The Enigma of Japanese Power (42 page)

Once the decision took shape among the oligarchs that Japan was not to be ruled by popular mandate through elected representatives, they were faced with the task of structuring and augmenting a ruling class. The formula they adopted still determines the allocation of power in present-day Japan. The principle of hereditary selection was giving way at the time to meritocratic principles. For many years following the restoration, an important qualification for membership in the oligarchy and its bureaucratic extensions was participation in the movement that had led to the
coup d’état
, or membership of the Satsuma or Choshu samurai class. Subsequently ‘Western knowledge’, preferably absorbed in Europe or the United States, became increasingly important.
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But by the turn of the century the surest, and almost the sole, way to get into the class of ‘those in the know’ that manages the country was to graduate from the law department of the University of Tokyo – a tradition that, as we have seen, determines the character of Japanese schooling to this day.

Todai acquired its pivotal position in conferring legitimacy as a result of the treaties providing for extraterritoriality that Japan had signed with the Western powers. As already mentioned, the foreigners were ready to scrap these deeply hated stipulations only if and when legal trials could be conducted by a competent judiciary. It was the desperate need this created that launched the law department of Todai in its function of ordaining the modern samurai. Its graduates did not, initially, need to pass the civil service exams in order to fill the highest posts, and by 1890 their supply was large enough to fill nearly all administrative vacancies and more than half the judicial vacancies.
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More than 50 per cent of Todai graduates in the 1880s achieved high status, and one out of every four attained membership in the upper élite, as against one out of twenty-five graduates from Waseda or Keio (the major private universities). Seventy of the 76 vice-ministers in the eight ministries between 1901 and 1926 were Todai graduates.
⁴⁴

So far as intellect and skill are concerned, this now firmly entrenched method of ordaining the ruling élite is fairly arbitrary. What was true then is true today: the special ‘knowledge’ and thus ‘virtue’ of the bureaucrat, which helps lend their role a semblance of legitimacy, comes down to membership in a class of people that has managed the art of passing the most abstruse entrance examinations. In Chapter 4 I have touched on the general misconception in the West concerning the selection of Japan’s élite. Its ranks have been selected mainly for stamina and dedication. Todai graduates tend to be ‘bright’, but many Japanese with very capable minds of a different cast are discarded and doomed permanently to operate on the fringes. Much capacity for original thinking is wasted. The Japanese ruling class is far more thoroughly schooled than it is educated: a fact of more than peripheral importance for the attitude and approach of Japan’s administrators towards the international world.

Legitimacy in post-war Japan is officially bestowed on the government by popular mandate. And elections and a parliament have, indeed, taken over to some extent from the emperor as institutions legitimising current arrangements. But the concept of the sovereignty of the people is not understood by most Japanese, and is certainly not a living principle among those who share power. The appeals to popular sovereignty in the press are purely rhetorical and never coupled to any coherent analysis of the pervasive exercise of informal power that systematically prevents the realisation of this principle. The Diet and elections are not seen as legitimising the existing political order. They have not replaced older institutions in the popular mind, since both already existed when the emperor was formally the bestower of legitimacy, at which time they were widely castigated as diminishing the purity and moral soundness of the Japanese nation.

Before 1945 it was considered that all laws and directives issued in the name of the emperor were, by definition, for the public good. The bureaucrats were therefore, by definition, impartial and just. Politicians, by contrast, were demonstrably spurred on by political considerations, which in the Japanese context could not be differentiated from selfish motives. There is still today a strong tendency to assume that whatever is politically motivated can never be as good as what is (supposedly) motivated by considerations of the public good. Even though it is manifestly clear that they are guided by their own interests and proceed without consulting the public in any way, the bureaucrats’ efforts are somehow made to appear more legitimate than anything done by the politicians, who have never been able completely to shake off their original reputation as loutish, self-seeking opportunists. The post-war press is still permeated with an unacknowledged prejudice against politicians, and routinely feeds the public with a view of politics that, though rarely well articulated, is mostly sceptical and negative. Popular suspicion and distaste are heightened by the ease with which political position can be bought and sold in Japan and the inherent instability that this creates among cliques of LDP politicians.

Nevertheless, Japan cannot do away with the politicians, since in theory they form the link between society and the body politic. Without them, the strongest components of the System would consist only of bureaucrats and industrialists, and bureaucratic authoritarianism would become too blatant. Parliamentary proceedings form a façade behind which the administrators manage affairs, just as the imperial throne once did for the Meiji oligarchy.

