The Enigma of Japanese Power (2 page)

Where ‘beliefs’ are dependent on socio-political circumstances, and ‘reality’ is something that can be manipulated, it is fairly easy to maintain fictions. The international confusion of tongues brought about by such fictions is further complicated by the special meaning acquired by the word ‘understanding’ in the mouths of Japanese commentators and officials. The dire need for better ‘mutual understanding’ is frequently and enthusiastically endorsed. But
wakatte kudasai
means ‘please understand’ in the sense of ‘please accept my explanation, regardless of whether it has any basis in fact’. It connotes acceptance or tolerance. ‘Understanding’ in this Japanese context is another word for agreeing. True ‘understanding’ of people or things implies accepting them the way they are, as long as you are not strong enough to change them. If you have strength, the other party will show ‘understanding’ by a certain degree of adaptation to your wishes. Thus in practice ‘mutual understanding’ implies that foreigners should accept the picture of Japan presented by its spokesmen. Foreigners who insist on protesting about Japanese trade methods despite the many Japanese explanations are seen as demonstrating a perennial lack of understanding. Japanese are often well aware of the political connotation of ‘understanding’ in their usage; as a newspaper editor warned, the time is gone ‘when we were able to enjoy the often beautiful misunderstandings – and ignorance – of the foreigners’.
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Two important phenomena complicate the communication-gap aspect of the Japan Problem. One is Japan’s use of ‘buffers’. The second is its monumental propaganda effort.

By ‘buffer’ I refer to someone entrusted with the task of making contacts with foreigners as smooth as possible. He is a peculiarly Japanese institution and is readily recognisable in government offices as well as business corporations. Resident foreign diplomats and businessmen deal with Japan through an intermediary community of English-speaking and supposedly internationalised buffers who are expected to absorb the shocks that an unpredictable outside world might deliver to their institutions.

These buffers can be amazingly frank, can convey a genuine understanding of the foreigner’s difficulties and often create an impression, if not of willingness to cater to his wishes, then at least of reasonableness with which the institutions they represent consider the foreigner’s problems. Japan has a handful of super-buffers who spend much of their time travelling the globe, trouble-shooting and explaining the Japanese case at international conferences. Some of these, such as Okita Saburo and the late Ushiba Nobuhiko, were made ministers for external economic affairs, in which roles they only increased the confusion, because in spite of their title they had no mandate to decide anything and could therefore not really negotiate.

Sometimes still more influential ministers or leaders of economic federations, or the prime minister himself, play the buffer role when speaking with foreign trade envoys. Foreign negotiators who arrive home with the news that this time they have really talked with the proper authorities, who have impressed them with their readiness to take effective action, are deceiving themselves. People with such broad authority do not exist in Japan.

Overlapping with the buffer category is a class of informants, hierarchically ordered according to the positions they occupy in the business, political or bureaucratic worlds, who are constantly being interviewed by visiting dignitaries and journalists. The rest of the world learns about Japan via the accounts of a much smaller group than is generally appreciated. Visitors who have met a ‘good source’ in the shape of one of these informants are often under the impression that they have heard an interesting personal opinion. Most are unaware that these informants tend to regurgitate currently circulating platitudes, whether on some pressing issue of the day or on more general themes concerning the character and role of Japan, that convey an ‘official reality’ to which they routinely defer.

It often seems as if all Japanese spokesmen are hooked up to the same prompter with the same message recorded on a loop of tape. Although they may introduce some personal variation, the essence of the message is almost always the same and is predictable down to the finer details, if one is abreast of the current preoccupations of the press, or of the voluminous explanatory literature distributed by the ministries, economic federations and subsidised ‘private’ institutions.

To believe that these predictable assertions reflect personal opinions would be doing injustice to the intellectual capacities of Japan’s more highly placed communicators. Their genuinely personal opinions are often very interesting, and can be at great variance with the public assertions. But to get to hear these opinions requires either a long period of acquaintanceship and large amounts of sake or, more rarely, a sudden realisation on their part that you are not going to believe the official line anyway.

The predictable assertions of the established informants may include criticism of certain points of government policy or of bureaucratic and business attitudes. But they practically always support the larger contentions of the System’s major institutions, that Japan is a pluralist democracy with a free-market economy, that progress is being made in opening the market, that the growth of individualism must be stimulated, that most Japanese are beginning to see the need to become more cosmopolitan, that foreigners do not try hard enough to compete and that conflict with Japan arises mainly from foreign misunderstanding.

Taken together, the activities of Japan’s buffers and informants constitute a propaganda effort that is not recognised for what it is, because it comes almost entirely in the guise of sincere efforts to ‘explain’ Japan to the world. The propaganda is all the more convincing because many informants believe these explanations.

