Leaving Japan

Observations on a Dysfunctional U.S.-Japan Relationship

Mike Millard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315499918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

A critique of America's flawed Asia policy that centres on US-Japan relations but harkens back to the same disastrous views that drew America into Vietnam. The technique is a narrative flow of short vignettes woven into longer chapters; the main strands are personal reflections and interviews.

1

Japan’s Burden of the Past

I MIGHT HAVE COME ASHORE LIKE some seventeenth-century castaway, like William Adams, the English navigator who was used for his knowledge of the wider world by Japan’s first shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the consolidator of Japan after Hideyoshi had largely conquered and united it.

The only thing Japanese that had ever caught my interest was Buddhism, perhaps because some Beat-generation writers with minds on fire had transmitted a passion for freedom ignited by pushing the boundaries of American life, finding inspiration in jazz, in Emerson’s essays on individualism, in the open-road poetry of Walt Whitman, and in the Buddhist thought of Japan.

I left San Francisco on a one-way ticket and plied my trade as a writer and editor in Tokyo for more than eleven years, mostly for Japanese companies. I could not help but become aware of problems in U.S.–Japan relations. I began to wonder why they existed and what might come of them. I became a student of the situation and my views of the Japanese, of Japan’s strategic economy and of its relations with the United States, began coalescing. My analysis has been drawn from research, from interviews for stories that I wrote, from conversations with participants in U.S.–Japan relations as well as observers, from books and articles, from the fabric of daily life, from experiences in the newsroom, on the train, in bars, and elsewhere. You hold in your hands the condensation of many years into a volume of modest size. But first, a brief sketch of the Japan that I and many of my colleagues who worked for Japanese companies encountered.

After a couple of years, you realize that you can never be at home in Japan in the way that a Japanese could in America. The relationship is not reciprocal. You can never participate fully as a professional in the Japanese workplace, whether as a journalist, an academic, or an English teacher, which are some of the few visa categories allowing foreigners to reside in Japan. You will be kept at a distance, not tenured, permanently employed, or made to feel welcome for the long term. You will be used for your skills as a necessary evil—a kind of foreign devil. If you ask why this is, they will probably tell you it is not an exclusionary or a racist attitude, it is just that you do not fit in. They will say you do not speak their language, and if you learn to speak it they will say you do not read it. If you learn to read the thousands of written characters, or kanji, as a good many foreigners have these days (I am not among them), they will find another reason, but you will still be excluded, as the American scholar Ivan Hall has eloquently documented in his book, Cartels of the Mind.

In asking the Japanese to dismantle their cartels of the mind, nothing is so effective for starters as sheer exposure. The vested interests these structures serve and the fortress mentality that sustains them must first be driven from the shadows of anonymity, where they feed and luxuriate on the assumption that the outside world doesn’t know, or if it did, wouldn’t care.¹

Hall is correct. Excluding all non-Japanese leads to egregious violations of their rights, yet there is no practical legal recourse through the courts because the Japanese system allows only an exceedingly small number of successful human rights lawsuits, which it drags out over so many years that in the end they hardly matter. A striking example is that Japan has yet to compensate the foreign women whom it forced to serve its army as sex slaves during the 1930s and 1940s, and before it ever resolves these lawsuits, the women will probably have died.

While working for Japanese companies, I was employed through a series of one-year contracts, excluded from full benefits and salaries that Japanese received, and consistently allowed to work only under the supervision of Japanese “handlers,” who were less than qualified in English-language journalism. I felt not only that I was often treated unprofessionally and unfairly, but that at times I was indeed a victim of racism, a new and depressing experience that gave me pause to reconsider attitudes toward minorities in America. Although to be fair, America is a racially mixed society that has made significant adjustments and continues to progress, while Japan is a homogeneous society that has shown no inclination to accept others. An elite Japanese once told me the attitude I had identified was not “racism” properly, but “Japanism.” This meant that the Japanese had an intricately structured society centered around ritualized obligations, and that you must be not only born to it and brought up within it, but also of pure Japanese blood to participate in it fully. Koreans, for example, born and raised in Japan and fully acculturated, are routinely denied the rights of citizenship. “To be Japanese is almost a definition of racial purity. A Korean Japanese would be a contradiction in terms, since a person can be either one or the other, but not both.”²

And if you come to Japan not as a professional but trying to sell products, no matter how good those products are, you will find similarly cartelized business structures and distribution systems that will keep you at bay as a niche player at best. But this is an old story. It has been well established that the way in which the Japanese organize their businesses—in keiretsu groups that buy and subcontract from “inside” companies and that hold each other’s stock in cross-shareholdings—constitutes a formidable barrier to those from the “outside.” And the fact that some failing automobile manufacturers such as Mazda and Nissan sought help from foreign companies in desperation during a global industrywide shakeout has not altered the underlying structure of Japanese business.

