The Enigma of Japanese Power (27 page)
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–
In its ‘fighting spirit’, its compulsory togetherness, its consciousness of rank within the company and more especially its proprietary treatment of the employee as a ‘family’ member, in a way that hinders his development as an independent individual, ‘salaryman life’ is clearly reminiscent of the military tradition. Indeed, most walks of Japanese life are highly regimented. It is ironic that the only country in the world whose constitution deprives it of the right to wage war, whose official spokesmen seriously suggest that it can teach the world to love peace and which formally decries the use of military power, whenever and wherever and no matter by whom it is resorted to, should so often remind one of a military organisation. The flocks of high-school pupils dressed in black uniforms cut like those of Prussia at the turn of the century are just the surface. The emphasis on collective exercise; the drills continued for their own sake far beyond the point where skill ceases to improve; the social approval given to
gambaru
(not giving up, sticking with something beyond reason); the sentimental emphasis on the ‘purity’ of single-minded youthful exertions; the spartan discipline in judo, karate, kendo and aikido training: all these represent a militarised approach to social order. The virtues of self-control and endurance that the Japanese are taught to hold in highest regard, along with loyalty, are among the most important that soldiers must cultivate.
This is not surprising, when one considers that Japan was ruled by soldiers during much of its history. For many centuries the military provided the chief model for proper conduct. The Tokugawa shogunate was a warrior regime maintaining something akin to martial law. In time, it evolved into a bureaucratic government with parallels to the Soviet Union after Stalin, complete with ideology and a privileged ruling class. But its ideals of social discipline remained those of the barracks and the battlefield.
Outside the cities of Tokugawa Japan, life seems to have offered few consistent pleasures for the common people. Most of the house codes of the feudal domains were oppressive. Some daimyos ruled extremely harshly, and were hostile to outsiders, overseeing every act of their subjects and forbidding contact with people from other domains. None the less there existed a Confucianist-derived ideal of benevolence as befitting anyone with power over others. Although no superior was bound by it, widely praised historical examples of benevolent power-holders provided a certain incentive for daimyos and samurai to be lenient when they could afford to be. It was understood, too, that benevolent government favoured peasant productivity, the economic basis of the political system.
1
After the Meiji Restoration, the posture of leniency was given a clear political purpose. Most major figures in the Meiji oligarchy accepted the necessity for occasional accommodation of the public’s wishes. Even Yamagata Aritomo, the arch-opponent of the incipient political parties, who moulded much of the bureaucracy and the military, understood that merely to cripple the parties without compensation would not ‘eliminate those factors which made the people susceptible to [their] siren voice’.
2
The Ministry of Education, Yamagata calculated, could handle social control, but not before local governments were reformed. Flexible and pragmatic in its policies, the Meiji directive élite was adept at easing repression when it suited its purpose in presenting the ‘paternalistic’ side of ‘paternalistic authoritarianism’.
3
This strategy worked. The most formidable oppositionist campaign – the Freedom and Popular Rights movement, which appealed to an imperial promise for the convocation of assemblies and open political discussion
4
– lost its momentum, and was destined thenceforth to survive only as a source of inspiration for equally ineffective political opposition movements in later decades. The Meiji oligarchy, and subsequent governments too, understood that whenever possible the power of propaganda should substitute for direct repression. The bureaucrats preferred not to carry out frontal attacks on organisations that were, or could become, sources of political challenge. Instead, they emasculated them, typically by presenting them with ‘guidance’ and official help. Thus the earlier part of the twentieth century saw the hurried organisation of societies for the betterment of discontented workers and other obviously disadvantaged groups. In the 1920s the Naimusho bureaucrats entrusted with labour policy promoted factory legislation and workers’ health insurance that somewhat mitigated the effects of exploitation by business corporations.
5
Along with this ‘benevolence’, of course, went the suppression of ‘dangerous thoughts’, but even here, as we will see, there was much leniency.
Those who today may apply naked power in the name of the state, the police and public prosecutors (the most noticeable reminders, along with the tax collectors, that something like a state exists), have turned the habit of leniency into a kind of second nature. But a condition is attached: the recipient must in turn acknowledge the goodness of the established social order; political heterodoxy elicits tough measures.
From the time of its formation in the 1870s it was understood that Japan’s police force, unlike its sword-wielding samurai predecessors, could not merely scare the populace into submission. Kawaji Toshiyoshi, first chief of the Tokyo metropolitan police and architect of the modern Japanese police system, neatly summed it up by saying that the government should be seen as the parent, the people as the children and the policemen as the nurses of the children.
