The Enigma of Japanese Power (29 page)

The theory of the benevolence of law-enforcement officers accords with a view of power relations assiduously promoted by Japanese power-holders since at least the 1870s. Today, on a personal level, the Japanese are asked to believe that their superiors have the best in mind for them. On a communal level, the LDP and the bureaucrats are supposed to be guided by this same disposition. Everlasting gratitude of subjects towards their superiors has been, next to unconditional loyalty, the major command of Japanese socio-political life, and it is bound up with the officially sponsored faith in the ultimate beneficence and virtue of the existing political order.

Traditionally, benevolence in Japan was considered to be not a condition for rule, as it was in China, but something extra bestowed upon the people out of the goodness of their ruler’s heart. Subordinates received privileges or goods because they had humane superiors, not because they had a right to anything. Whereas Chinese emperors were expected to be benevolent and maintain justice in order to keep the ‘mandate of Heaven’, their Japanese counterparts, as direct descendants of the sun goddess, were not in need of heavenly endorsement; they were themselves assumed to be in perpetual possession of benevolence. There is no clear evidence that this claim of totally unselfish benevolence was ever widely believed.

Japan’s re-entry into the international world in the middle of the nineteenth century did not undermine this ideology. The oligarch most closely associated with the Meiji constitution, Ito Hirobumi, stated it clearly in his later years: ‘It was not the people who forcibly wrested constitutional privilege from the Crown as in other countries, but the new regime was to be conferred upon them as a voluntary gift.’
³⁷
The unfathomable benevolence of the emperor figured largely in the ‘family state’ and ‘national essence’ ideology (see Chapter 10) current from shortly before the turn of the century until 1945. Nitobe Inazo, one of the first explicators of Japan to the West, wrote that Japan had never had ‘the despots of occidental history’, and asserted – forgetting the murder of at least one emperor and many assassination attempts – that Japanese annals were ‘never stained by such a blot as the death of Charles I, or Louis XVI’.
³⁸
Unlike the subjects of other monarchs, Japanese are alleged to have loved their emperors by definition. A Japanese who in 1910 received his doctoral degree at the London School of Economics with a dissertation on Japanese political development explained the context of Japanese emperor-worship:

[it is] almost an impossibility for a sensible Japanese to denounce that which is associated with the pleasantest ideas of his native land, with the peace, tranquillity, happiness, and prosperity which his fathers enjoyed and he himself is still enjoying, and which he consciously recognises as the basis of the stability, dignity, unity and strength of the nation.
³⁹

Japanese Buddhist teachings supported the native and imported Confucianist concepts of the obligations towards one’s lord in return for his beneficence, by placing them in a metaphysical context. As another of the earlier commentators on Japanese culture explained to a European audience:

the universe itself is the manifestation of kindness, or grace, or favour. The sun shines. The rain fertilises the fields. The flowers blossom. Everything is the manifestation of favour. We, human beings, are favoured with this great grace of the universe. We were born from parents. We are living in the land. We are cultivated by the teaching which was revealed by various sages and wise men. Americans wear silk garments which are made in Japan. The train, which was invented in England, is now used all over the world. We live in the house which was built by carpenters. We can buy anything without special labour owing to the manufacturers’ and traders’ labours. Is not, therefore, everything in the world indeed the expression of favour?
⁴⁰

This in itself admirable ethical sentiment was easily skewed to political uses.

In her classic study of fundamental Japanese motivations, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict spoke of the Japanese as ‘debtors to the ages and the world’.
⁴¹
Until 1945 Japanese children were taught that they owed a debt of gratitude for everything that ancestors, teachers and superiors had ever done to make the world habitable. This load, which all Japanese still carry to some extent and which once justified the greatest personal sacrifices, is referred to as
on
. It differs from common social obligations, or
giri
, in that complete repayment of the debt is never possible. In the context of power relations, an
on
obligation justifies the permanent subordination of the receiver of a ‘favour’ to his benevolent superior.

