The Enigma of Japanese Power (3 page)

Japanese politics is still largely portrayed (very enthusiastically so by Japan’s official spokesmen) as obeying cultural dictates. Japanese authors who choose a non-Marxist vantage-point practically always take it for granted that their native world is a product of the predilections of past generations of the people as a whole. Most writing on Japanese politics and its history does not give the impression that there have been power-holders at every stage with the means to organise the lives of those they controlled. A major recent effort by three prominent scholars to arrive at a new, all-encompassing perspective of Japanese socio-political life is an elaborate attempt to reduce everything to cultural factors, as if power has never been exercised in Japan.
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Such reductionism is all the more remarkable because, if there is one nation whose predominant social and cultural idiosyncrasies can be traced back to political decisions that can clearly be seen in isolation from other influences, it is Japan.

If I had to explain the essential characteristics of Holland, where I was brought up, I could trace political determinants in the development of its economic, religious and general social life, but I would not necessarily adopt a political emphasis. Holland shares the European heritage of Greek and Hebrew thought, Roman law and the powerful force of Christianity, as Japan shares in the continental Asian heritage of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. But the Dutch patricians were not in a position to choose what suited them from among Christian tenets and Roman ideas of jurisprudence, to be incorporated into Dutch culture as they saw fit. Nor did the absolute monarchs of Europe often have the power to control their borders effectively against ideas they did not like.

Any European country offers a whole jumble of possible leads to original causes of whatever one wants to explain. The same is true of India, to take one other example. And where must one look for the beginnings of what is most essential in Chinese culture? To the state, or to the philosophy that justified it?

Such ‘chicken and egg’ questions are less applicable to Japan. Looking back over its history, it is clear that political arrangements have been a major factor in determining the development of Japanese culture. Japan’s relative isolation meant that the élite, in its efforts to hang on to power, could readily control the inflow and the impact of foreign culture. Power-holders could also pick and choose, from among what the rest of the world had to offer, those techniques and attitudes best calculated to consolidate their own positions. Such relatively wide control over culture meant a near absolute control over potentially subversive thinking.

It is generally acknowledged that Chinese ideas and methods have helped shape official Japanese culture to a greater extent than any other influence. Apart from the great legacy of the writing system and the techniques and styles of artistic production, these cultural imports primarily served political purposes. In the sixth century Japan’s rulers adopted Buddhism, explaining that they did so for political reasons. The introduction of the Chinese model of state administration, shortly afterwards, was obviously also a political move.

Diplomatic channels to China were subsequently closed, and kept closed at the discretion of generations of Japanese rulers until 1401, when shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu established trade relations with the Ming court. In spite of the huge profits and many luxuries this brought Yoshimitsu, his successors again put a stop to the Chinese traffic. During the periods when court and shogun did not maintain official relations with China, Japan’s southern provinces continued to trade, and some Chinese cultural influence must have continued to filter through, but it does not seem to have had a lasting effect on Japanese élite culture.

From the middle of the sixteenth century the Portuguese were allowed to bring their firearms, medicine, astronomy, clocks and, most significantly, their religion. But this hospitality was reversed not long after the turn of the century, when the shogun began to fear them as a political fifth column, realising the potential threat posed by a Lord beyond the clouds towards whom his underlings could redirect their sense of loyalty. The result of this political insight was a policy of almost hermetic seclusion, kept in force until the middle of the nineteenth century.

The new set of rulers that came in with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 promoted the import of practically anything their official missions to the United States and Europe considered useful for a new Japan. When this, inevitably, resulted in the spread of subversive ideas, they clamped down on them and began propagating an ‘ancient’ tradition, which they had themselves manufactured from bits and pieces of earlier political ideology, glorifying the emperor as head of the Japanese family state.

Until 1945 Japanese power-holders had a special police force with the task of eliminating ‘dangerous thoughts’. Half a dozen officers of that police force became ministers of education, justice, labour, home affairs and welfare after the war.
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And the essential character of Japanese nationalism in the 1980s is still determined by notions incorporated in the mythology fabricated by the Meiji oligarchy.

Fourteen centuries ago Japanese power-holders could rummage among what China had to offer and limit such outside cultural influences almost totally to institutions and beliefs that suited them. They again succeeded remarkably well with Western influences in the second half of the nineteenth century. In between, after centuries of civil strife, the power-holders suppressed those indigenous Buddhist sects that threatened to inject religious competition into the political realm, and selectively stimulated or arrested various social, economic and cultural trends depending on their importance to their own staying in power. The power-holders could even reverse the development of technology, as when they banned and forgot the firearms introduced by the Portuguese. They preferred not to run the risk of commoners acquiring the skills to rise up against them; firing a musket or rifle is a great deal simpler than swordsmanship, and sword-wielding opponents are more easily kept at bay before castle walls than gun-toting ones.

As we have seen, no intellectual leverage over the power of the political élite was possible, since the notion of a universal or transcendental truth was never permitted to embed itself in Japanese thought. The power-holders could control even this; indeed, no law ever restrained their power. It is thus no exaggeration to say that political arrangements have been crucial in determining the limits on Japanese religious life and thought.