6
This view of things was not as far-fetched as it may sound. Kawaji had seen the Parisian police force in action when he went to Europe in 1872 as a member of one of the many Meiji study missions, and he closely followed and expanded upon this French model. The Parisian police – in those days the most respected internationally – performed incidental functions ranging from the enforcement of health regulations to the licensing of prostitution and the supervision of a wide range of commercial activities.
7
The importance of the police role in public administration during the Meiji era can be seen from employment figures for 1880, when the total number of prefectural and city officials for the Tokyo metropolitan area was only 912, whereas the police bureau had a force of 4,400 men. Not until the second decade of this century did the figures begin to balance.
8
The Japanese police looked after health regulations and could issue licences and permits for a great variety of businesses. They monitored the publishing world, the theatres and political gatherings.
One of Kawaji’s major recommendations was that the men responsible for this wide-ranging monitoring of society should be placed under a ministry of their own. The Naimusho, established in 1873, was to remain the most powerful institution of the administrators until finally, after the war, it was divided up into ministries of Welfare, Labour and Construction, a new Home Affairs Ministry to oversee local government and a National Police Agency. Even today, these organs of officialdom view their roles as partly inherited from those of their mighty predecessor.
9
An important function of the police from the turn of the century was to monitor the potentially explosive new relationships between early entrepreneurs and the labourers they hired in factories and on building sites. The combined office and residence (
chuzaisho
) of the rural policemen was often established on factory land and supported by an entrepreneur. The latter sometimes even paid the salaries of these policemen, who thus became virtual factory guards, a deterrent against labour unrest.
10
Until 1945 the Japanese police were also, of course, in charge of suppressing political heterodoxy. This was made easier by an extremely elaborate information-gathering network, with spies throughout the civilian population. All Japanese were regularly checked within the framework of a home visit programme. Police called on important families and landowners once a year, people without property twice a year and unemployed or suspicious citizens three times. Yet even while clamping down severely on anything that might upset the established order, the police understood that a tranquil Japan was best achieved through leniency and accommodation. Even after the dreaded Tokko (Special Higher Police – later known as the ‘thought police’) acquired great power through the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, people with the ‘wrong thoughts’ were not treated harshly once they had shown repentance. Recantation of one’s beliefs would result in dropped charges and, frequently, in official assistance in finding a job for smooth reintegration into the community.
11
The established process for this, actively encouraged by the Ministry of Justice and known as
tenko
(best translated as ‘apostasy’), involved the suspect’s ‘conversion’ to belief in the benevolence of the ‘family state’ under the emperor.
The disbanding of the Naimusho by the occupation authorities after the Second World War brought great changes in police behaviour. Today, they are rarely overbearing towards individuals (as distinct from their exhortations directed to the public in general through megaphones and loudspeakers); they generally blend in with the area they patrol, and cultivate a friendly and helpful demeanour.
Every neighbourhood in the cities has its
koban
, or police box – introduced in 1888 on the advice of a captain in the Berlin metropolitan police
12
– and the countryside is dotted with the
chuzaisho
where local policemen live with their families. The
koban
is a source of information on many matters, from unfindable addresses to treatment for a sick pet. All people still receive twice-yearly home visits from the
koban
-based police, who use these opportunities to collect gossip about the neighbourhood and inquire after any ‘unusual behaviour’. Many foreigners in Tokyo are excluded from these rounds, but I, for example, received a visit from the policeman of the
chuzaisho
in a nearby hamlet within a month of settling in the countryside to work on this book.
Subtle social control is greatly facilitated by the ease with which the police can trace the movements of most people by means of the domicile and family registers (for Japanese) and the alien registers (for foreigners), and the observations of attentive neighbours. The limited scope for the Japanese to change their employment helps greatly in keeping society under survey. In residential neighbourhoods, newcomers with obscure backgrounds are scrutinised by trusted acquaintances of the police. If anything untoward appears to be going on in a particular household, a police officer may visit it sooner than the twice-a-year routine calls for. A number of embezzlement cases have been discovered in this way, through tips from neighbours who noticed refrigerators, TV sets, cars and the like being delivered to a home in quick succession.
13
The police like to compile records of minor infractions, especially of people who are not well established in communities. This gives them an excuse to ask people to come for questioning at any time. A curious personal experience may illustrate this. I was once summoned to a police station for no reason I could think of. Waiting for me was a copy of an apology I had written four years previously for having been one day late in registering my re-entry into Japan at the office of the Tokyo ward in which I lived. Since the final date for registering had fallen on a public holiday, and since my written explanation and apology were contrite in the degree prescribed for such occasions, I had not expected to hear of it again. However, while the friendly police were taking the prints of all my fingers and of both full hands and asking dozens of seemingly irrelevant questions, it became clear that they wanted to see me for something entirely different – most probably it was a case involving an acquaintance, which happened to have been solved before my arrival at the station.
