Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan

Jeff Kingston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815352051
• eBook ISBN: 9781351139625
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This new and fully updated second edition of Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan provides undergraduate and graduate students with an interdisciplinary textbook written by leading specialists on contemporary Japan. Students will gain the analytical insights and information necessary to assess the challenges that confront the Japanese people, policymakers and private and public-sector institutions in Japan today.

Featuring a comprehensive analysis of key debates and issues confronting Japan, issues covered include:

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• A rapidly aging society and changing employment system

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• Nuclear and renewable energy policy

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• Gender discrimination

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• Immigration and ethnic minorities

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• Post-3/11 tsunami, earthquake and nuclear meltdown developments

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• Sino-Japanese relations

An essential reference work for students of contemporary Japan, it is also an invaluable source for a variety of courses, including comparative politics, anthropology, public policy and international relations.

Part I

Political environment

1 Japanese politics

Mainstream or exotic?

Arthur Stockwin

Introduction

The politics of Japan is often regarded, particularly in Western media, as obscure and radically difficult to understand, presenting conceptual difficulties far greater than those of political systems closer to home. A young BBC journalist once told me that whenever some aspect of Japanese politics came up, the newsroom entered a mode of collective panic, and journalists would search frantically for a conceptual peg on which to hang a coherent argument about the limited facts at their disposal. In my experience these pegs would often turn out to be clichés of dubious value, such as that “Japan is a consensus society,” or that “Politics in Japan is governed by questions of face.”

In contrast, many political scientists, taking their cue from economics, tend to shun explanations dependent on essentialist reasoning or what are assumed to be “cultural” characteristics of a given population. It is intriguing to compare two works in English on the Japanese political system, published 18 years apart: J. Mark Ramseyer and Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Japan’s Political Marketplace (Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1993), and Ellis Krauss and Robert J. Pekkanen, The Rise and Fall of Japan’s LDP (Krauss and Pekkanen 2011). The two books develop contrasting—even diametrically opposed—arguments concerning the dynamics of Japanese party politics.

Ramseyer and Rosenbluth rest their analysis on a “principal-agent” variant of rational choice theory, and maintain that reforming the Lower House electoral system from a single non-transferable vote in multi-member districts to a mixed system based predominantly on single-member districts would inevitably lead to a drastic upheaval in the way parties behaved, so that factions (habatsu), personal support machines (kōenkai), the powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Policy Affairs Research Council (seimu chōsakai) and other elements would rapidly decline once the particular set of incentives embodied in the old electoral system were removed.

Krauss and Pekkanen, by contrast, able to reflect on several years of experience under the new system, and using historical institutionalism, argue on the basis of detailed research that the effects of the electoral system reform in 1994 were far less drastic, and far slower to appear, than had been predicted by Ramseyer and Rosenbluth, even though at the same time they were curiously deferential to the writers of the earlier book (Stockwin 2012). On the other hand, the course of events from December 2012 negates the expectation of Krauss and Pekkanen that the LDP was headed for a fall in the long term.

A comparison of the two books, therefore, reveals a major theoretical and empirical gulf between them, so that we find here a significant controversy in the English language literature on Japanese politics. Yet on one issue it is impossible to insert a sheet of tracing paper between their two respective arguments.

In the words of Ramseyer and Rosenbluth:

[n]ot so long ago, scholars began their accounts of Japanese politics by invoking the peculiarities of Japanese culture … Scholars lavished praise on the [cultural] theories and elaborated them in essays about Japan’s need for consensus, about its rejection of individualism and open conflict, about its Confucian fascination with loyalty, and about its patriarchal legacy. To their credit, many Japan specialists eventually recognised the circularity of much of this work.

(Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1993: 2)

Krauss and Pekkanen would presumably agree with this opinion. Writing of habatsu, they express their scepticism about “culture” as an explanatory variable in the following terms: “[c]ultural determinist explanations for the factions have often been made, but they are not sustainable in the face of the transformation of the factions over the first postwar decades … [T]he culturalist claims [are] trying to explain change with a constant” (Krauss and Pekkanen 2011: 266).

