The Enigma of Japanese Power (59 page)

A common Japanese complaint is that the United States is irrational and that it is not clear what, after all that Japan has already done, it really wants. In American eyes this is ridiculous; almost every visiting American interviewed by the press hammers on the need for a more open market and reiterates that only the results really count.

Even so, Japanese confusion is to some extent understandable, for official America has been sending mixed signals for a long time. Although the Japan Problem is already decades old, what must pass for a Japan policy in Washington is totally unrealistic. In 1986 approaches were still based on the assumption that by cultivation of cordial personal ties with Japanese ‘leaders’ reason could be made to prevail, and that in the end the market would straighten out any distortions. Policy measures towards Japan were largely improvised on the spur of the moment, with no coherence and no consistency. More often than not, a specific action was not followed through. For the Reagan administration just as for its predecessors, trade and the economy were considered secondary to security and strategic interests. The departments of State and Defense appear to believe that therapeutic trade sanctions would endanger the status of US bases in Japan. The possibility that Japan’s industrial onslaught might, by undermining US strategic industries, actually compromise security, and that the US dilemma derives from its own false assumptions had, at least in 1987, apparently not yet occurred to the US government. Whatever action was taken tended to be based on the wrong premisses. As one of the USA’s most thoughtful negotiators with Japan put it:

Nothing in US law or tradition . . . anticipated the possibility of industry and trade being organised as part of an effort to achieve specific national goals rather than on the individualistic Western model. . . . The result was a series of negotiations that never focused on the main issues but dealt with symptoms instead of causes.
¹⁵

Political and diplomatic considerations have done much to confuse the situation. To demonstrate success in negotiations, token concessions by Japan have until the late 1980s been routinely presented by the US government as genuine concessions. The eagerness with which the Reagan administration has, with the help of easily manipulated media, presented the financial ‘liberalisation’ measures as a fundamental breakthrough has made it more difficult to dismiss equally irrelevant bureaucratic action taken subsequently. Washington would announce success in sector-specific trade talks in the field of communications equipment, while its negotiator, Clyde Prestowitz, was telling me that he had not yet finished negotiating.

By 1987 there had been seven ‘market-opening packages’ and an ‘action programme’ of bureaucratic measures whose effectiveness was in doubt from the moment they were announced. Sometimes concessions extracted from Japanese bureaucrats after much wrangling turn out upon closer scrutiny to be the same concessions obtained with great difficulty two or four years previously. I myself and a number of my colleagues have often experienced a giddy sense of unreality at the jubilation with which such measures are usually greeted by Washington. European spokesmen, too, have been in the habit of diplomatically praising Tokyo for insubstantial measures; but what Europe says carries not a fraction of the weight of American statements.

This process is damaging in the long run, because whenever the USA makes a fresh request for what are essentially the same concessions it is seen by many ordinary Japanese as demanding new ones. To make matters worse, the USA has sometimes asked for measures that Japan was willing to implement but that are almost totally ineffectual, such as domestic reflation through a demand package, lowering of interest rates or financial market ‘liberalisation’. Hence in the popular imagination the USA has begun to appear insatiable, demanding ever more from Japan, even though it has received almost nothing. Half-hearted measures and measures that were never followed through have created the impression that Washington is a never satisfied nag and that it has basically no legitimate grievance.

Probably most detrimental to chances of solving the Japan–US conflict is the fact that the United States has permitted it to be discussed within a largely Japanese frame of reference. The administrators have gladly undertaken the management of reality in this particular realm. And the inability of Japanese bureaucrats to deal with their most important foreign relationship from a long-range perspective contrasts strongly with the tactical skill, always ensuring that they have the advantage, with which for some fifteen years they have negotiated with the Americans.

There exists what can best be described as a ‘mutual understanding industry’, whose Japanese practitioners take it for granted that the world needs to understand Japan more than Japan needs to understand the world. Innumerable panel discussions, study meetings, lectures and symposia plead without exception what is essentially the cause and position of the administrators. Subtle flattery (‘You must teach us how to confront our dire problems!’) often mutes what might otherwise become critical voices.

