The Enigma of Japanese Power (46 page)

The obsession with social order has, at least since Tokugawa times, been accompanied by the understanding that much ceremony is needed to ensure its survival. ‘In the great chain of being that theoretically connects the Emperor to the humblest laborers via the Shogun, lords and myriad ranks of samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants, all must perform ceremony so that order may be maintained throughout.’
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Hierarchy and ritual are, of course, related, and ritual too is essential to
wa
. Infringements of the rules of etiquette or failure to sustain the prescribed rituals constitute grave sins. If there is one important way in which the Japanese are clearly different from other people, from Westerners as well as their Asian neighbours, it is in the extent of their ritualistic behaviour. Japanese wrap themselves in rituals. The ceremonial Japanese behaviour noticed abroad gives but a slight impression of what a Japanese must go through at home. A rigid web of formulas covers areas of life and activities, such as sporting events, parties and honeymoons, for which spontaneity would be considered an essential ingredient in other societies.

Japanese do not necessarily love ritual more than other people, but they feel lost without it. The rituals need not at all be old and venerable. A good example of a new ritual, dating from some time in the 1960s but one that has conquered the entire nation, is the Japanese wedding party. Commercial interests, those of large hotels and wedding parlours, have shaped the ‘customs’ that the majority of marrying Japanese are nowadays subjected to. These wedding parties are extremely rigid, boring and expensive.
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They are highly predictable, with their identical cake-cutting, flower-offering and candle-lighting ceremonies, the three or four costume changes by the bride (bridal dress, kimono, evening dress and optional honeymoon uniform) and the long speeches by senior employees in the companies of bride and groom in which the jokes at the expense of the couple are almost totally interchangeable from one wedding to the next. The rituals are full of (newly designed) symbolism suggesting that the bride and groom (almost invariably in their early and late twenties, respectively) are only now leaving their childhood.
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Lacking any kind of festive spirit or spontaneity, these wedding parties are disliked by most people who have to go to them, judging by their common comment, but the entire population puts up with them as the ‘done thing’.

Japanese are conditioned from childhood to believe in the done thing, which extends to all areas of life, including leisure pursuits. A conspicuous product of this conditioning is the highly ritualised golf culture. Japanese golf is not in the first instance a sport or pleasant pastime, but for high business officials a bitter necessity, and for the 30 per cent of all salarymen who practise it an extremely serious business. The obligatory
shain ryoko
, or company outing, has in recent years usually consisted of a golf competition. The golf culture offers ideal opportunities to display hierarchic status. Memberships in newly opened courses cost an average ten million yen in the mid-1980s – roughly $77,000.
³⁰
Courses with prestige charge 25 to 50 million yen. Such memberships are traded like stocks and bonds, and are considered excellent investments. But the main function of the extraordinarily costly golf culture is to provide businessmen, bureaucrats and politicians of roughly the same hierarchic level with an opportunity to make contacts in a relatively relaxed atmosphere, and thus to expand their
jinmyaku
.

Even among scholars, to do the done thing is more important than any commitment to the quest for truth. Thus the self-respecting Japanese scholar will not touch certain subjects of recent political history or current affairs, leaving these to the journalist, which by implication keeps those subjects in the realm of gossip.

In daily situations Japanese must adhere to an etiquette, as complex perhaps as that in old-fashioned royal courts, that renders the world outside the inner circle of work group, family and intimates almost completely free from unsettling social surprises. Japanese are expected to stick to their roles, and to make the roles clear by their dress, speech and behaviour. There is an easily recognisable mother role, housewife role,
sempai
role, boss role and apprentice role, to mention only the most obvious.

Hierarchy and ritual in Japan are marvellous mechanisms whereby the weak can give in to the strong without loss of their sense of dignity. This avoids much cause for conflict. The conciliation procedures offered in lieu of litigation allow all concerned to save face, and the same is true of the mediation that, in less formal contexts, smooths out a multitude of snags in relationships.

