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–
The Enigma of Japanese Power (40 page)
If Japan’s strict social norms were to wear off there would not be much underneath, since the political system has prevented the emergence of any religion or ethical belief-system that could be a source of moral principles. Strip Japanese society of its rigid codes of individual submission, and there would be little left to hold it together. Many of the administrators are uncomfortably aware of this.
The reaction against the fanatical wartime version of Japanism, which has been sustained by the Nikkyoso and other leftist groups, has gone much too far in the eyes of these guardians of Japanese morality, who show what to outsiders seems an excessive, unending concern with the moral quality of the emerging generation.
In the early 1960s when I first arrived in Japan, there was much talk about declining customs, disrespectful Japanese youth and the loss of a resolve to work for society. In the late 1980s one hears identical complaints; the national ‘spirit’ is always seen to be declining. The administrators sometimes seem obsessed with worry that the generation now in school may give it all up: devotion to the companies, housewifely roles, obedience to authorities and toughness for the sake of their country. They share a conviction that something must be done about it.
It is against this background that the campaigns in the 1950s and 1980s to ‘correct the excesses of the occupation’ must be seen, as well as the calls from LDP members and education officials for a new sense of patriotism among young people. There is much open dissatisfaction in many quarters with the absence of moral guidance and the restraints the government faces in seeking to reintroduce it into the schools. The top businessmen-bureaucrats in the economic federations have encouraged the development of an education system that has furthered ‘examination hell’ excesses, not only because they consider the docile middle-class workforce it engenders good for business, but also because they see its discipline as preventing the break-up of Japanese society. Although the keepers of the Japanese political order would not express it in these terms, what they fear the most is the ‘secularisation’ of Japanese society. It is significant in this context how casually it is accepted that the government should help nourish ‘cultural values’, as it did in the Meiji period.
The tensions that exist within Japanese education, caused by contradictions between the Japanese System and beliefs of Western origin, have become more acute in the 1980s. Former prime minister Nakasone hoped to resolve them through an unapologetic reassertion of Japanese mores as interpreted by himself and other staunch Japanists. He has forcefully propagated the need for a thorough and sincere study of what being Japanese is all about as a first requirement for a truly internationalised Japan, contributing to the world’s welfare. In answer to a question, put by myself, as to whether Japanese must be taught a morality different from that of other people, Nakasone stated that basic morality may be the same everywhere, but that it has different social bases and comes in different forms, which in the Japanese case necessitates attention from the authorities.
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Some LDP politicians go considerably beyond this. Education Minister Fujio Masayuki (who had to resign in 1986 after writing that Korea had assented to its own annexation by Japan in 1910) was quite explicit about the need to reintroduce the moral code taught by the Imperial Rescript on Education to restore Japan’s traditional moral order. Another education minister, Setoyama Mitsuyo, asserted in 1983 at a press conference that United States occupation officials were indirectly responsible for increased unruliness in Japanese schools. They had been assigned to destroy the customs, morals and history of Japan in order to adjust the Japanese to American living habits. Although resulting in some good, this had not, according to the minister, created a happy people. As a remedy, he suggested that the question of national morality as well as old-fashioned teaching methods should be re-studied; the concepts that he suggested should be instilled in children are all to be found in the Imperial Rescript on Education. Setoyama would no doubt have been forced to resign had he come out with this only six years earlier.
Japanese who think like Nakasone and most of the post-war education ministers, believe that ‘individualism’, which has allegedly replaced traditional morality since the occupation, has resulted in rampant selfishness and violence. In their ‘guidance’ concerning teaching about the constitution given in 1987 to the authors of school textbooks, the censors of the Ministry of Education explained the need for a shift of emphasis from guarantees of individual rights to social and national responsibilities. There exists considerable ambivalence about the concept of ‘individualism’. It is a code word indicating that the user has the correct ideas about the purpose of education, as set forth in the Fundamental Law of Education adopted in 1947. It is also deemed necessary to provide Japan with more creative thinkers. The important Ad Hoc Council for Educational Reform, established by Nakasone and consisting of academics, intellectuals and businessmen, has wrestled with the notion, and reports produced between 1985 and 1987 left an inescapable impression of believing that more individualism and more creativity would follow from more control. Japanese officials often define their imported terms rather sloppily, thus enabling themselves to take action that is contradictory to stated purposes. Well acquainted with the technique of juggling incompatible realities, Nikkyoso and other critics fear that ‘individualism’ will be the long-expected Trojan horse smuggling in nationalistic ethics.