The Western tendency for moral self-flagellation and Western intellectuals’ habit of denigrating the institutions of their own country have helped shape a general perspective in which Japan is compared favourably to the West and which has been gratefully exploited by Japanese spokesmen. Panel discussions on trade problems become forums for taking the foreigners present to task for insufficient understanding and for not trying hard enough to break into the Japanese market. Nor should one forget a category of people unparalleled in the context of any other bilateral relationship: the Japan apologists. As one historian who was once closely associated with cultural exchange relations between the two countries sums it up:

Unlike the flow of ideas between the US and Europe, the Japan—US discourse is determined largely by a small group of Japanese and American experts on each other’s countries who have bridged the great linguistic and cultural gap. Ostensibly dedicated to mutual friendship, this narrow channel of scholars, journalists, and diplomats serves increasingly to skew the dialogue in Japan’s favor. It does this through cultural excuses and other special pleading; by fending off critical analyses; by glossing over sensitive issues in Japan; by assuming adequate Japanese knowledge of the US; and by failing to protest Japan’s restrictions on foreign academics and journalists.
¹⁶

The enormous propaganda potential of the System described in previous chapters has been put to good use here. Despite their predictable display of disagreement, all administrators – most crucially those in editorial offices – ultimately echo the same basic contentions. Anyone known to the Japanese authorities to be involved in thinking or writing about Japan is inundated with glossy magazines and other documentary material carrying ostensibly independent opinion that says more or less the same thing in every case. The administrators can also take advantage of general foreign ignorance, of the quick turnover among US officials dealing with Japan, and of the relative lack on the American and European side of any institutional memory. Red herrings are strewn about with unparalleled skill.

One of the administrators’ great successes is seen in the general acceptance of the postulate of ‘equivalent duty’. Japanese understanding of the US penchant for ‘looking at both sides’ of things and US defensiveness when confronted with appeals to ‘fairness’ have led to agreements whose stipulations include measures that the USA itself must take concurrently with those intended by Japan. Both sides promise to exert themselves on behalf of a more open market. Official Japanese statements, comment by the ‘buffers’ and innumerable editorials and ‘analyses’ in the late 1980s urge the need for Japan to open its market further and become more responsible internationally, yet in the same breath mention the need for the USA to eliminate its budget deficit and to save more. Until the meteoric rise of the yen against the dollar, the automatically included ‘equivalent duty’ clauses directed the USA to lower its interest rates and allow the dollar to become cheaper. This ‘equivalent duty’ tactic results in the unspoken assumption that Japan does not really need to feel too bad about doing nothing so long as the USA does not do anything either, and that ‘both sides are to blame’. Any assessment of Japan that is critical can thus be dismissed as ‘overly one-sided’.

A related success is the portrayal of Japanese officials valiantly fighting on the side of the USA’s remaining free traders against a rising tide of US protectionism. Practically every formal statement on the bilateral relationship made by the Japanese prime minister refers to a ‘mutual resolve’ to halt protectionist tendencies in the world. In the eyes of nearly all ordinary Japanese the danger comes from members of the US Congress who harbour feelings of ill will towards Japan, and from European governments that know no other way to placate their jobless; very few are aware that the pervasive structural protectionism of the Japanese System is the major cause of the conflict to begin with.

A third and more recent success is the function that the term ‘bashing’ has attained in Japanese manipulations of opinion. Originally used by some American commentators who believe that US jealousies, frustration and even racism cause the friction with Japan, the term has been enthusiastically adopted by Japanese commentators. It tends to be automatically applied to any critical assessment of Japan and any serious analysis of Japan’s international problems that places responsibility at the feet of the administrators. The result is that many observers who wish to appear totally fair are inhibited from saying anything beyond the platitudes that most Japanese commentators can agree on – such as the need to become more international, to open the market a bit further and to participate more fully in world politics. The label ‘Japan-basher’ is not easily shed.