While the System is no longer presented as a source of all blessings in life, as the pre-war ‘family state’ under the emperor was, Japanese are still implicitly expected to take its benevolence for granted. In actual practice, Japanese can be quite cynical about the supposed benevolence of those placed above them. A political representative whom voters have sent to the Diet in Tokyo is judged by whether or not he can deliver the bridge, road or other benefits he has promised the constituency. Villagers have for centuries fended for themselves as best they could, and in the process they have developed a strong sense of their right to certain customary amenities.
⁴²
Eavesdropping on salarymen imbibing sake will confirm that one of their favourite pastimes is grumbling about their superiors. But this cynicism has not undermined the habit of profusely apologising and expressing gratitude towards supposed benefactors. And the benevolent motives of officialdom and the large companies are taken for granted by the leaders of those institutions themselves.

The nurses of the people and the self-policing people themselves have managed to make their society, industrialised, urbanised and congested as it is, safer than at most other periods of Japanese history, and safer than most other countries are today. One need not worry about being mugged, let alone murdered, in the small alleys of Tokyo. People can walk most streets at night without fear. Japan has become the envy of the world for, next to its successful trade, its low crime statistics. Only 1.47 people per 100,000 of the population were murdered in 1984, as compared with 7.92 people in the United States, 3.24 in Britain and 4.51 in West Germany.
⁴³
Burglaries and petty theft are fairly common, but the statistics for robberies with assault are even more lopsided when compared with the West: 1.82 cases per 100,000 population in Japan, 205.38 cases in the USA, 50.02 cases in the UK and 45.77 cases in West Germany.
⁴⁴

Besides the networks of police informants and crime-prevention squads of ordinary civilians, the symbiotic relationship between the Japanese police and organised crime must also be part of the explanation for this great discrepancy. The unavailability to ordinary people of hand-guns and strict control of their introduction into Japan help as well, as does the absence of a crime-producing drug problem. Heroin addiction is rare, and the measures taken against its distribution and use are merciless. No sympathy is shown for the suffering of the addict, no weaning with substitutes; if caught, drug users go ‘cold turkey’. The use of stimulants like meta-amphetamine (‘speed’) by housewives, office employees and teenagers is a problem, but has not led to a kleptomania epidemic. Marijuana is treated as a dangerous hard drug, and suspected users – mainly among those exposed to Western youth culture, especially in the entertainment world – may expect pre-dawn raids on their apartments. If caught they go to prison, and foreigners among them may be deported.

A closer look at the treatment of the mentally ill shows Japanese society’s adamant attitude towards even its involuntary nonconformists. In any country, of course, those who society decides are mad have a good chance of being locked up, the very worst cases perhaps against their will. But a constitutionalist political system is supposed to provide safeguards in the form of standards for judging who is or is not dangerous and guarantees for the safety and personal dignity of those placed in institutional custody.

In July 1985 the International Commission of Jurists severely criticised the way in which Japanese mental patients are treated, stating that it violates the Japanese constitution as well as the Covenant for Civil and Political Rights that Japan has ratified. The organisation discovered an extraordinarily high death rate among the incarcerated, and established that institutions are heavily overpopulated, that unnecessary violence is practised and that patients are exploited, poorly fed and forced to live under miserable conditions. It also concluded that many patients were locked up without good reason. The year before, the International League of Human Rights based in New York had claimed that an abnormally high number of mentally retarded are incarcerated in Japan. It also stated that normal Japanese practices in treating the mentally ill constitute a violation of human rights.

Some 340,000 people currently reside in Japanese mental institutions, 87 per cent of which are privately owned. Four-fifths of the population of these institutions are locked up without their own consent, as against only one-twentieth in Britain. Two-thirds of these are under lock and key, in the majority of cases without any means of communicating with the outside world. An estimated 200,000 inmates have been locked up for much longer periods than is justified. The Japanese law allows anyone responsible for a person who is thought to be mentally ill to have the final say whether or not to commit that person to a mental hospital, and allows the institution, in turn, to determine how long that person must remain.

Japanese with physical or mental handicaps have customarily been hidden from society by their relatives, because many consider such handicaps shameful. In recent years increasing numbers of the mentally retarded have been brought to institutions instead of being kept in back rooms. Medical personnel at a cross-section of those mental hospitals willing to co-operate in an investigation told researchers that roughly 70 per cent of all patients could be treated at home if discrimination were not a factor. Besides the genuinely mentally ill or retarded, there are numerous cases of parents being sent to a psychiatric institution owing to a combination of senility and the proverbial quarrels with daughters-in-law. Sometimes incarceration is also deemed a proper solution for dealing with uncontrollable youth.