To counter the lingering distaste for the archetypal politician with his ‘egotistical motives’, the LDP likes to make it appear that it is nothing more nor less than a collection of benevolent administrators. Roughly one-third of its Diet members – generally the most powerful ones – have in any case travelled the élite administrator course from the Todai law department or its equivalents and on through one of the ministries. Whereas individual LDP members would not be credible if they denied an interest in power, and would raise doubts about their ability to bring pork-barrel benefits to their constituencies, the LDP as a whole can more easily gloss over its
raison d’être
.

In line with its denial of the exercise of power, the LDP likes to present a depoliticised picture of politics. It is greatly helped here by the ancient notion that those in power are more ethical than those out of power, that they are legitimate by the very fact of wielding power. The LDP – despite many a press campaign in which it is lambasted for its ‘money polities’, its arrogance and its wrong priorities – has a certain aura of respectability that the other parties lack. For all the routine criticism levelled against it, the government party is still treated as if it belonged in a different category from groups entering the political arena with new political suggestions. The latter are easily denigrated as concerned with the interests of a very limited number of citizens rather than of the Japanese people as a whole. Their desire for some of the LDP’s power for themselves automatically stigmatises them as ‘self-seeking politicians’.

In Western constitutionalist democracies the problem of legitimacy does not arise, because citizens have recourse to corrective mechanisms whenever the procedures preceding political decisions diverge consistently from a legally sanctioned, course. In Japan, where laws do not control the administrators but are tools for administrative control, there is no such recourse. The concept of democracy in Japan is not a pragmatic concept guiding actual political processes. As one of the foremost specialists on Japanese intellectual history remarks, democracy is in Japan a radical concept, valued in an abstract, normative sense. It furnishes the Japanese with a point of reference, based on rational humanitarianism, outside existing politics and history. ‘It provides an ethical identification with which to criticise historical trends and the cultural and political content of the present. As in the 1920s . . . democracy is not an empowering ideology for constitutional politics, but critical and quite often antipolitical.’
⁴⁵

Japan can be called a ‘democracy’ by the criteria that Aristotle used in his famous classification of monarchies, aristocracies and democracies, since ‘what Aristotle called a democracy was simply an aristocracy of fairly broad membership’.
⁴⁶
And Japan’s ‘democracy’ is constitutional, but it is not constitutionalist. The democratic provisions of the constitution are ultimately unenforceable, if only because the Supreme Court is in the hands of the bureaucrats.

In Western constitutionalist democracies, the preservation of a legal order justifying political arrangements is safeguarded by the opportunity to ‘throw the rascals out’. As long as voters can choose to transfer power to a different set of power-holders, they can prevent the political system from becoming a System with its own legally uncontrolled dynamics of the abuse of power. For this purpose, a political system must tolerate an institutionalised loyal opposition. We have already seen that one of the most essential traits of the all-embracing Japanese System is that it tolerates no genuine opposition, as was dramatically illustrated by its response to – and the fate of- Nikkyoso, the teachers’ union.

The concept of a loyal opposition – a political organisation allowed effectively to oppose government policy yet considered perfectly legitimate – has been particularly troublesome for all countries where the exercise of power has been justified by traditional Chinese theories of government. The political problems of South Korea are related to it. It hampered the ‘democracy’ of South Vietnam before it was overrun; and the cases of contemporary China and Taiwan are other good illustrations.
⁴⁷
President Ngo Dimh Diem of Vietnam had much difficulty in dealing with John Kennedy and Henry Cabot Lodge because his Confucianist way of thinking allowed no tolerance of opposition.
⁴⁸
In the Confucianist tradition, rulers are by definition virtuous; thus to oppose them automatically means to question their legitimacy.

So it still is, essentially, in contemporary Japan. A genuine opposition with the potential to take over the reins of government, or merely to change the policy agenda, is not acceptable to the administrators in the LDP and the bureaucracy. To say that they would feel discomfort in the face of such an opposition is wildly to understate the problem. A genuine opposition would nullify everything they stand for. Thus even Japan’s official political system, that respectable mantle hiding the reality of
jinmyaku
deals, is in effect a one-party system.

The LDP is as one with officialdom in its deep distrust of opposition of any kind.
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When Prime Minister Nakasone made election campaign speeches in which he repeated over and over again, as he did during the campaign of 1986, that the opposition parties behave like wilful kindergarten children, he echoed a deeply embedded prejudice that these parties are not ready to look after the people, whereas the LDP is a supreme model of responsibility. Voting for the opposition, though a widespread practice, is considered a mild form of deviance that can be controlled. Giving one’s vote to a party one knows will never be allowed to share power in the central government is an ‘expressive’ (as distinct from ‘instrumental’) act comparable to joining a lunch-hour strike or marching past the Diet building with pseudo-revolutionary banners.