The administrators are abetted in their favourite tactic of shifting attention from essential to peripheral issues by a body of foreign theorists. There are still economists who will hear nothing of a Japanese industrial policy. The possibility is dismissed on purely theoretical grounds, without any examination of the institutions through which such a policy might be implemented. Then there is the peculiar type of econometric sophistry that demonstrates that, even should the Japanese market be opened up completely, it would make hardly a dent in the trade balance. Precise figures can be given by experts, who are usually doing research with Japanese funding but who apparently have little inkling of how the System operates. On a more mundane plane, there are old chestnuts such as the oft-repeated contention that if US car manufacturers would just remember to put the steering wheel on the right side they could sell more cars in Japan.
¹⁷

The administrators are also unwittingly aided by US diplomats in their reality management of the relationship. The State Department and the Embassy in Tokyo have long had a tendency to echo the Japanese interpretation of bilateral problems. This tendency has a curious history. The US occupation saw the emergence of ‘a series of cross-national alliances between organisations seeking to maximise or protect their own institutional spheres’.
¹⁸
Thus US bureaucrats were easily won over as ‘friends’ by Japanese bureaucrats within the same area of responsibility, and proceeded to bicker with Japan–US bureaucratic allies in other areas. The relationship between the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Department has been fairly similar in recent decades. And even while US diplomats may not formally agree with their Japanese counterparts, there are influential figures among them who react negatively to critical analyses that their Japanese counterparts would not like to hear.

Compounding the diplomatic problem is the role of the US ambassador, who is seen less as an ambassador in the traditional sense than as a ‘guardian’ watching over the relationship. In a tradition pioneered by Edwin O. Reischauer (who did much to consolidate the ‘exploitative dependence’ relationship), Mike Mansfield, who was ambassador for over a decade, frequently seemed a better spokesman for Japan in Washington than the other way round. In his public statements, he tended to repeat the current Japanese line on what the USA ought to do. In dealing with Japan on a diplomatic level one faces a world of ritual and incantations far beyond what is generally considered diplomatically necessary or even acceptable, and a person such as Mansfield fitted in here very well indeed. He had the air of being concerned, but ‘fair’ and ‘non-partisan’, as if he wanted to remain above the quarrelling parties. The Japanese press was used to Mansfield’s admonishing both countries. In a representative interview, the ambassador was quoted as saying that the larger share of the responsibility for the trade problem lies with the United States.
¹⁹
Even supposing that this were correct, it would seem a perfect example of mixing diplomatic signals. Such US attitudes sustain the bureaucrats of the Japanese Foreign Ministry in their belief that the conflict is essentially a public relations problem.

It fits in, too, with the common Japanese perspective of socio-political events and developments for which no one is accountable and no one held responsible. ‘Fortunately at the end, Japan could escape from war,’ the
Asahi Shimbun
‘s most widely read column once said, in the context of a commemoration of the events of 1945.
²⁰
War in this perspective is like an earthquake or a typhoon, an ’act of nature’ that takes people by surprise. As one of Japan’s most articulate intellectuals has written about the war in China: ‘Seen from the outside, Japan appeared to be invading China with imperialist intentions. Seen from the inside, however, most political leaders felt that Japan was being dragged into the swamp of war as part of some inevitable process.’
²¹
Today, the ‘militarists’ are seen as responsible for great suffering among the Japanese, but the moment one gives them faces and names they become, for perhaps the majority of Japanese, patriots who sacrificed themselves for their country.

The general attitude towards the Pacific War is one of the best illustrations of Japanese ‘victim consciousness’. Nearly all the war films of the past fifteen years or so show the wartime sufferings of the Japanese people, and many young people are amazed when told that neighbouring nations suffered also, possibly more, at the hands of the Japanese. Atrocities committed in the occupied Asian countries tend to be ignored, and the idea that Japan was the main victim is gaining ground. The early 1950s saw the issue of anti-war films critical of the Japanese wartime military, largely because many Japanese soldiers died. Subsequently, the soldiers abroad began to be portrayed as carrying love for peace in their hearts, in a way reminiscent of Hollywood’s ‘good Nazi’ cliché. From the end of the 1960s on, there appeared films portraying the US occupation as the most awful experience. Finally, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the appearance of the first genuinely revisionist war films. Japanese soldiers are friendly, gentle, full of goodwill towards the local population in, say, the Philippines, whereas US soldiers are brutes who play football with human skulls (
Dai Nippon Teikoku
– a film that turns General Tojo into a hero). The Imperial Navy consisted of peaceful family men, trying to make the best of a difficult situation for Japan (
Rengo Kantai
). In the Japanese film version of the fall of Singapore, the murder of five thousand Chinese is presented as motivated by fear of the Chinese guerrillas obstructing Japanese order-keeping among a local population that did not understand the good intentions of the occupiers (
Minami Jujisei
). The end of the last-mentioned film shows, out of all context, a mushroom cloud – to remind us who were the really bad men in the Second World War.