Modern Japan began to take shape around 1600, when shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu turned his domain inward, which kept foreigners and their ideas away from Japan’s shores for two and a half centuries. Formed in self-absorbed contemplation of its culture and internal realities, this island of humanity has yet to look back outward in a significant way, which may seem strange for a nation that now lives by exporting. But Japan has maintained its feudalistic institutions that were formed in isolation—its elites because they enjoy the authority granted them, and the common folk largely because their will was broken centuries before and the system allows no other choices, holding them within the narrow confines of tradition, trapped and often victimized by the puzzle of their own history.

On the surface, the Japanese seem to be a modern people. They are hard-working, they enjoy baseball and play it pretty darned well, they are voracious readers of newspapers and they have, through manufacturing and exporting, begun to participate in the wider world. But the Japanese approach to life is different than that of most people’s. When a company hires new graduates they arrive en masse, like a new class, and are often subjected to a boot camp-like training that is designed to strip away any individualism that might have accumulated during their school days, and to instill selfless devotion to their company. They wear company uniforms when they work, company badges on their suits, and they may well sing the company song in the morning before warming up for work by doing group calisthenics. Even if you see a gang of construction workers toiling at the side of a road, they will not be clad in jeans and workshirts, but usually in uniforms and helmets. It is a different—more collective and insulated—mode of life. Most Japanese are comfortable only within their groups. They work, travel, and play in collectives that are structured with the ritualized inner dynamics and relationships particular to their culture. There is a whole Japanese literary industry called nihonjinron that purports to explain to the Japanese how and why they are unique. And there is of course a cause behind all of this. The Japanese carry with them a burden of their nation’s premodern history, a behavioral shadow left from their feudal period of social development that peoples who settled North America escaped, and of which Europe has mostly cured itself through revolutions and the refinement of civilizations.

Not so the Japanese, who were never able to mount a successful revolution against the ancient regime, although they tried many times, and thousands of oppressed, starving peasants died trying to throw off the yoke of the samurai and the central government. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children—whole families—were slaughtered by Tokugawa forces, for example, in quelling a 1637–38 rebellion. The “Japanese messiah” Amakusa Shiro, a Christian from southern Kyushu, led about forty thousand commoners in a futile rebellion against a government that had taken to torturing to death family members of those who were unable to meet heavy tax levies that were starving them anyway.

Amakusa Shiro’s career … fits at almost every point into the pattern of Japanese failed heroism. He fought bravely for a doomed cause and after the usual period of early success led his followers to unconditional disaster. The fantastic elan and courage of the Shimabara rebels, which contrast with the cautious, lacklustre calculation of the enemy, could never prevail in the world of sober reality.³

Tokugawa broke and subdued his subjects with a ferocity that still reverberates along the archipelago every day when people mutter shogenai (“It can’t be helped”) as their hopes crumple against the hard realities of the Japanese system.

There is a nice earthy side to today’s common Japanese, who include workers, artisans, farmers, fishermen, and small independent businesspeople. But they are kept beneath and supporting the controlling system at the top of the pyramid—a triangular elite of mandarin-like bureaucrats, their political cronies, and captains of industry whose export manufacturing companies are arrayed like military forces to attack the world’s markets under a flag of Japanese nationalism. These are the direct, if somewhat moderated, descendents of the Tokugawa government and of the later Meiji Restoration samurai. They comprise the less charming side of contemporary Japan, still cloaked in an aura of imperialism from the decaying cult of a formerly “divine” emperor. From this emperor-centered system and from the elite political apparatus that fosters and manipulates it stemmed Japan’s World War II cruelty as well as the fanatical willingness of many Japanese to “die for the emperor.” It is also a primary source of Japan’s inability to adjust itself to the modern world, as well as of the economic problems that this island nation continues to cause for its ostensible allies.