Culture, however, is a highly contested area because the term attracts contrasting definitions. On the one hand, many political scientists assume that “cultural” means essentialist, unquantifiable and very slow to change. Given this definition, they reasonably reject most “cultural” explanations as spurious at worst and only marginally useful at best. Social anthropologists, however, favor a quite different type of definition based on the view that culture is changeable and contingent. The following definition is by Brian McVeigh: culture is “‘something learned,’ or more specifically the arts, beliefs, customs, socio-political institutions, and all other products of human creation and thought developed by a group of people at a particular time that is learned” (McVeigh 1998: 16).

If we adopt a concept of culture along these lines, then we may be able to reintroduce the factor of culture into political analysis. We shall return to this in the final section of this chapter, but, meanwhile, we need to examine why “culturalist” explanations of Japanese society and politics have acquired such a bad name.

The Nihonjinron controversies

Reluctance to take “culture” seriously owes much to the frontal attack launched in the early 1980s by scholars based in Australia and elsewhere on the literary and (pseudo-?) scholarly genre popular at that time in Japan known as Nihonjinron, which is roughly translated as “what it means to be Japanese.” Prominent among these writers were Sugimoto Yoshio and Ross Mouer, both Australia-based sociologists whose approach was firmly rooted in American social science of that period. Their best-known work, published in 1986, was Images of Japanese Society (Mouer and Sugimoto 1986).

Another anti-culturalist writer of the same period, once again Australian but resident in Italy, was Peter Dale, whose 1986 book The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness achieved a succès de scandale (Dale 1986). He shared similar perceptions of Japanese society to those of Sugimoto and Mouer, but applied a quite different methodology, being a multilingual literary scholar steeped in European and East Asian cultures, classical and modern. He defined the Nihonjinron in a broad sense as:

works of cultural nationalism concerned with the ostensible “uniqueness” of Japan in any aspect, and which are hostile to both individual experience and the notion of internal socio-historical diversity … What we are dealing with is not a national “mentality,” … but rather a fictional mentality constructed by innumerable thinkers and writers over a considerable length of time, through whose lens, due to the impact of constant discussion and exposure, the people often tend to interpret their world.

(Dale 1986: v–vi)

Mouer and Sugimoto worked with various Japanese scholars, in particular the sociologist Befu Harumi, whose “Critique of the Group Model of Japanese Society” became a classic of the genre (Befu 1980). There is an interesting passage in his article where Befu argues that the cultural uniqueness assumption of many Nihonjinron writers was a denial of the relevance of social class analysis to Japanese society:

Since the group model of Japanese society is predicated on the absence of conflict and on the presence of harmony, a model of society that assumes inherent conflict is not acceptable. The denial of the existence of social classes in Japan is suspect regardless of whether one adopts an objective or a subjective definition of social class.

(Befu 1980: 34)

It is clear from this passage (and from many other possible citations) that the culturalist versus anti-culturalist controversies in the 1980s had strong political overtones. Those who wrote, often expansively and with enthusiasm, about the inherently harmonious and non-conflictual character of Japanese society were easily portrayed as conservative or reactionary by those whose political instincts were further to the left. Few of the anti-culturalist writers were specifically Marxist (though we should remember that Marxist concepts were still often to be found in the intellectual writings of the period), but they rightly perceived that conflict was a powerful driver within the political process and that change without conflict was likely to be stillborn, in Japan as elsewhere.

Prominent among the targets of the anti-culturalist attack was Nakane Chie, a social anthropologist at Tokyo University. Her book Japanese Society was widely read during the 1970s and was distributed by Japanese embassies in various countries (I believe in a cut-down version) as a key to understanding how Japanese society worked (Nakane 1970). Her analysis presented a rigid and unvarying hierarchical model of vertical loyalties. Another target was the social psychologist Doi Takeo, who popularized the notion of amae—roughly meaning a pervasive psychological need to presume upon another’s benevolence—as the key to comprehending social interaction in Japan (Doi 1971). There was good reason for believing that these writers’ theories were conservative in implication.

Remembering these often passionate controversies after 30 to 35 years within what is now a far more turbulent and somber politico-economic environment, it seems extraordinary that so many writers should have been seriously arguing in the 1970s and 1980s that the Japanese were a unique people whose society worked according to principles of harmony, hierarchy, consensus and sacrifice of the individual for the good of the whole (whereas most countries, particularly those in the “West,” exhibited characteristics contrary to those principles).