14
The public is not undivided in its admiration of policemen. To some extent they are still feared. But, especially in the countryside, people bring them presents, offer them free meals and invite them to drinking parties. In the cities, the police can rely on a large number of enthusiastic informers: people who monitor the life of the streets while selling cigarettes from tiny window-shops, or respected members of the neighbourhood such as doctors or dentists, who may double as parole officers. There are in addition thousands of volunteer crime-prevention associations based on neighbourhood organisations and occupational groups, all linked by federations.
I once spent a Saturday afternoon with a small group of middle-aged housewives patrolling the streets of one of Tokyo’s major entertainment districts. Their trained eyes would soon spot any teenagers from the suburbs, whom they would approach for questioning. The conversations usually ended with encouragement to return home on the next commuter train and avoid the temptations and traps awaiting innocent youth in the city. Encounters which in many Western countries would have resulted at least in foul language produced only bowed heads and muttered thanks for the advice given by the crime-prevention ladies.
The function of nursemaid to all citizens is still cherished by the contemporary police:
The police actually seem to play the role of a social worker or a clergyman in their approach. They investigate the suspect’s personal background and try to determine why he went wrong. They convince the suspect that he is essentially a good person, but that he made a mistake. If they yell at him in the interrogation, their anger is not because they hate him, but because he is a good person who did wrong and will not admit it.
15
One need not be a criminal to earn such nursing attention. One detects it in the admonishing tone of instructions suddenly emanating from the loudspeaker on a police box or cruising patrol car. In the apartment-block districts of some smaller cities the police may try to make people feel part of a community by wishing them good morning through a public address system at 7 a.m., and by providing music for calisthenics, uplifting talk and reminders to be careful about all manner of things.
The public, on its side, tends to obey police directions, however unnecessary and overbearing. Pedestrians will usually wait for quite superfluous traffic lights to change on narrow streets that could be crossed in a stride or two, or even where no vehicles can pass because of a blocked-off road.
A good example of tolerance of police interference can be witnessed every year during the cherry-blossom season in Tokyo’s Ueno Park, which attracts a large number of partying groups, mainly office workers, who sit on mats beneath the blossom, picnicking, drinking, singing and clapping their hands in unison as is the custom at office parties. But the police have staked out large territories for themselves too, and use their megaphones liberally for exhortations and warnings. These go on until about 8.30 p.m. when, with the revelry in full swing, the police begin to shout that it is time to go home. Amazingly, within thirty minutes or less the park is nearly totally empty. Practically everyone obeys, even though the police are making arbitrary rules; in fact, the park is open twenty-four hours a day.
Another example of this combination of police meddling and almost blind obedience by the public occurs regularly on crowded major roads where snow has turned to slush. Lit-up signs along the road and cruising police cars command drivers to put on snow-chains, whereupon hundreds upon hundreds of people stop and fumble, often in the dark, to follow orders, only to ruin their chains and damage their tyres, not to mention the road, in the process.
The Japanese, especially in the cities, are constantly made to feel like subjects rather than citizens. They live in a cajoling and exhortative environment. They are continually warned about dangers, reminded of the proper way to do things, gently chided. Kawaji’s nurses of the people have stayed on as permanent instructors. The loudspeakers on cruising police cars and on the bigger police boxes recall a worrisome mother; something is always
abunai
, dangerous. The hint of aggrievedness in the tone emphasises further the likeness to a Japanese mother; people walking the streets are made to feel like potentially naughty children.
In the railway stations that almost all commuting salarymen pass through every day, incessant announcements giving mostly superfluous information acquire the quality of an acoustical whip, spurring on commuters as though they might otherwise clog the passageways and platforms. Together with the ubiquitous admonishing of the police, this constitutes the daily manifestation of authority outside the workplace. The intrusion is only aural; no one is picked up by the collar, no flashlight is shone in the face. But one is reminded, ever so mildly, that authority is immanent in the world.
For drivers there are other, special reminders. In some prefectures one can still find nearly life-size concrete or plastic policemen clad in full, if weatherbeaten, regalia. In some areas these have been replaced by large pictures of policemen printed on vinyl sheets, or by highly stylised structures with fluorescent paint that in the beam of headlights suggest the white bandolier and red nightstick of traffic police.