For much of this, however, the United States has largely its own policies to blame, because it had a rare opportunity during the occupation after World War II to uproot the emperor system—along with Japan’s powerful bureaucrats—and to instill real democracy. America failed to do that in a blunder that altered the course of history, and led to the conflicts the two nations endure more than half a century later in their bilateral relations. The American government, frightened in the early 1950s to the verge of paranoia by the rise of communism in Russia and China and by the remote possibility of a labor-led communist takeover of Japan, reversed Japan’s course toward democracy and reinstated authoritarian prewar bureaucrats to positions of utmost power. Although bureaucratic power is occasionally challenged by politicians, it maintains a grip on Japan’s political economy today, most prominently through the ubiquitous tentacles of the Ministry of Finance, which tends to dismiss politicians as second-rate money-grubbers.

Today, the symbol of the state is the innocuous Emperor Akihito, son of the less-innocent Hirohito, who the writer Patrick Smith has suggested was protected by American occupation forces when he probably deserved to be tried for war crimes involving what seemed to have been a substantial role in Japan’s attempt to seize Asia for its resources, and to divide the world with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Smith wrote of Hirohito’s war room in the imperial palace:

He occupied it just before the Rape of Nanjing began. Twenty thousand women were raped in Nanjing and something over two hundred thousand people massacred. Hirohito quickly rewarded the officers who oversaw this terror (and whose commanding general was an uncle by marriage).⁴

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hirohito was forced to proclaim publicly that he was not a god. Yet even today, partially through its affiliation with the symbolism of the Chrysanthemum Throne, the traditional bureaucratic, political, and business oligarchy routinely circumvents Japan’s pretense of democracy, and maintains a soft authoritarian control of the nation’s citizenry.

Japan is not a modern industrialized democracy as the United States government finds it convenient to pretend, but an industrial complex organized along feudal lines that never completely demobilized after World War II. Its workers, no longer soldiers but now “corporate warriors,” are kept in step through a nationalistic, quasi-religious ideology (Japanism) that casts them as a unique people with the destiny of controlling Asia. They may well be, as Japan’s gross domestic product is twice that of the rest of East Asia, but “Japanism” is one reason much of Asia continues to distrust its intentions. Even after more than five decades there have been uttered only grudging and untimely Japanese apologies for the brutality of the war, because the old ideology manages to live on beneath a high-tech veneer. The old system still controls people’s lives, rendering Japan less than a nation of sovereign individuals who exercise a democratic franchise, and more a political remnant of an earlier period that reflects the failure of a people to develop a level of individual responsibility necessary to create an effective mechanism through which to express their political will. Japanese governments are routinely supported by around 30 percent of the electorate or less, but that is irrelevant because the majority is not directly connected to decision-making, and often, neither are the politicians. The elites wield “Japanism” as the legitimator of their authority in order to achieve growth in global market shares that stabilizes their power by keeping disciplined workers employed and uncomplaining. The vast majority of Japanese people, subdued, inward-looking, and drilled since childhood in the virtues of passive acceptance, follow quietly as long as most have work and prosperity.

This traditional Japanese mentality—narrowly focused on functioning within an insular traditional society—is referred to by the scholar Mayumi Itoh as the sakoku attitude, or the “secluded nation” mentality that sprang from two primary sources: the remote geographical location of Japan as a large archipelago some distance off the coast of Asia, and the policy of the Tokugawa shogunate for more than two centuries of near-absolute seclusion. But while Itoh sees an “irreversible tide” of globalization sweeping through Japan, others see a glacier that moves so slowly in relation to the rest of the world it may actually be falling further behind. In any case, Itoh argues persuasively that the sakoku culture keeps the nation from clearly seeing and understanding the rest of the world, and that it is the original cause of Japan’s prejudices, of its frictions with its economic partners, its consistent failures in the foreign policy arena, and its inability to assume a significant degree of international leadership despite having built the world’s second largest economy. Itoh wrote,

Japanese exclusionism, protectionism, racial prejudice and xenophobia, all derived from the sakoku mentality, constitute the attitudinal prism of Japanese foreign policy decision makers (as well as of the public), which has retarded Japan’s liberalization and internationalization even today.⁵

But we should not forget that while Japan’s political and social development may have been arrested by obsessive internal controls of its traditional elites, those elites were allowed to reclaim control of Japan during the early years of the Cold War. America had begun with a series of progressive, New Deal-style reforms for women and farmers, only to falter in its vision by refusing to allow a democratic process to revolutionize postwar Japan. For that craven decision, the people of Japan and America continue to pay a price, although both governments usually claim all is well with a relationship that has in fact become crippling—retarding the political and social development of Japan and destroying whole industrial sectors in America.

It is this quality of morbid dependence between two nations whose histories have rendered them in many ways incompatible that seems objectionable. The entwined sources of the problem are historical, political, and economic. Perhaps...