in ten major wars, lasting thirty years in total, the great majority at the expense of its Asian neighbours.
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In contrast, Japan had not engaged in a single foreign war throughout the entire 250-year Tokugawa era.
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Meiji Japan was thus intent not only on economic modernization and the emulation of the West, but also on territorial expansion, as the national slogan ‘rich country, strong army’ (
fukoku kyôhei
), which was adopted at the beginning of the Meiji period, implied.
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Although Japan presented its proposal for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere during the 1930s as a way of promoting Asian interests at the expense of the West, in reality it was an attempt to subjugate Asia in the interests of an imperial Japan.
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