The Past In Japan's Future: Will The Japanese Change?

In a world fraught with geopolitical un-certainty, Japan is clumsily searching for a new political order. At the same time, it is trying to extract itself from a deep structural recession. Will these challenges produce a new political economy that gives greater weight to consumer interests, or will they merely reinforce Japan’s old mercantilism? Will Japan become a "normal" country and develop a military commensurate with its economic power, or will it continue to assert itself primarily through nonmilitary means? Will Japanese foreign policy continue deferring to the United States, or will Tokyo finally assert its leadership in East Asia?

These three books help readers better understand and anticipate the playing out of this saga. James Fallows spices a well-written synthesis of academic writings with perceptive personal observations and anecdotes based on his extensive travels in East Asia. Richard Samuels provides a masterful study of the Japanese arms and aircraft industries, analyzing the inter-relationship between military and civilian technology since the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, John Dower’s volume offers trenchant essays on the legacies of the Pacific War and the American occupation. In addition to traditional diplomatic and political history, it contains fascinating studies of wartime cinema, "atomic-bomb art," and racial stereotypes.

The strength of all three books is a framework built on three important historical themes, the Meiji Restoration, the Pacific War, and the U.S. occupation of Japan. These are the historical moments that have shaped much of modern Japan, and they are critical to any serious thinking about Japan’s ability to confront the challenges spread before it today.

KEEPING UP WITH THE WEST

The Meiji era laid the foundations of modern Japan, and so provides the first common thread for all three authors. After Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open after 1853, a new oligarchy emerged to mobilize its people in an exploitative effort to "catch up" with the West and avoid external subjugation. The Meiji system provided an "organizing ethic," as Fallows calls it, in which national loyalty subsumed any debate about grand political goals. The Japanese people became subjects, not citizens. Workers and consumers got an artificially small portion of the national wealth, while industry’s share was inflated. This ethic, Fallows writes, "intensified a sense of separateness, rivalry, and victimization relative to Western powers, and of deserved supremacy relative to other nations in Asia."

Part of the system’s legacy was what Samuels calls "technonational" ideology, that is, the Japanese belief that technology is fundamental to national security. What makes Japan tick, then, is a deep sense of insecurity. Since the Meiji Restoration, if not before, the Japanese have been asked to make sacrifices to overcome the nation’s special vulnerabilities. Politics tends to be bounded within this ideological consensus and concerns itself primarily with struggles and bargains among an extraordinarily stable and self-sustaining bureaucratic, business, and political elite.

In Samuels’ analysis, this "cult of vulnerability" caused Japan to continue striving to catch up with the West even after it had already become one of the world’s leading technological powers. Both he and Fallows recognize that this emphasis on state-guided industrialization and technological autonomy is not necessarily unique to Japan; much of Japanese mercantilism has Western intellectual roots. What is exceptional, according to Samuels, is the emergence of an enduring, coherent set of beliefs that guide, or at least justify, this course.

Notwithstanding the dramatic changes that have taken place in Japan since the end of the nineteenth century, both Fallows and Samuels are correct in emphasizing the ethical and ideological continuity since the Meiji era. In their search for a national identity and international role in the post-Cold War world, the Japanese have indeed turned to popular histories about this period for guidance.

THE "USEFUL WAR"

The Pacific War provides a second key factor that fashioned Japan’s current system of state economic guidance. In fact, Dower refers to the conflict as the "useful war" since it consolidated Japan’s policy of economic mobilization on behalf of national goals. During the war, Japan experienced a "second industrial revolution." Capital and the banking structure were consolidated. Small- and medium-sized enterprises were integrated into subcontracting networks centered around large industrial conglomerates. And the industrial work force was stabilized through prohibitions on unauthorized job changes and a seniority-based wage system. Japan’s postwar economic dynamism, in Dower’s view, is an extension of its wartime mobilization.

Samuels, too, stresses the positive aspects of Japan’s military technonationalism. The nation stimulated its industrial growth. It gained institutions and practices for developing and diffusing national technologies. And it laid the foundations of Japan’s current commercial technonationalism. The only seeming tragedy was that after World War I militarists hijacked that system and drove it toward the wrong end.

This reading of history is troubling, however. Samuels fails to explain why the Japanese state was so vulnerable to fanatical military officers. He overlooks the fact that the close links between the commanding heights of Japanese industry and the military helped make politicians unable or unwilling to redirect the economy in more benign ways. The boundaries that the Meiji system had placed on meaningful political discourse precluded development of an effective mechanism to rein in the militarists once Japan started down its disastrous expansionist course.