Large profits can be made by crowded private psychiatric hospitals. The national health insurance system allows for much racketeering, and running costs, with only one doctor per 68 patients – as compared to one for 14.3 patients in ordinary hospitals – are small.

In 1984 nineteen suspicious deaths in one mental hospital drew the attention of the Japanese press to the issue, resulting in a number of revelations from different parts of Japan about forced incarceration, maltreatment and deaths. But the general secretary for the Japanese Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights, Totsuka Etsuro, sees little hope that the bureaucracy will take effective action. Changes in the law pending in 1987 were expected to have only cosmetic effects. The reaction of the Ministry of Health and Welfare to the allegations from Geneva and New York has been that Japan has its own culture, different in some ways from that of the West, and that Japan therefore has a right to treat its mentally retarded in its own way.

One type of nonconformist that the Japanese System has reacted against consistently and vehemently is the leftist. I have already traced the war between the Marxist-inspired teachers’ union and the Ministry of Education, and referred to the cracked heads of many post-war labour organisers; but it is also no secret that police and prosecutors discriminate quite heavily against participants in any conflict thought to be ideologically motivated. ‘Ideology, not income, structures the misuse of authority.’
⁴⁶
Ordinary violent quarrels are generally handled good-humouredly by the police and subsequently forgotten. But fights involving blue-collar workers in their place of work are strictly pursued and generally prosecuted.
⁴⁷
The Supreme Court supports law-enforcement officials in this bias, and decides against labour in most cases, sometimes reversing verdicts of the lower courts.
⁴⁸

Japanese who disagree with the way in which the System works and who translate their discontent into political action are considered subversive and looked upon as potential bomb-throwers. Radical students receive considerably harsher treatment from police and prosecutors than most other people brought before them. The reaction of the police to leftists is ‘almost visceral’.
⁴⁹
As an American scholar summarised: ‘The police seem to be galvanised when discussing Communists or leftist labor unions, and they told me on numerous occasions that they consider them a threat to Japanese society and to the police establishment.’
⁵⁰
Applicants for the police force who reveal leftist leanings are deemed unsuitable for police work and filtered out.
⁵¹
One author, who served for ten years with the police in Hyogo prefecture, describes the automatic retort of ‘Aka!’ (‘red’ or ‘communist’) that higher police officers are likely to use against anyone, not only on the outside but also within the police force, who questions police methods and priorities.
⁵²

It is also accepted as a part of Japanese reality that the police should assiduously clamp down on activist leftist groups while allowing the activist
rightist
groups to run wild. In the Ginza area of central Tokyo, one of the busiest places in the world, one will find, day after day, year after year, a sound-truck with flags and banners parked at a strategic spot. It belongs to the famous pre-war ultra-nationalist agitator Akao Bin (he used to call himself the ‘Hitler of Japan’), who was shouting himself hoarse at the very same spot when I first passed it in 1962. In the name of free speech, he is allowed to blast the crowds with high-volume exhortations against leftist causes and world communism. The shoppers ignore this senile old rightist, but it is inconceivable that the police would permit a leftist activist an equal opportunity to harangue passers-by year after year with his beliefs.

Rightists are given much freedom to cruise through traffic with blaring sound-trucks and to make deafening speeches on busy street comers. They are in fact allowed to disturb and obstruct meetings sponsored by the Socialist Party, with the police turning a blind eye. And rightist threats, as we have seen, have made it difficult for the teachers’ union to find venues for its conventions.

Compounding the anger of police and prosecutors when confronted with leftist activists is the latter’s refusal to recant their beliefs. To the police, their crimes, if any, appear less important than their ‘wrong attitudes’. The fact that they will not apologise renders them less than ‘fully Japanese’ in the eyes of the law-enforcement officials. Extremists who are incarcerated, sometimes only on charges of premeditation, preparation for criminal action or conspiracy, are treated much worse than ordinary prison inmates guilty of proven crimes. They are expected to buy improved treatment by forswearing their ideological commitment in a way reminiscent of the pre-war
tenko
, in which committed Marxists and intellectuals renounced their ‘wrong thoughts’ and acknowledged the virtues of the imperial order. The pressure today is only on certifiable extremists, but this does not alter the fact that demands for apostasy are in violation of the constitution.