Mushroom clouds, it sometimes seems, have become all but mandatory in the war films made by the established Japanese studios. Here is victimhood in its ultimate guise: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The belief in Japanese uniqueness has received very special support from these events: the Japanese did not just suffer, they suffered uniquely; one might even speak of national martyrdom. It has become common in Japan to consider the dropping of the atom bomb as the worst act of the war. Some even see it as the crime of the century.
²²
Older Japanese still have some sense of perspective concerning these events. A few will remember that, before Hiroshima was devastated, the generals had formed a civilian militia of 28 million men and women between fifteen and sixty years of age, who were being trained to stop the US invaders on the beaches using only bamboo spears. But a Japanese intellectual or public figure can no longer suggest with impunity that the bombs probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives. And for a week in August the nation indulges in a media-generated display of self-pity. The ‘peace park’ and museum in Hiroshima – pilgrimage centre for numerous foreign anti-nuclear activists and pacifist groups – do not give the multitude of Japanese visitors any impression that history began before the bomb.

There are lobbies campaigning for the inclusion of a visit to Hiroshima in the itineraries of highly placed or famous foreign visitors. Once there, the visitor will find a small army of reporters ready to convey his or her regrets, feelings of remorse and expressions of sympathy (and sometimes ‘excuses’) to the Japanese people. The ‘studies of peace’ that a number of organisations undertake within this context consist of books of children’s drawings, photographs and reminiscences on the theme of Hiroshima’s suffering. The actual circumstances surrounding Japan’s decision to surrender, and the relative part played in it by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria compared to the bomb, receive hardly any attention from Japanese intellectuals. The majority of Japanese high-school students are taught history by teachers who themselves have hardly any idea of what transpired in the first half of this century.

Hiroshima is lifted out of history; it is a shrine to Japanese martyrdom. The suffering is considered to have been for humanity, in order to convey to the world the importance of peace. But the world has continued to make war, so that Japan has been betrayed again. The latter line of argument is pursued by the major film on the Tokyo Trials (
Tokyo Saiban
). This film, which drew an uncommon degree of attention, implies that Japan went along with a guilty verdict against its military leaders for the sake of teaching the world the importance of peace, but that the world did not keep its side of the bargain. The same idea of martyrdom to no avail – double victimhood as it were – has been conveyed in a number of serious magazine articles.
²³

The imagery of national victimhood purveyed in popular culture as well as in serious articles provides a perfect frame of reference in which to place Japan’s international problems in the 1980s. There is no shortage of ’proof that the international system has always obstructed Japan’s national interests. One has only to remember the Asian immigration exclusion act passed by the US Congress in 1924 – still a favourite point-maker at conferences and in articles. It appears to ordinary Japanese that, although Japan must participate in the world’s affairs, this participation will get it into trouble by placing it at the mercy of uncontrollable external forces.

The sense of victimhood is nurtured by the criticism that Western trading partners level at Japan in connection with lopsided trade balances, and is thus considerably stronger in the 1980s than it was in the 1960s. The view that Japan is misunderstood, and that irate trading partners are either mistaken in their impressions or acting in bad faith, carries much force because it is presented everywhere in the newspapers, the magazines and on television. It is also clear that other countries do not have the best in mind for Japan; the external world is not benevolent. It is therefore seen as crucially different from Japanese society, in which benevolence of the superior towards the subordinate is the essential assumption which keeps the bureaucrats and other administrators in their positions.

Japanese readily believe that adjusting to the demands of the world means paying a price. Giving in to United States and European pressure aimed at reducing Japanese economic controls is thus presented by the administrators as a sacrifice the Japanese ‘people’ must make for the sake of coping with trade friction.
²⁴
The Japanese public has rarely been told by the newspapers that it would benefit from the greater choice and lower costs of more imported products. The management of reality has twisted perception to a very drastic extent. Many Japanese do not think the West has a case in calling Japanese trade practices unfair, because they are hardly aware that their System is not compatible with the rules of international commerce. Instead, they are told that it is the Western countries that want to change the rules in the middle of the game. It has almost become an article of faith in Japan that foreigners hold it against the Japanese that they do their best, and begrudge the Japanese the fruits of their post-war efforts. The administrators would make it appear that lazy Americans and Europeans want to force their bad habits on the thrifty, hard-working Japanese.
²⁵
The Japanese press is poorly informed, and instead of trying to explore the issue is stuck in the same cocoon of self-justifying rationalisations as the majority of officials.