The elected parliament that existed before 1945 was an imported institution that, in its original function, theoretically conflicted with the ideology of the ‘national essence’. It presupposed the possibility of political choice and political conflict, whereas
kokutai
implied political arrangements as having been endowed by a benevolent emperor and sustaining a conflict-free society. Today, genuine parliamentary politics, with the possibility of sustained legitimate opposition, remains completely incompatible with the powerful Japanist beliefs that postulate a conflict-free society.

The very bases of pluralism in politics are regarded as morally suspect by the administrators, though they can never concede this while Japan is being presented to the world and to the Japanese as a parliamentary democracy. Certain statements coming from the LDP, however, appear to be groping towards a more satisfactory formulation of the actual state of affairs, one that can be used as a conceptual basis for future plans. A month after the July 1986 elections in which the LDP gained a record number of parliamentary seats. Prime Minister Nakasone explained that this victory marked the beginning of what he dubbed ‘the 1986 political order’. The birth of this order would be assisted by a new party strategy, with which the ‘flexibly conservative’ urban voters would all be won over. (Unlike the rural population and business owners, urban housewives, salarymen and students have not been stable supporters of the LDP.) Such additional support for the LDP, according to Nakasone, would signify the end of the ‘1955 political order’ – which is common shorthand for the uneven rivalry between the LDP and the socialists following the formation of the LDP – and the beginning of the ‘1986 system’.

This was more than mere rhetoric delivered in the flush of victory. Four years previously, LDP ideologues had published an important article whose theory of Japanese political history led to the conclusion that the LDP is destined to entice the labour unions away from the socialists, and to create a new political organisation that can directly absorb the political energies of city dwellers and consumers.
⁵⁰
What these LDP theorists, as well as Nakasone, were saying more or less out loud was that soon there would no longer be any need for the JSP, their only ‘rival’.

With the gradual demise of Marxist-oriented scholarship, the System is beginning to win scholarly support for what it stands for. A favourite new term for it is Murakami Taisuke’s ‘new middle mass’.
⁵¹
Japanese political analysts have begun to refer routinely to a ‘mass inclusionary system’, by which they understand bureaucratic control that is not open to checks from the public but is nevertheless supported by a majority.

In the final analysis, the claim of undivided support for a depoliticised, ‘mass inclusionary’ political system is not credible. To begin with, such support is taken for granted and never measured. Also, the United States occupation ‘reformers’ were not the only ones who counted on vigorous party competition to establish a healthy Japanese democracy. Many Japanese hoped this would happen. And the apparent gradual decline in the fortunes of the LDP in the 1970s, a decline accompanied by much media speculation about the advent of a ‘multi-party’ era, was welcomed by liberal-minded Japanese. The number of Japanese journalists and scholars who discuss the relative power of various segments of officialdom, and of ordinary people who themselves have sensed the intimidation of which System components are capable, is great enough to make the denial of power unconvincing.

The other countries in Asia with Confucianist-influenced political cultures hindering acceptance of the idea of a legitimate ‘loyal opposition’ happen to have strong central leadership. Their problem of who has the right to rule may divide the power-holders from a large segment of the population, as is exemplified by South Korea. The Japanese legitimacy problem does not cause such a political division because the ideology of Japaneseness dampens potential political recalcitrance on a national scale. But that does not solve the problem for the ruling élite. The attempted partial solutions examined earlier, especially the outright denial of the exercise of power, have created further problems.

The idea that one can depoliticise a political system is, of course, an illusion. Pretending that relationships and social processes in which power plays a role are not political means that essential distinctions are not made, so that many areas of life normally kept outside the political realm tend, on the contrary, to become heavily politicised. In one sense the System is so depoliticised that there seems to be progressively less and less of what in the West would be considered politics. But precisely because of this one can say that the whole System, with everything in it, is eminently political. As we have seen, this very pervasive political aspect of Japanese life goes in the guise of ‘culture’.

The most serious consequence of an ostensibly depoliticised society that denies the existence of genuine conflict, and must constantly create the illusion of unified consent, is that it does not provide the normal means for conflict resolution to be found in modern constitutionalist states. The effect of this is insufficiently appreciated but far-reaching, not least in the context of Japan’s international relations. The absence of official institutions for resolving conflict means that Japanese social relationships are shot through with unmediated power – or, to use another word for this, intimidation.