The general lenience of the police and judiciary has, as can be imagined, created a multitude of grateful suspects and convicts in Japan. On the other hand, it is not difficult to imagine how easily politically engaged youth can become radicalised by their discriminatory attitudes, as providing ‘evidence’ that society can improve only through violent revolution. Activist students are basically faced with only two options: to stop being politically involved, or to join the ranks of the radicals and resort to extra-legal activities. Thus the power-holders have had a direct hand in the creation of Japan’s extremists.

To avoid the kind of abuses of which
tenko
was a major feature, the United States occupation authorities disbanded the Naimusho and decentralised the police, making them answerable to prefectural public safety commissions. But it soon became clear that the latter arrangement had no future. In the 1950s influential bureaucrats from the disbanded ministry wormed themselves into key political and bureaucratic positions for social control. The alleged threat from the left seen in the labour movement helped expand their power. ‘As politicians, they continued to behave like officials of the [Naimusho] in their defense of the existing order from the leftist threat. No issue concerned the ex-bureaucrats more in the first half of the 1950s than the recentralisation of the nation’s police forces.’
⁵³
In the forefront of this successful campaign was former Naimusho official Nadao Hirokichi, who appeared in Chapter 3 in his later role as Nikkyoso’s most dreaded enemy. Top positions in the National Public Safety Commission, the National Police Agency and the interior, labour, welfare and education ministries were never in ‘neutral’ or ‘moderate’ hands long enough to give the leftist opposition a chance to influence social policy adjustments.

The Police Law of 1954 caused an uproar among intellectuals and the left, who (inappropriately) compared it with the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, in whose name the Naimusho had locked up a multitude of Japanese with ‘dangerous thoughts’. The 1954 law was actually less than the social control bureaucrats had hoped for, but enough to undo many of what they considered the ‘excesses’ of occupation reforms. Already in place were special security regulations, first issued in Fukui prefecture in the aftermath of an earthquake in 1948 and later copied by Kobe, Osaka and Tokyo, regulating and limiting demonstrations. The Supreme Court, in three separate suits, has refused to declare these regulations unconstitutional and in 1960 declared that demonstrators were in essence ‘rioters’. The maintenance of public order is the court’s absolute priority, one that is reflected in strict judicial decisions against those who appear to threaten this order.
⁵⁴
The court has twice insisted on retrials by the Tokyo high court after the latter passed not-guilty verdicts on defendants charged under the security regulations.
⁵⁵

The great ‘
ampo
struggle’ of 1960, in which many leftist groups united in their opposition to Prime Minister Kishi’s handling of the extension of the US–Japan security treaty, represented the high-water mark for the Japanese anti-establishment movement and provided the authorities with a moral pretext to expand the powers of the police. The most eye-catching aspect of this has been a display of power by the
kidotai
, or riot police. In their sense of a mission to safeguard the security of the nation, these heavily trained troops are the closest successors to the élite forces of the Imperial Army. The sense of belonging to a separate community, strong enough among the police in general,
⁵⁶
tends to be particularly intense here, as is mutual devotion between commanders and men.

In the same organisational category with the
kidotai
are the security police who gather information on potential trouble-makers, including leftist unionists and members of the Communist Party. The security police insist that they do not use eavesdropping devices (forbidden by the constitution), but informed observers are convinced otherwise.
⁵⁷
These suspicions were borne out when the news leaked out that in November 1986 workers of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone had found that the telephone of the chief of the international division of the Communist Party had been connected to a wire-tapping cable. The cable led to an apartment rented by the son of a policeman, whose contract with his landlord was countersigned by a former policeman of the public security division. There had been numerous earlier cases of JCP officials’ telephones being tapped, but the party had never before collected enough evidence to satisfy the prosecutor. This case, too, was dropped when top career policemen apologised to the prosecutor’s office and the prosecutor accepted that the policemen responsible for the tapping had only followed orders from superiors. Thus, though wire-tapping is unconstitutional, the higher levels of the police are allowed to get away with it.