Foreigners play an important role in the dissemination of opinion favourable to the System. A great deal of foreign criticism has been defused by the use of Japanese money. No country has ever spent as much on officially recorded lobbying expenses as the Japanese were spending in Washington in the mid- and late 1980s. The Japanese government and corporations hire the best lawyers and former US administration officials to defend their position. A large proportion of academic research by Western scholars who concentrate on Japan is funded by Japanese institutions. The idea that scholars and commentators can remain objective because no formal conditions are attached to what they receive is mostly an illusion when the money comes from Japan. Access to the necessary personal contacts and institutions is a great problem for businessmen and scholars working in Japan, who are therefore acutely aware that a genuinely critical stance may close many doors. A combination of money and the need for access, as well as political innocence, has bred large numbers of Japan specialists who are in varying degrees – however unwittingly – apologists for Japan.
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Their public pronouncements and comments in the media regularly attest to this.

Defending Japan is the bread and butter of many real and supposed specialists, who hold forth at highly publicised seminars, panel discussions and conferences organised to improve ‘mutual understanding’. Most representatives of the big foreign corporations in Japan, and also the foreign consultants, have had to become part of the Japanese System in order to function in it. They cannot risk alienating themselves from it by publicly coming out with critical analyses, and are therefore unreliable informants.

Japanese propaganda is also spread, consciously as well as inadvertently, by numerous newspaper and magazine articles mindful of the editorial convention of telling the imagined ‘two sides’ of a story. And it has had an impressive effect, as can be gathered from the fact that at the time of writing the US government and many US commentators continue to think that market forces can ultimately solve the bilateral problem with Japan, notwithstanding the systematic Japanese protectionism that has been staring them in the face for more than two decades.

‘Understanding’ Japan has become a heavy export industry funded by several components of the System. Yet many Japanese, specifically those who must represent domestic interests internationally, are uncomfortable with the idea that they actually might be understood. The idea that there is a spiritual dimension to being Japanese, which by definition cannot be grasped by foreigners, is an important ingredient for Japanese self-esteem and therefore widely believed.

A top editor on one of Japan’s five national dailies once told me that his paper, as well as its competitors, felt that they could print practically anything foreigners said, no matter how devastating their criticism might be, because editors and readers could always console themselves with their belief in the ultimate inability of foreigners to understand the more subtle aspects of what they were describing. Readers of critical foreign assessments may thus enjoy a superficial masochistic thrill without having to draw genuinely disturbing conclusions.

It is almost an article of faith among Japanese that their culture is unique, not in the way that all cultures are unique, but somehow uniquely unique, ultimately different from all others, the source of unique Japanese sensibilities and therefore safe from (if not off-limits to) intellectual probes by outsiders. Japanese are constantly persuaded of the specialness of their nation in their schools and corporations and through the media and speeches by functionaries, whenever an opportunity arises for comparisons with the outside world.

Western intellectual support for the idea of the utter strangeness of Japan, which is easily converted into the idea of uniqueness, goes back many centuries. When it was still ‘on the other side of the world’ Marco Polo turned Zippangu (as he called Japan) into something mysterious and paradisiacal, imagining roofs of solid gold on its emperor’s palace. Jonathan Swift had Gulliver drop in on Japan after Luggnagg, as his final destination before returning home. The first Westerner to interpret Japan in modern times, Lafcadio Hearn, wrote just before the turn of the century of ‘the immense difficulty of perceiving and comprehending what underlies the surface of Japanese life’.
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Hearn thought that ‘no work picturing Japan within and without, historically and socially, psychologically and ethically, can be written for at least another fifty years’. In 1946 Ruth Benedict published the admirable first attempt at an inclusive appraisal of ’the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle. In no war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of thinking and acting.
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The same things that led Lafcadio Hearn and Ruth Benedict to make such strong statements still lend vehemence to discussion of Japan today. Westerners still repeat Hearn’s excited discovery of the topsy-turviness of it all. And Ruth Benedict’s interpretation of Japan as a cohesive entity that can stand on its own, culturally cut off from the rest of the world and essentially different from it, has remained seductive to many serious observers. Physical isolation can no longer be blamed for this. In 1962 I was one of 202,181 foreigners entering the country, and in that year only 145,749 Japanese travelled abroad. Twenty-five years later some six and a half million Japanese went overseas, and over two million foreigners visited Japan. But despite this greatly increased international traffic, much of the earlier aura of remoteness has remained. Japan is still the object of romantic musings. For some Westerners who decry the decline of polite manners, industriousness and other such things in their own countries, it is something of a Utopia.

We are often warned, especially in academic literature, that we must resist treating Japan as too special a case. And it is a good thing, of course, to emphasise that the Japanese are human and to show that they share the essential human traits; the intellectual desire to incorporate Japan more fully into the world is in itself laudable. Yet in their zeal to carry out this mission, some Westerners go to unwarranted extremes in pointing to the similarities and ignore those habits and institutions which cannot be forced, no matter how hard and consistent the attempt, to fit Western patterns of experience.