A scholar of comparative political history has pointed out that, whereas in nineteenth-century Europe an ‘intellectual mobilisation’ – with lawyers,
philosophes
, freemasons, writers and journalists participating – could be distinguished from social and political action, in Japan no such a distinction could be made. The daimyo and samurai who took up ‘Dutch studies’ were equally engaged in intellectual activity, but ‘they are distinguished from “intellectuals” in nineteenth-century Europe by the extraordinary singleness of political purpose with which they pursued these studies’.
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Power patterns have both directed and inhibited Japanese intellectual pursuits. Japanese ideas of justice and the place of law in society have been fashioned by rulers in terms of expediency, and have not influenced the attitudes and methods of those rulers in any critical way. Supposedly typical aspects of Japanese society and culture, such as group life, company loyalty and the love of harmony, the lack of individualism, the near absence of litigation, ultimately originate in political arrangements and are sustained for political purposes.

So long as Japan is considered primarily in social and cultural terms, one always runs up against a basic question: what is the origin of the great differences between the habits and institutions of the Japanese and those of other peoples? Part of the answer lies in Japan’s historical isolation. But it is the political approach that can answer the question most satisfyingly, since it makes it possible to recognise the strong forces behind the shaping of Japanese society.

We have no difficulty in accepting that Soviet society, sixty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, has acquired characteristics it would not have had if it had known liberty, if it had been spared oppression by a ruling
nomenklatura
class and if it had no built-in impetus for people to lie for personal advantage. By comparison, Japan constitutes an altogether different, freer and more pleasant society. But the Japanese System has so far been as inescapable as the political system of the Soviet Union, and it has much deeper foundations.

Why, even so, does the cultural explanation of Japanese political life appear so much more attractive than the political perspective on Japanese culture? Perhaps because a superficial first look at the country would not urge one to look at it through political spectacles. There is no tyrant in sight; not even is there a clear centre of political power. The situation would not, on the face of it, suggest any particularly strong coercion over the individual. Even after a long stay in Japan one does not notice much coercion traceable to, say, a police force or some other government agency. Literature on Japan abounds, rather, in descriptions of a striving for harmony. Japanese power, in short, is highly diffuse; and, while this makes it particularly pervasive, it is not so immediately noticeable.

Yet I suspect that there is another, more important, reason for the success of the culturalist perspective among Westerners. Many people in democratically organised societies feel uncomfortable with the notion of power. Even the less threatening word ‘politics’ evokes distaste, associated as it often is with greed, lying and other things beneath our dignity. ‘Power’ is a dirtier word still, eliciting pleasurable emotions perhaps only in those who are themselves power-hungry.

The concept of ‘power’ has been eliminated from the vocabularies of a fair number of contemporary scholars studying human affairs. So unpleasant are its connotations for intellectuals, especially Americans, that they tend to deny or renounce it,
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sometimes to the point of seriously suggesting that the concept be banished altogether.
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One explanation for this might be that the idea of power clashes emotionally with the ideal of equal opportunity, which has gained the force of an ideology. Power in the sense of control by a small group of people over the majority, and power of the kind wielded by a master over a servant, are unpleasant possibilities. Thus intellectual constructs are created that sanitise power relations and view them as the perfectly rational result of collective decisions.

This is no place to linger over the foibles of contemporary political science, but a few observations may help to place this approach in perspective. Since the Second World War academics have offered us, by and large, a cellophane-wrapped, hygienic version of our socio-political world. In this version, the concept of power is sometimes replaced by that of an allegedly more neutral ‘influence’ in which the element of (potential) force is absent. Master-servant relationships are, if noticed at all, considered in exclusively economic terms, as something moreover that works for the good of everyone; while the idea of power ‘red in tooth and claw’ emerges only in reference to revolutionary situations.

This view, especially as purveyed by the adherents of ‘pluralist theory’, leads to the acceptance of any political arrangement as basically what it ought to be, though with room for improvement of certain details. Even where power is not eliminated from scholarly discourse, its sharp edges are removed. It is often treated as if it were a scarce commodity that can be allocated through forces akin to those of the market-place. This economic explanation of the political world denatures the idea of power. It cannot explain the very real bloody noses of, say, Japan’s teachers fighting against the attempts of national educational administrators to regain control over ‘moral thinking’ in the schools. It cannot envision a country rushing headlong into disaster because of the disastrous way in which power is exercised.

The parcelling out of responsibilities and duties in the manner of the democratically organised Western communities – the basis for ‘pluralist theory’ – is possible only with some prior agreement on how to limit power, and on the guises in which it is allowed to affect ordinary citizens. This approach to power presupposes the existence of laws that are taken seriously. It also assumes that the ideal of pluralist representation is a reality, and uses this reality as a point of departure.

Japanese citizens do not in practice have recourse to the law; in fact, the idea of ‘citizen’ as distinct from ‘subject’ is hardly understood. Pluralist representation exists on paper, of course, but to believe that this informs Japanese practice is taking very much on faith.

If, between the lines of the following chapters, I give the impression that power in Japan is something to be wary of, this is intentional. Unlike power-holders in the countries that have provided the models for ‘pluralist theory’, Japanese power-holders systematically use power in ways and for ends over which the voter has ultimately no control whatsoever.