The Enigma of Japanese Power (25 page)

To begin with, Japanese loyalty is directed solely at a group or person, not a belief or abstract idea. And since organisations that are potentially hostile to the System have been weeded out of society almost entirely, Japanese loyalty is most directly supportive of the established socio-political order.

Loyalty is frequently mentioned in the same breath as ‘filial piety’, as both values are central to the Chinese Confucianism that the Japanese aristocracy imported long ago to buttress its power. The influence of the injunction of filial piety must have been considerable. B. H. Chamberlain wrote shortly after the turn of the century: ‘There are no greater favourites with the people of Japan than the “Four-and-Twenty Paragons of Filial Piety”, whose quaint acts of virtue Chinese legend records.’ One Paragon had a cruel stepmother, who loved fish. Despite her awful treatment of him, he lay down naked on a frozen lake, melted a hole with his body heat and caught two carp that came up for air. Another slept naked so that all the mosquitoes bit him and left his parents alone. My favourite, though, is the seventy-year-old Paragon who dressed in baby clothes and crawled on the floor, deluding his ninety-year-old parents into believing that they could not be so very old after all.
¹³

The Meiji government not only propagated filial piety to strengthen politically significant family morality and to foster patriotism, but also decreed that filial piety and loyalty to the emperor were one and the same thing. An even greater political revision of the Chinese ethical system had taken place long before that. The Tokugawa rulers had turned the ethic upside-down by making loyalty to one’s lord the highest command, rather than filial piety.

Having shoved the divinely pedigreed emperor aside, Japan’s early rulers could not appeal to universally held principles in persuading lower lords to follow and obey them. This was a big problem, solved to some extent by maintaining a military hierarchy, which set standards for loyalty towards the government. The discipline and ethic of obedience that automatically prevail in all military organisations provided an ideal setting for development of the Japanese loyalty cult. In such a context, loyalty has nearly always meant obligatory blind obedience to one’s master. In medieval Europe, a knight could forsake his lord in the name of God, and he had specified rights; the feudal system was based on reciprocal fidelity between leaders and retainers. The relationship between leader and retainer in Japan, by contrast, was ‘characterised by obligations incumbent only on the follower, who had to be absolutely obedient to his leader’s commands’.
¹⁴

Today, the obedience of contemporary Japanese towards their superiors is generally no longer blind or totally unconditional, yet the element of choice is in most cases still lacking. When most employees of large corporations feel that they have had enough of their present boss, they have no option but to remain ‘loyal’ because, as we have seen, if they were to leave they would not find another job with a comparable income. Even today, loyalty to one’s superiors overrules other established moral considerations. A national television audience was reminded of this in 1976 when a group of executives consistently, elaborately and rather obviously committed perjury to ‘protect’ their employers during parliamentary hearings in connection with the Lockheed bribery scandal. Systematic deceit in such cases where ‘loyalty’ is involved is to a large extent socially sanctioned and widely admired.

When it is carried to its culturally praised ultimate expression, celebrated in Kabuki plays and some contemporary films, the ethic of loyalty is morally unacceptable to Westerners, as for example when parents murder their own child in order to save the life of the child of their lord. Most important, however, it must be understood that the Japanese ethic of loyalty is, in essence, an ethic of submission.

Not only are employees forced to be ‘loyal’ to the Japanese firm, but its small subcontractors also have no choice but to accept less or delayed payment for their parts and semi-finished products in times when business is bad for the big ones.
¹⁵

The salaryman world and its preoccupations may set the tone of contemporary Japanese life, yet it encompasses no more than roughly one-third of the working population. Businesses with between 100 and 1,000 workers provide some 16 per cent of jobs, and those with more than 1,000 another 15 per cent. Outside this world, the relative job security known as ‘lifetime employment’ (which generally ends between the ages of 55 and 58) does not apply. However, entrepreneurial ambitions provide a respected alternative to salaryman hopes and attitudes; the dream of having a company of one’s own is still widespread, and is an important contributing reason in the survival of the so-called dual economy. Supporting the towering hierarchy of large conglomerates there exists a vast collection of medium-sized and small firms that can be squeezed when times are bad.