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What the reformers are saying is that in order to stimulate individuality and creativity and bring about meaningful membership in the international community, education must imbue schoolchildren with love for Japan. In their final recommendations for a curriculum of moral education, already in part revived, the educational reform committee members emphasised the teaching of ‘respect for Japanese culture’, which, in the context in which the phrase is generally used, means respect for existing power relations.
In 1985 the Ministry of Education caused turmoil among educators by issuing instructions to all school heads that they must hoist the national flag and have their charges sing the national anthem at school ceremonies. This first order of its kind was prompted by a report revealing that only 92.5 per cent of primary schools and 86.4 per cent of middle schools hoisted the flag at the ceremony closing the school year, while only 72 per cent of primary schools and 53 per cent of middle schools sang the ‘Kimigayo’ (‘His Majesty’s Reign’, the unofficial national anthem); not enough, according to the officials concerned, to instil patriotic love in all Japanese children. Nikkyoso, on the other hand, considers both flag and anthem to be remnants of the ‘emperor system’. To the ministry’s contention that other countries have similar practices, the critics respond that both Germany and Italy changed their national anthems and flags after 1945. Shortly before the Ministry of Education issued its instructions, a publication from the Prime Minister’s Office openly stated that some Japanese were allergic to the sight of the flag because of personal war memories, and that for that very reason it was necessary to generate patriotism in a generation with no such memories.
Travelling through Japan, one once again sees, in front of schools, statues of a boy reading a book while carrying firewood on his back. It is Ninomiya Kinjiro, also known as Sontoku, a historical figure born in 1787 who by simultaneous hard work and hard study became a shogunate official and precursor of the movement of agrarian nationalism. The emphasis of his teaching was on the virtues of diligence, thrift, sincerity and mutual co-operation as a token of collective gratitude for blessings received. This would create a ‘true society’.
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The innocent-looking statue, symbolising these Confucianist ethics, was a central prop of moral education in pre-war and wartime schools. And since the number of such statues in primary-school grounds increased rapidly during the years in which the military increased their grip on the country, Ninomiya Kinjiro reminds many Japanese of the ‘morals’ they thought they had seen the last of when the occupation began to change the Japanese curriculum.
Selfishness and materialism have long been imagined to be Western imports.
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The virtues of thrift and collective endeavour that Ninomiya Kinjiro stood for are now being threatened – so many administrators have commented – by foreigners who ‘have become work-shy, abandoned production in favour of consumption, and are now losing out to Japanese economic competition’.
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When in the late 1980s foreign criticism of Japanese economic practices and intransigence on international issues began to be supplemented by more analytical probes into ‘nationalistic’ Japanese behaviour, a new indignant tone began to creep into the commentary of some of Japan’s scholars, editors and other spokesmen. The critical foreigners allegedly aim to weaken the foundations upon which Japanese society is based.
This is explained by some of the more articulate commentators as being the result of the West jettisoning the principle of ‘cultural relativism’. As one Kyoto University professor of economics puts it:
When challenged by cultures and practices outside the Western tradition, increasingly the impulse among Americans and Europeans is to condemn what is non-Western as unethical and unfair. . . . It is against this background of rising anti-cultural relativism among European and American opinion leaders that trade conflicts . . . have gathered momentum. With such philosophical conservatism on the loose, it might be unrealistic for us to expect fair understanding of our culture, and our social structure and customs.