When studying a people by comparing them to other peoples one faces the age-old choice of whether to emphasise ‘sameness’ or ‘otherness’. In the case of Japan this has led to great discrepancies in the views held by informed commentators. No important human practices and attitudes found elsewhere in the world are entirely unknown to the Japanese. Conversely, in other countries one can recognise habits and institutions corresponding with those in Japan. But to describe the Japanese experience more often than not requires the addition of phrases such as ‘much more so’ or ‘much less so’. There is a point at which differences in degree and in the combination of elements add up to a difference in kind, particularly in the context of socio-political organisation – dependent as that can be on the ambitions and caprices of small groups of power-holders.

Countless newspaper articles, magazine features and scholarly assessments have asserted over the past quarter-century that Japan had reached a crossroads. Perhaps no other country is so regularly examined by journalists and scholars for signs of impending change: not just the routine kind of change that may be expected in any society, but something basic, a change in the way people see themselves and consequently a change in the attitude of the entire nation towards the world.

Implicit in most reports on the Japan-at-the-crossroads theme is the idea that Japan must change; the things setting Japan apart from the rest of the world are often seen as anomalous and temporary. In the 1960s it was widely believed that Japanese youth was going to change things once it had reached positions of influence. At the same time, demands by labour were going to bring about drastic changes in the socio-economic structure. In the 1970s it was thought that the many employees who went abroad for their corporations were going to ‘internationalise’ Japan upon their return, and that widespread hankering after better living conditions would redirect Japanese efforts through a change in priorities. Later it became fashionable to think that the ‘internationalisation’ of the Japanese financial market and other unstoppable economic developments would force Japan to come to terms with the outside world’s expectations of greater Japanese concern and initiative on behalf of collective international interests. In 1987 there existed a pervasive notion that the pressure of a supposed public demand for change, combined with loss of bureaucratic control over businessmen, was beginning to transform the Japanese political economy into one more clearly driven by market forces.

Today, Japan is stuck at the same crossroads as twenty-five years ago: one where the Japanese people are expected to choose a new approach to the world, helped along by supposed changes in their own society but always in a direction mapped out by Westerners. No country should be condemned to waiting at the same uncomfortable spot for so long. What the crossroads stories appear to reflect more than anything else is myopic Western preconceptions about the possible forms that institutions and the organisation of affairs in non-Western nations can take. The march in the direction that many Western observers thought inevitable is just not going to take place.

For a while in the late 1970s Japanese officials began to fight back by contending that, if there was going to be evolution anywhere, it would be in the West. A government-sponsored publication spelled this out, saying that Japanese forms of social and economic management would ‘become universal in all advanced industrial societies’ if those societies wished to follow a rational course of further industrial development.
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Around this time the idea caught on in Europe and the United States that a number of Japanese practices might profitably be adopted. This is understandable. The question of whether the West should not be moving towards a society similar to that of Japan today inevitably arises in the minds of visitors who learn that Japan has next to no violent crime, no industrially damaging labour conflicts and an economic system that seems to weather oil crises and the like better than anyone else’s. But the ‘learn from Japan’ approach has glossed over some crucial differences between Japan and the West. The adoption of parts of the System is not likely to work without most of the rest of the Japanese package, and the costs of that package cannot be paid by the West. An evolution of Western practices in Japanese directions would entail the reproduction of conditions inconceivable as long as social and intellectual freedom are valued.

There is reason to emphasise Japanese differences precisely because the crossroads view persists. Many sober Western analysts continue to expect large-scale change. ‘Japan Inc., to the extent it ever existed, is being further dismantled,’ asserts a highly respected economic daily.
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Japanese slogans about ‘internationalisation’ are taken at face value. The official Japanese line in the 1980s is that the various forms of governmental guidance carry much less weight with the private sector than in the past. But even though this contention is regularly accompanied with figures intended to show that current tariff regulations make Japan about the freest market in the world, Japan has not in fact transferred into the category of Western free-market economies. What is true on paper in Japan is often – and always more frequently than in the West – not true in practice. Tokyo’s officials are extremely inventive in devising subtle controls and euphemistic labels to render them more palatable. Foreign governments and columnists, automatically assuming that Japan sees itself faced with new choices and a new sense of responsibility, continue to expect major developments. But barring some great upheaval unforeseeable at present, it is unlikely that Japanese institutions will come to mesh more smoothly with the outside world, because this would entail the break-up of the bureaucracy-business partnership that forms the heart of the System.

The crossroads view should be discarded for yet another reason. It creates frustrations when expected changes fail to materialise, and ultimately leads to further vilification of Japan.

Having abandoned the crossroads view, we are left with the Lafcadio Hearn-Ruth Benedict thesis of cultural singularity. But this approach fails, in itself, to relate Japan to any wider, universally understandable realm of human experience. It is also, on a more practical level, powerless to help foreign governments and businesses formulate a
modus vivendi
with Japan.

There is, however, a way out of the conceptual maze. The Japan problem appears less mysterious, and many of the puzzles are soluble, when instead of the common approach of looking for cultural explanations we ask questions concerning the way power is exercised in Japan.