Thanks to the tradition of managing reality, social conflict can be defused without any attempt to resolve contradictions. Logical reasoning is seldom allowed to disturb the all-important
wa
. In the West arguments appealing to logic are an accepted (and expected) part of reconciling differences of opinion. In Japan such argument is associated with conflict itself, and, since all conflict is defined as bad, arguing and debating are not usually recognised as healthy ways to settle disputes. There is practically no scholarly debate, and most Japanese scholars would not know how to carry on such a debate. Visiting foreign academics and intellectuals are nearly always praised, rarely argued with. The risks of losing face are thereby minimised.

One way of categorising political behaviour is into the ‘expressive’ or the ‘instrumental’. Most behaviour is a compound of both, but when the emphasis is clearly on demonstrating to the world where one stands, as opposed to achieving a certain direct benefit, we speak of ‘expressive’ actions. These clearly dominate where Japanese opposition movements are concerned.

The annual spring rituals of go-slow actions and strikes organised by Sohyo unions in the 1970s, and the May Day rallies of today, are good examples of such completely harmless ritualised protest. The best example, perhaps, is Japan’s radical student movement. Though no longer the common sight they were in the 1960s and early 1970s, detachments of student ‘demonstrators’ are still occasionally seen participating in a bigger rally. With their identical helmets and near-identical clothes, they snake-dance to the rhythm of shrill whistles and a cadence of voices uttering slogans as if in a trance. They move in hermetic close-formation: breast-against-back, shoulder-to-shoulder, with a small gap between the boys and the girls running behind them. They form a long undulating body, and no chorus line or military unit on any parade ground in the world could improve on their act. Yet none of this achieves anything substantial, nor is it meant to. It is demonstration for its own sake.

Ritualism in the guise of democracy is rampant in the Japanese political world. For the ‘management of reality’ to operate without a hitch, it is necessary for protocol to be meticulously followed and the forms of democracy fastidiously maintained. Hence the ritual of budget hearings in the Diet. Those hearings are all pre-arranged, but no politician or bureaucrat would dare make light of them. The cabinet is formally responsible to the Diet, and no minister would dream of being absent during the almost wholly ritualistic questions on the budget.
³¹
Diet interpellations, questions and answers are mostly elaborate performances staged by the bureaucrats. Opposition Diet members often rely on the bureaucrats to supply them with questions, which are subsequently answered by the same bureaucrats. Since the Ikeda cabinet there has been much deference to opposition interpellations in the Diet. But attention is paid more to the tone of voice in which the answer is given than to its substance.

Not to observe political custom can lead to a crisis. Thus, the first thing Nakasone did after the LDP’s record gains in the election of June 1986 was to demonstrate ceremonial meekness in the face of the opposition. Failure to show concern lest his own party become ‘too arrogant’ might have provoked a storm of protest from the press and signs of disapproval from the public. A minority may complain that it is being made subject to the tyranny of the majority, so that a façade of benevolence on the part of the stronger party is virtually obligatory.

The bureaucracy lives in a thoroughly ritualistic world. Officials speak in code. When they say ‘the matter will be studied’, they mean that nothing will be done. If they promise to ‘study it with a forward-looking posture’ there is more hope; this means that, as far as circumstances allow, there will be some adjustment. As with the politicians, everything in the world of bureaucrats is settled out of sight, prior to the ritual event at which decisions are formally reached. There have been rare instances of directors-general who in negotiations with foreigners greatly upset their subordinates by not always sticking meticulously to the briefing books that had been prepared.