Almost half Japan’s manufacturing workforce is engaged in factories with fewer than fifty workers. These are often no more than sweatshops in which husband and wife may work ten or more hours a day. As subcontractors these small companies – which make parts, or assemble finished products for distribution by the famous firms – provide cheap labour, and in times of economic downturn absorb much of the shock. When the yen doubled in value against the US dollar between 1985 and 1987 these small companies were asked to bear a large share of the loss in profits of companies eager to hang on to foreign market shares.
¹⁶

Japan has a much larger proportion of such small enterprises than the highly industrialised Western countries. Only 0.2 per cent of all Japanese corporations employ more than 1,000 workers (though this percentage still represents more than 2,000 companies). Self-employed workers and family workers (mainly women) form 29 per cent of the Japanese labour force, compared with 8 per cent in Britain, 9 per cent in the US, 14 per cent in West Germany and 17 per cent in France.
¹⁷
The resilience of this vast segment of smaller firms in the face of economic vicissitudes is of vital importance to the formidable international competitiveness of the large Japanese firms. A large number of bankruptcies among small firms is balanced by a roughly equal number of openings; the same entrepreneurs launch into another line of business. In large areas of Tokyo and Osaka back streets rarely visited by outsiders, one hears the same incessant clickety-clack of small machines behind hundreds of wooden doors as one did ten or twenty years ago; but the clickety-clack produces entirely different things today.

The freedom of the small entrepreneurs is real in that they can give their own name to their companies and be their presidents. But it is unreal to the extent that almost two-thirds of all small manufacturers are financially dependent on one of the larger firms, which can dictate the conditions under which they work. On this level, too, much is made of the family metaphor. The ‘parent firm’ helps the subcontractor with supplies and technical assistance, including investments in machinery. It will not, under normal conditions, turn to cheaper subcontractors. But the ‘child firm’ must accept its role as shock-absorber in periods of economic downturn.

Here too the System is at work, and its embrace is also apparent in the numerous associations of small and medium-sized businesses, and the federations of these associations, that support LDP candidates at election time. With the LDP behind them, the bureaucrats help preserve the dual economy by not burdening small manufacturers with stringent regulations and, most significantly, through formal and informal tax privileges. MITI has an agency for small and medium-sized enterprises that, by coordinating an intricate support system of financing by local banks, helps maintain a hierarchy among the smaller businesses. The larger members in the community of small firms, which feel more beholden to the LDP, help control the smaller ones.

Besides controlling the thought and behaviour of the salaryman, the Japanese business world helps preserve order in the System in other ways too. Relationships within firms are strongly hierarchical, and so are the ties among firms – intensively so in the case of subcontractors. The firms do not employ a cross-section of the population, but narrowly selected groups that emerge at various levels from the schooling hierarchy. Thus the larger firms, themselves hierarchically ordered in conglomerate groupings and industrial associations, emphasise still further the hierarchic order of society by, as it were, ‘grading’ the population.

Prospective employees are not very interested in the kind of company they join, whether it deals in insurance or in chemicals. But they are extremely interested in its ranking, because this directly determines their own ranking in society. Nor does the salaryman recruit worry much about the prosperity of the company he joins. Whereas in the West and most other non-Japanese political economies economic factors such as profitability determine a company’s success, in Japan success is measured more by political indicators: the company’s size and market share and, related to these, its position in the hierarchy.