Insights from history

It remains theoretically possible that Japanese society and politics have changed so much over three decades that what was reasonable then is absurd today, and there may be some truth in this. Nevertheless, the critics could marshal powerful arguments to show that political manipulation by dominant national power structures was at work in the formulation of such culturalist literature, and indeed that this may have stemmed from the political dominance of a particular set of forces between the 1950s and the 1980s. By contrast, a recent 80-year history of prewar Japanese political history from 1857 to 1937 by a leading historian of modern Japan, Banno Junji, shows that for many years before the war the politics of Japan was extremely fragmented rather than extremely cohesive. In a passage towards the end of the book, he writes:

[T]he greatest reason that Japan entered the Age of Breakdown (hōkai no jidai, 1937–1945) was that the domestic rulers were split in multiple directions, and were unable to control foreign relations. This situation of multiple divisions had deepened over the five years from 1932, and it developed into one of divisions without winners … Leaders who might have restructured the political system so as to stop the Japan-China war in its tracks and then avoid war between Japan, Britain and America essentially did not exist.

(Banno 2014: 231)

Cyclical politics in Japan?

If the politics of Japan can manifest extreme fragmentation at certain periods, and extreme solidarity at other periods, this suggests at the very least that narrow interpretations of Japan as a “consensus society” prevalent in the 1970s only painted half of the picture—or perhaps missed the point altogether. Scrutiny of both prewar and postwar political trends suggests that there have been periods of common purpose and energy when the population was effectively energized through the actions of a relatively united political, bureaucratic and commercial elite towards widely accepted goals of national development, but there have also been periods where they system has performed badly and narrow interests have torpedoed any serious attempts to pull Japan out of a mire of political fragmentation, lack of effective leadership and consequent stagnation. The three decades or so following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and a similar period following the 1945 defeat are examples of the former, while we can find examples of the latter in the 1930s and over the two decades 1993–2013. Another way of looking at this is to say that both types of period have seen attempts at radical systemic reform, but while some have succeeded, others have failed.

Banno adopts what might be interpreted as a cyclical approach to modern Japanese political history, dividing his book into six “ages,” namely the Age of Reform (1857–63), Age of Revolution (1863–71), Age of Construction (1871–80), Age of Enforcement (1880–93), Age of Reorganization (1894–1924) and Age of Crisis (1925–1937). He deliberately refrains from covering what he calls the Age of Breakdown, lasting from 1937 to 1945, for the following reason:

As for the eight years that were to follow [1937], those prepared to express dissent in the political parties, bureaucracy, financial world, the world of labor, among critics and academics, were nowhere to be found, and above all, it was the “Age of Breakdown.” I lack the ability to describe this “Age of Breakdown” in which those expressing dissent had been extinguished.

(Banno 2014: 231)

What Banno was expressing here was not despair at the pluralistic elements he had identified in the “Age of Crisis,” but rather at the consequences of fragmentation and sectionalism leading inexorably to a semi-totalitarian state imposed in an Orwellian pursuit of mindless war. In a series of newspaper articles after the book was published in 2012 (with an English translation in 2014), he ventured also into postwar history and hinted at a cyclical view of Japanese modern history as a whole. Developing a series of parallels between the various “ages” traversed by Japan from the Bakumatsu period to the 1930s and political history from 1945 into the twenty-first century, he argued (writing in 2012, after the Tōhoku disasters and with the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) still in power) that Japan had in a certain sense entered an “Age of Breakdown”:

Concerning politics, leaders who were supposed to lead Japan to recovery following the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Disaster were divided all ways and rendered inadequate, just like their predecessors in early Shōwa who embarked on the Japan–China war, so that both politics and society were in meltdown. This is the “Age of Breakdown”

(Banno 2012b: 2)

Some observers would not agree that the reaction of the Kan government to the natural and man-made disasters of March 11, 2013 was as hopeless as this. For instance, according to Curtis:

[b]y any comparative measure, the Kan government’s response to the triple catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear breakdown was not as awful as his critics made it out to be … It was far better than the way the Bush administration dealt with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and compares favourably to how other governments have responded to disaster situations.

(Curtis 2012: 25).

Nevertheless, Banno ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Political environment
• PART II: Nuclear and renewable energy
• PART III: International dynamics
• PART IV: Social dilemmas
• PART V: Reforming Japan?
• Index