Even those who confirm the need for structural adjustments often assist in the successful campaign to portray Japan as the victim of unreasonable demands and in criticism of ‘less hard-working’ foreigners. Traces of both attitudes can be detected in pronouncements by such a key figure as Gotoda Masaharu who was Nakasone’s right-hand man in attempts to bring structural changes about, and who compares the situation in the 1980s with that of 1853, when Commodore Perry and his ‘black ships’ forced Japan to end its centuries-old isolation. Intellectuals commenting on the subject may take the bureaucrats and politicians to task for their failings, but on balance they too portray their country as the easy victim of an unreasonable, capricious Western world. Others praise Japan and its people for their remarkable patience in the face of ‘emotional American behaviour’. Some respected authors see an alleged US racism at the root of the problem. There are echoes, too, of the wartime imagery that contrasted an enfeebled USA with a purposeful, dynamic and hard-working Japan. The USA is chastised for believing that ‘its rules’ are universal by authors oblivious to European (or indeed Chinese, ASEAN, Pakistani and nearly everyone else’s) protests. The USA is even, in all seriousness, taken to task for not appreciating the Japanese contributions to world peace.

If the general public has an ahistorical and apolitical view of Japan’s place in the international world, so, by and large, do the administrators. This is borne out by, for instance, their apparent refusal to see the conflict with the United States and other trading partners in political terms, as requiring political solutions.

Here we come to an essential aspect of the Japan Problem. After decades of economic impact on many other countries, plus the recent increase in its financial leverage over the international economy, Japan undoubtedly exercises power in the world. The Japanese economic onslaught, apparently unstoppable by economic mechanisms, is
ipso facto
a political problem. Yet the administrators who deny that they exercise power in Japan also deny, implicitly but systematically, their exercise of power abroad. They insist that their international difficulties can and should be solved by economic measures taken by others, or by the workings of the market. They prefer not to see that Japan’s massive export drives, and its undermining of certain industrial sectors in the USA and Europe, have political repercussions, that Europeans are beginning to seek a political solution, that the US Congress is trying to legislate one and that the reason the problem will not go away is Japanese political paralysis.

To accept Japan’s international problems as being of a political nature would deposit them squarely in a realm of discourse in which the exercise of power would be addressed unambiguously, in which informal relations and processes would be made explicit and in which rules and regulations, binding on the authorities, would become inevitable: a universe of discourse, in other words, that would horrify the top administrators.

Throughout this book we have seen Japan’s power-holders in charge of what is in fact a gigantic control mechanism – the System – for keeping order among ordinary Japanese. But it is clear, especially when the perspective shifts to Japan in the international context, that the administrators are also, in the final analysis, victims. They are products of the environment their predecessors created, and any debate on their situation that deviates from conventional lines is unwelcome; it is they who, tied down by their lack of imagination, are the real servants of the System. They are victims of a self-deceit inherited from their predecessors in the Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji oligarchy: the pretence that they do not exercise power, together with the concomitant denial of any need for universally accepted rules to regulate that power, and hence the problem they have in accepting unambiguous leadership. The administrators have fostered complex personal ties that thrive on mutual aid, and their major task has been, by preventing laws and the courts from becoming the supreme regulators of society, to keep those relationships and the rules that govern them informal. They protect themselves by means of an elaborate rationale denying the forces that actually govern the System and explaining everything as a natural result of Japanese ‘culture’. The Prussian vision of a society of perfect regimentation, and the overpowering fear of social disorder to which it is an antidote, both inherited from earlier administrators, limit their movements. They do not have the advantage, enjoyed by politicians, bureaucrats and intellectuals in most Western countries, of a political system that is to a considerable degree responsive to rational argument, to intellectual warnings and to genuine political debate. Some of them whom I know personally are horrified by the realisation that the System is, in fact, not under control.