Another way in which Japanese firms help maintain the social order is by systematic discrimination against women. Women make up a very important part of the workforce. More than half of those who are married supplement the family income with full-time or part-time employment, often in subcontracting firms. But these working women furnish the System with a gigantic pool of relatively cheap labour through purposeful corporate policies, which have been explicitly excused by appeals to ‘Japanese social customs and traditions’ and are supported by the bureaucracy. From the age of eighteen or twenty, girls work in the service sector or in offices; then, in their mid-twenties, they marry and retire. Many return to the labour force in their mid-thirties, after bringing up a child or two. Most women in offices start their career with 10 per cent less pay than male colleagues hired in the same year, and this gap widens to about 30 per cent. When they return to work, they cannot claim seniority in the way that the men can under the ‘lifetime employment’ system, and are typically employed on a ‘part-time’ basis though they may work as many hours as their male colleagues at half the pay, and with few if any fringe benefits.

In the wake of litigation by a few activist female employees in the 1970s, most large firms will not summarily dismiss young women when they reach ‘retirement age’ or marry.
¹⁸
But the pressure on them to leave ‘voluntarily’ is nearly always irresistible. Unless she works for a bank, insurance firm, government office, department store or foreign company – organisations that do offer careers to women – a female employee approaching the age of twenty-nine will have to find a husband or an alternative source of income.

Since the spring of 1985 Japan has had an Equal Employment Opportunity Law, which basically enjoins corporate Japan to ‘attempt’ to treat male and female employees equally. The law does not spell out the consequences of not making such an attempt, and the final wording – a result of years of bureaucratically guided
shingikai
discussion – is widely considered a victory for management. The law was the minimum Japan could come up with for the sake of its international image, and it was passed just in time for ratification of the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

The role of Japanese women in the economic process has become a problem that is only partially reflected by pressure from activist groups. The number of working married women in 1985 had doubled compared with twenty years before, the phenomenon of the ‘honeymoon baby’ has drastically decreased, and the gradual increase in the still very low divorce rate is largely due to the initiative of wives wishing to pursue a career. To help defuse strains and tensions, the administrators actively endorse the picture of their ‘traditional’ Japanese family purveyed by the mass media and establishment ‘social critics’. From the vehement reactions in serious magazines to the emancipation activists who were bent on strengthening the equal employment law, one would conclude that the continuation of Japanese ‘culture’ was at issue.
¹⁹

Although in reality Japanese tradition has never frowned on working women, and today the majority of working married women are obliged to help make ends meet in their families, the officially sponsored portrait of ‘wholesome’ family life invariably shows that the proper place for women is at home. In a country where stereotypes are treasured, emphasis on the established proper roles of women is especially noticeable. It extends to demurely polite deportment, a studied innocent cuteness, a ‘gentle’ voice one octave above the natural voice and always a nurturing, motherly disposition. The model woman in the world of the salarymen is a cross between Florence Nightingale and the minister of finance (as women are almost always totally responsible for household finances). Superior intelligence is a liability for girls and women, and must be disguised. Women are frequently subtly and sometimes not so subtly degraded in TV programmes and comic strips. Many bookstores have an SM section in which the most popular items are magazines and books with pictures of ladies tied up to look like rolled meat. In 1985 a director-general of the cultural affairs bureau of the Ministry of Education, Miura Shumon, caused a small stir when he wrote in a couple of magazine articles that rape, although not gentlemanly conduct, was not so bad if practised on modern young women whose moral standards had slipped anyhow.

The picture is not entirely negative. A great step in the legal liberation of Japanese women was taken under the auspices of the United States occupation when adultery as a criminal offence was scrapped from the law books. Under the old code, in keeping with Confucianist practice, only the wife could ever be guilty of this crime. Also, there seems to be no doubt that behind a majority of closed doors the Japanese wife is the more powerful member of the family, and that the salaryman shackled to his firm could use as much emancipation as his wife. But the expectations of proper behaviour are hammered home through a plethora of comic books and films and the numerous soap operas serialised by television stations. Soap operas in all countries that have them tend to support standard social mores, but the Japanese type is generally tougher on nonconformists. The enterprising and independent young woman who persists in going her own way beyond a certain point will meet with all manner of obstacles and calamities. With very few exceptions, happy endings conform to the unwritten rules about work, marriage, giving birth and taking care of elderly parents and in-laws, as marking the proper stages of a Japanese woman’s life.