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Foreign scrutiny of the Japanese System and the ideology and notions that help sustain it regularly invites vehement Japanese responses, which seems inevitable. It is, after all, tantamount to analysis of an ineffable divinity – which is destructive to any kind of religion. Thus Japan’s unofficial but, to all intents and purposes, most prominent mouthpiece in the world, the
Japan Times
, editorialised – apropos of an exchange in an intellectual magazine between a foreign author and a Japanese professor propounding Japanist views – as follows:
any foreigner who lashes out in an angry and inaccurate fashion at this country’s identity, its mythology if you will, encourages Japanese deafness to foreign criticism. The claims to guilt-free national identity are now firmly on the human agenda. But such claims are not the stuff of smooth global relations. Hence the need for patience, for understanding, for tolerance, for good manners.
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Without a far-reaching ‘secularisation’ of Japan, its subjects cannot become true citizens; nor can they gain a clear awareness of where the System’s activities, in which many participate with such seemingly religious fervour, are taking them. But since foreigners, especially the representatives of governments and businesses, cannot accommodate Japanese society in its capacity as a substitute religion, since they
do
worry about where Japan is going and since they will always ask questions and suggest answers that cut too close to the bone, they are, indeed, the ‘secularising’ force the administrators are afraid of. The
Japan Times
and the Kyoto professor, along with numerous other commentators, do not know it, but they are defenders of a faith.
So long as it is fairly diffuse, the exercise of informal power in Japan causes no acute anguish. If sensed at all by the post-war Japanese, the System’s ubiquitous and inescapable power is subtle, vague and rarely locatable. The unofficial methods by which order is kept outside the sanctioning framework of the law are rarely perceived, let alone openly scrutinised, and can therefore never present explicit problems. The exercise of official leadership, on the other hand, causes constant, severe and apparently insoluble tensions.
The Japanese who are formally in charge of the country – the prime minister and his cabinet – are in practice not allowed to exercise the power they should exercise under the constitution. Political leaders who hanker after genuine leadership will always face an elusive yet impenetrable wall of mistrust and unceasing sabotage. No one in Japan is given the unambiguous right to rule. No one person or group of people is ever really accountable for what Japan does. Japanese leadership is thus always incomplete.
The widely remarked weakness of Japan’s official leadership is usually explained with reference to a social tradition that discourages ‘individualism’, and therefore does not produce individualist leaders. But when one considers potentially strong leaders such as Nakasone Yasuhiro, Tanaka Kakuei, Ikeda Hayato, Kishi Nobusuke and numerous ‘bosses’ of interest groups or gangs, this theory does not hold; Nakasone, for example, was no less ‘individualistic’ than the foreign counterparts with whom he conferred at the annual summit conferences. The related theory that it is the public which will not accept a strong leader, because it won’t have anything to do with individualists, is equally unconvincing. There have always been plenty of popular heroes who behaved quite individualistically, and have been widely admired for that very reason.
To explain this particular issue in culturalist terms ignores the crucial political fact that Japanese who partake in the sharing of power are unremittingly ambivalent about who among them should have the right to rule. This extraordinary – for a modern industrial nation – characteristic is the most fundamental problem of Japanese political life. It is a problem whose repercussions affect, in varying degrees of immediacy, most of the phenomena described in this book. It is essentially and by definition a problem of political legitimacy. I say by definition, because among other things legitimacy always implies a condition where the right to rule has clearly been established.
On the face of it, political legitimacy would appear to be no problem in Japan. Unlike in South Korea or the communist countries of Asia, it is not an issue that draws attention. Admittedly, leftist intellectuals routinely question the legitimacy of a state that is the servant of ‘monopoly capitalism’. Affected despair about this binds them together in groups that, as we have seen, actually serve the System by helping to ritualise emotional dissent. But outside this rigid and ritualistic Marxist frame of reference the concept of legitimacy simply does not occur in Japanese political discourse. Nevertheless, the absence of an intellectual frame of reference that might enable Japanese to perceive and discuss the problem does not mean that it is not, potentially, there. The fact that it is never raised may make it all the more insidious.