In the 1970s and 1980s events involving Japan’s international reputation – US presidential visits, visits by the Queen of England and the South Korean president and two summit conferences – have enabled the
kidotai
and security police greatly to expand their routine powers without public or news media resistance. Terrorism by Japanese extremists abroad and crude kitchen-made rockets fired off by untraceable extremists at home have further helped to create a climate of tolerance for strengthening the police. The
kidotai
on their side are past masters of tactical restraint, being especially careful not to turn opinion against them by making martyrs.

Successive state visits or summits have encouraged the police to break their own records of money spent on equipment, and to interfere further in the lives of ordinary citizens. The 1984 visit of President Chun Doo Hwan of South Korea prompted the police to stop cars on Tokyo’s elevated expressways for ‘practice searches’ a month before the event; and foreign diplomats visiting the Foreign Ministry were stopped and questioned by guards. Even these security measures were outstripped by those surrounding the Tokyo summit of 1986. About 50,000 buildings and small apartments were investigated or searched. Some 900 leftist activists were arrested for no clear reason. Sewers were investigated and sealed every day. During the summit, much of central Tokyo within a 1.5- to 2-kilometre radius of summit and lodging sites was sealed off by a
cordon sanitaire
to all but a few summit-related vehicles and individuals with special passes. Thirty thousand policemen were mobilised to guard the summiteers, and all over the city cars were stopped for vehicle searches. The
kidotai
was able to try out the equivalent of $40 million worth of new equipment (in addition to which the cost of security measures as such reached an estimated $17 million).
⁵⁸

One of the most significant aspects of the nurses of the people is that they are governed by no one but themselves. This gives them an unusual place among the components of the system. Regional public safety commissions still exert theoretical control; but aside from the fact that these tend to be composed of old-fashioned conservatives with rightist histories,
⁵⁹
the police force is in any case highly centralised. A quarter of a million policemen and their clerical assistants are controlled by a mere 450 career bureaucrats. The top level, as with all components of the mainstream of the System, has consisted ever since the 1880s of graduates of the University of Tokyo’s law department. When these administrators think the situation calls for it, they will demonstrate their independence. For example, when Tagawa Seiichi, home affairs minister and chairman of the National Public Safety Commission, wanted to give a formal talk to police officers in the Kansai area following a 1984 scandal involving the police, the National Police Agency flatly rejected his request with the excuse that it would not accord with usual practice among the officials concerned.

Appointments to the crucial posts of head of the National Police Agency (NPA) and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) are made by the outgoing chief of the NPA. The appointment of the MPD superintendent-general is subject to formal approval by the prime minister, but the NPA ‘stands absolutely independent, formally, from all other bureaucracies and branches of government’.
⁶⁰

There is no check on the police apart from public opinion as supposedly reflected in the press, and the latter has had no effect in restraining the recent expansion of their power. The police maintain smooth relations with the press via the
kisha
clubs attached to major police bureaux. Reporters are well taken care of, with some press facilities paid for by the police, and they generally pass on news as it is interpreted and handed to them by police officers who exist for this purpose.
⁶¹

Significantly, a newspaper like the
Asahi Shimbun
, which normally raises its editorial eyebrows at authoritarian practices, cannot rebuke the police for over-zealous efforts (such as the car searches ‘for practice’), since to do so might make it look irresponsible in the face of an alleged extremist threat to the nation.

Before the war, the police had rivals for power in the form of other bureaux within their own Naimusho and the formidable Army and Navy. Today, they no longer face competition from any of the System’s components. The Self-Defence Forces, Japan’s euphemistically named military, are no competitor under current conditions. In fact, many ‘civilian’ staff members of the National Self-Defence Agency, which has the same status as a ministry, are former policemen.

Measured by what they can do in emergency situations, the police are the strongest component of the Japanese System. They have the means to pull off a successful
coup d’état
, should an ambitious clique ever gain control over them. In some ways, their effectiveness inspires confidence; in other ways, their ambivalence towards democratic principles and the concept of law gives reason for concern. Under normal conditions the police guarantee a safe System, but not a lawful one.