Ritual and an emphatic demonstration of hierarchy are, furthermore, believed by the bureaucrats to be essential as a means of cultivating respect for authority and thereby the foundation of order in society. Lower-level officials carefully demonstrate deference to their superiors, and always pretend to take matters to a higher level for final decisions. The bureaucratic hierarchy in itself is thought to strike the public with awe.
³²
In all of this, the illusion of benevolence is vital. Japanese society requires reassurance that the administrators are doing what they are doing, not for themselves but to promote the stability of the people’s livelihood; that they are doing it relentlessly, without relaxing their attention; that they are doing it at the expense of time to themselves; and that they are ever vigilant against unexpected accidents.

In the political imagery inherited from the Tokugawa period and enhanced by the ‘national essence’ mythology earlier in this century, the benevolent care of the people by selfless administrators produces the best of all possible worlds and represents ultimate truth. The unity of the people is an essential given in this perspective, not something to be achieved. At worst, this natural state of the nation can be only temporarily disrupted by some fluke occurrence.
³³

Wa
is immanent in society, even while all Japanese are expected to exert themselves to maintain it, and this means, as we have seen, that the possibility of conflict is formally ignored. Hierarchy and ritual are amazingly effective in maintaining order under these circumstances, but they cannot cover all eventualities. Where conflicts fester in the absence of a formula for agreeing to disagree, there is a total lack of rational communication that may lead to emotional outbursts and sometimes even to physical violence. This can happen in such unlikely places as the assembly hall of the Diet or in company boardrooms. But even then, the gestures accompanying the stand-off tend to become extremely ritualised.

Until the mid-1960s the Diet was frequently the scene of physical violence when communication between the minority parties and the LDP or its predecessors completely broke down. These brawls were serious enough for the Diet’s stenographers to demand a pledge in 1954 that parliamentarians would not walk over their table and not touch them or their notes during the fights. The pledge was reaffirmed in 1971 and at least once more after that.

A good example of a complete breakdown in communication is a dispute between the in-patient and out-patient units at the psychiatry department of Tokyo University Hospital. Their conflict goes back decades, but they are unclear about each other’s views because they have ceased all communication.

Just how eerie Japanese non-communication in festering conflicts can become is shown by scenes, recorded on film, of the protest by victims of mercury poisoning in the notorious Minamata case. The victims waved their malformed limbs only inches away from the eyes of executives of the polluting company, Chisso Corporation. Mothers held up their children, malformed and shaking with spasms, immediately in front of the officials’ faces. But those faces remained totally impassive and silent. At some point an executive would be overcome by it all and faint, a loyal servant of his company to the last.

It is not easy to ascertain how much disharmony and how much potential for social chaos exist in Japanese society. Because the Japanese media believe it is their task to help defuse social conflict rather than reflect it, much remains unreported. When on one occasion in 1987 riot police clashed with protesters against the revision of the alien registration law in front of the Ministry of Justice buildings, protesters were prevented from emerging from a nearby subway station, handled roughly and thrown on the ground. Yet there were no photographs or reports in the next day’s newspapers. Japan’s television news programmes did not show any of this either.

I saw riots in Shinjuku in the late 1960s that were started by factions of the student movement but were enthusiastically participated in by salarymen, who helped set fire to overturned cars and throw stones at the police. The subsequent news stories depicted these disturbances as the routine activity of ideologically inspired radical students.

Japan received a glimpse of the potential for social disorder in 1974, when irate passengers who had been cooped up in overcrowded commuter trains, purposely stalled as part of go-slow actions by government railway engineers, smashed an office on a platform of one of Tokyo’s stations. Shortly after that, passengers went on the rampage at Ageo station in Saitama prefecture, close to Tokyo. This proved contagious, and within days passenger rioting had spread to several stations in Tokyo. I witnessed ticket machines and windows being smashed by ordinary salarymen at Yurakucho station in Tokyo. This behaviour was somewhat comparable in character, though on a much smaller scale, to the rice riots of 1918. Unorganised, spontaneous commuter riots spread all over the country. The outbursts died down quickly, but the authorities took them seriously enough to plead with the go-slow organisers to go on normal strikes (which are illegal for government personnel) henceforth, so that the stations could be kept closed.