‘Political legitimacy’ is a slippery concept. It corresponds to a reality that lends itself even less than most other socio-political phenomena to measurement. It is, moreover, that kind of subtle attribute of a political system that is generally noticed only when it is absent, or when there seems to be not enough of it. Such shortcomings may make themselves felt in acute form on two occasions. The first is at the birth of a new power system, when new habits of obedience are demanded. The other comes ‘when the customary ways and limits of power are altered, when subjects are presented with new and disturbing uses of power and are asked to assume new burdens and accept new claims’.
1
In much contemporary political science, legitimacy is interpreted as something that automatically accompanies or follows from acceptance, acquiescence or consensus.
2
But this cannot be so, because if acceptance, acquiescence or consensus constituted the key to legitimacy, widespread protests against some government action could be mistaken for an indication of the illegitimacy of power-holders. The right to rule must not be thought to depend on good or bad policies. It is something that stands above the incumbents themselves, whether or not they follow disastrous policies. On the other hand, there can be a relative lack of political legitimacy without this becoming manifest in riots or other evidence of an end to acquiescence. Failure to recognise that an absence of opposition does not automatically confer legitimacy can lead to a complete misreading of political situations. Certainly in Japan an aggregate of supportive attitudes, based on what is in part a deliberately induced popular supposition that the authorities are benevolent and have the people’s welfare at heart, does not add up to legitimacy.
3
Legitimacy implies more than acquiescence or consensus because it is, by definition, bestowed upon a political arrangement through an external agency such as a system of laws, a sanctioning deity or whatever else transcends the temporal, political world and is, by common consent, perceived as ruling the rulers as well as the ruled. Seen in this light, it is immediately clear why legitimacy should be a problem in Japan. The Japanese System sets out to be self-validating. It is itself the ‘divinity’, supplying its own closed system of faith and self-justification. And since a political system cannot legitimise itself, the Japanese System can by definition never be legitimate.
I do not mean to make light of ‘acceptance’ and ‘acquiescence’ as political factors. On the contrary, public apathy, an important ingredient for the maintenance of an established power pattern in any country, has so far been a particularly potent factor in the preservation of Japanese political arrangements. ‘Shikataganai’, ‘It cannot be helped’, is one of the daily interjections of Japanese life. It acknowledges a fact of nature, like saying ‘It’s hot!’ or ‘It’s freezing!’ Obedience to the dictates of those in power is largely a matter of ‘shikataganai’, helped by the fact that no clear division is seen between the social order and the political system. But this kind of obedience rests on latent social threats of coercion and therefore, once again, has nothing to do with legitimacy.
4
Those who are obliged constantly to resign themselves with a sigh of ‘shikataganai’ to the political status quo are not likely to be excited by the question of who has the right to rule. But passive acceptance is a product of circumstances. Political belief does not enter into it. If the System is all around you and unbeatable, if it is supposed to contain the ultimate meaning of your life and if you do not know where else to look for such ultimate meaning, then there is little else to do but sit back and enjoy it or, alternatively, grin and bear it. From what we have seen of the vagueness of the boundary, in the Japanese imagination, between the private individual and the socio-political realm, and of the religious role of the System, it should be clear that to question the legitimacy of the System would be for most ordinary Japanese like questioning the legitimacy of one’s mother.
In contrast to the average person, the individuals and groups that form the ruling class are often deeply involved in questions of who among them may demand their obedience and co-operation. Though they do not express it in these terms, bureaucrats, LDP politicians, the administrators at the apexes of the industrial hierarchies and newspaper editors are all alike faced with the problem of the right to rule. The prime ministership of Nakasone Yasuhiro offers a splendid illustration of this.
Nakasone appeared fully aware that Japan’s international difficulties were to a large extent due to weak national leadership, and he tried harder than any of his post-war predecessors to bring his office closer to the power that the world generally expects prime ministers to exercise.
5
As we saw in Chapter 5, he formed a new administrative agency with the rank of ministry, tried to improve the ability of the Prime Minister’s Office to react quickly to emergency situations and found new ways to gain more leverage over the bureaucrats in breaking through deadlocks. One would think that such measures would be welcomed by bureaucrats, LDP politicians and many editorial writers who, uncomfortably aware of foreign pressure and criticism, routinely confirm the need for major structural adjustments, for effective leadership and for a more responsible global role. And there is no doubt that Japan’s administrators and commentators, as well as a large segment of the public, noticed the advantage of having a prime minister who was taken seriously by other heads of government. Nevertheless, the very same voices that conceded that a decisive prime minister benefited the country also objected to the way in which Nakasone tried to be stronger and more decisive than his predecessors. As far as probably the majority of his fellow LDP Diet members were concerned, the attempt to establish a credible Japanese leadership was reason for a hearty dislike of Nakasone. The bureaucrats made barely any move to accommodate the policy adjustments he pleaded for; and a pervasive sense of distrust emanated from editorials commenting on his efforts.
Interestingly enough, the public at large was not at all distressed by Nakasone’s trying to be a strong leader. The popularity polls indicated that he stood in higher esteem with the people than any of his post-war colleagues. It was the various élite groups that were upset. True, certain groups among Japan’s intelligentsia mistrusted him to begin with. Nakasone was notoriously candid about his nationalistic convictions. He was prepared to go much further than his predecessors in breaking taboos connected with Japan’s undigested imperialist past, and he is associated with groups and individuals that purvey the idea of Japan as a mono-ethnic, mono-racial society. But on the whole this programme is in line with the wishes of most administrators – it was only his explicitness that caused a few raised eyebrows. The problem was that.those who run the various components of the Japanese System simply did not accept unambiguous central political leadership. If Nakasone’s predecessors Fukuda Takeo and Ohira Masayoshi had tried to strengthen the office of prime minister, they too would have been greatly mistrusted.
Looking back through Japanese history, one can discern a succession of measures that were introduced to compensate for the failure to establish who has the right to rule. These incomplete solutions deserve attention here because most of them continue to have a decisive influence on the manner in which Japanese power is exercised today.
The simplest method of maintaining political order is the threat of physical force. Residues of naked power, for instance the power the police exercise in the arrest of criminals, can be found in all advanced societies, and are accepted as unavoidable by the vast majority of citizens. But for more general political control, brute force has obvious drawbacks. It is not conducive to the stable situation that all power-holders desire if they are intent on holding on to their power. The exercise of naked power may give a ruler prestige, but will not, unless their subjects are masochists, produce positive emotions. Besides, the armed servants that the ruler must employ to keep the threat of punishment credible may, under the leadership of an ambitious captain, turn against him.
To solve both these problems and make subjects, including soldiers, believe that the ruler has a right to control them, a body of theory, together with rituals and other symbolism, is necessary. Early Japanese chieftains asserted the right to rule by claiming an inherent virtue derived from their original kinship with patron deities, and underlined it with clan temples, burial mounds and chronicles. How they fared in these first Japanese attempts at legitimising political power is unclear. The
Nihon Shoki
(
Chronicles of Japan
), the oldest official history, mentions a test, decreed in the year 415 by the Emperor Ingyo, in which clan chiefs and holders of hereditary titles had to subject their claims to their positions to divine judgement by putting their hands in tubs of boiling water. The chronicle relates that truthful claimants remained unharmed, while liars fled in terror, and that thenceforth no one told lies about his descent.
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The attempts by the Yamato court in the sixth and seventh centuries to expand its sway over hitherto independent chieftains required new and more compelling definitions of legitimacy. Hence the stress on the need for harmony in Shotoku Taishi’s ‘constitution’, and the eagerness with which Yamato rulers seized upon Buddhism and Confucianism in order to buttress their claims of legitimacy.
The rise of the warrior houses and the age of civil wars speak for themselves. Unsolved problems of legitimacy, wherever they occur, tend to bring military power to the fore.
7
Hence the fact that Japan – most extraordinarily, considering the nearly total absence of any foreign threat – has experienced one form or another of warrior rule for much more than half of its traceable history.
Japan’s rulers could – and often had to – give massive demonstrations of military might to back up their political claims. Hideyoshi brought together more than 150,000 soldiers for the siege of Odawara – about ten thousand more than all the army and garrison troops that Charles V needed to rule most of Europe.
8
The third Tokugawa shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, symbolically consolidated his regime by marching 307,000 men through Kyoto. The emperor, incidentally, still lived there; he had, of course, no choice but to consent.
9
An expression frequently used to describe events in pre-Tokugawa Japan was
gekokujo
(‘lower overturning the upper’), a term indicating much scrambling for power positions and a lot of opportunism. During the Muromachi shogunate (1338–1573) ‘in most matters force was required to back up the exercise of delegated authority’.
10
So much for political legitimacy up to the great watershed of Tokugawa power. And the situation that followed could hardly be considered an improvement.
Tokugawa warrior rule was imposed upon an unenthusiastic and sometimes demonstrably unwilling populace.
11
Contrary to the general impression that Japan enjoyed two and a half centuries of public peace, there were disturbances throughout the period. Despite the relentless suppression of heterodoxy, and an ideology presenting the body politic as the ultimate good, the peasantry, according to one compilation, rebelled 2,809 times and rioted approximately one thousand times.
12
Fujita Yukoku (1774–1826), one of the major Confucian scholars involved in the compilation of the
History of Great Japan
, had no illusions about the willingness of Japan’s commoners to support the power-holders, believing that, given the chance, they would eagerly join the ranks of an enemy. This assessment appears to have been shared by his colleagues.
13
When legitimacy is unobtainable and direct suppression by force cannot be sustained, there is still a middle way for retaining control:
14
to make sure that groups of people at crucial locations in society believe that the current arrangements are the best for
them
. Their assent can be won by a system of scaled benefits for the military and civil servants. I have observed such a system, in perhaps its neatest form, among the North Vietnamese cadres. The
nomenklatura
, the upper layer with hereditary privileges, of Soviet society also clearly belongs to this category.
Challenges to an established ruling order are unlikely to come from the lowest and least privileged members of society unless these have the support and leadership of certain élite groups. Spartacus-type movements are rare and in the end they fail. On the other hand, those in key positions have very good reasons to hinder change; for them, change in the midst of economic scarcity – the condition in which this kind of system flourishes – is dangerous. Not to toe the line is out of the question since this would mean losing privileges that have begun to appear essential for a decent life. The more control any individual has, the more he stands to lose in the way of purchasing privileges, medical services, élite schooling, good jobs for his children, and so on.
The system that the Tokugawa regime forged closely resembled this
nomenklatura
solution. Its security depended on forcing all ‘vassal’ lords to reside in the capital during alternate years, and to leave their families as hostages the rest of the time. It also developed, at least in its later phase, a political system reminiscent of the communist examples I have cited. An upper stratum of samurai with inherited privileges guaranteed political continuity. Beneath it, a layer of educated and disciplined lower samurai existed; these were early ‘technocrats’ entrusted with the daily management of a fairly rapidly evolving political economy and the channelling of wealth from society, through taxes and other levies, to the parasitic upper layer.
15
The lower samurai became increasingly restive but they also realised that if they rocked the boat they would most likely fall overboard themselves.
The
nomenklatura
class of the Tokugawa period rested on a politically apathetic rural populace, largely unseen by the élite and never won over to an active belief in the goodness of Tokugawa rule. Various sources, including European eyewitness accounts, suggest that this military regime ruled more harshly in its waning days than it had in the seventeenth century.
16
It struck Sir Rutherford Alcock as ‘an administration based on the most elaborate system of espionage ever attempted’.
17
Even so, it had in practice lost much of its control over the feudal domains. The sudden United States demand in 1853 that Japan open itself to the world seems to have been no more than the final shove that left the tottering apparatus of warrior power ready to collapse when the samurai of Satsuma and Choshu staged their
coup d’état
. The subsequent attitudes of the vassals demonstrated that there was in fact little love lost between them and the regime.
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