Japan: Beyond the End of History

David Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134863204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this analysis of Japan's policy-making, David Williams places his argument within the debates about Japanese political economy in the United States and Britain, debates previously polarised between `market' and `ministry' views. He presents Japanese-style nationalist development as a serious challenge to Western values and theory.

PART I THE POLITICS

Policymakers and the Japanese political system

3 Why the centre holds

A NATIONALIST SOLUTION

From the standpoint of the policymaker, particularly the nationalist addressing the state’s core concerns, the supreme fact of Japanese political life has been the existence of more than one centre of authority, legitimacy and policymaking initiative. This condition has prevailed throughout the country’s long experience of government, from the sixth century of the Christian era to the present. As a political system, Japan has been polycentric. This polycentrism has taken two forms.

First, for a variety of practical political reasons, but also as a result of a set of mental habits many Japanese would describe as ‘cultural’, those who have enjoyed ultimate power have on numerous occasions sought to exercise their authority from ‘behind the throne’. This persistent duality between the nominal holder of power and the true wielder of power has been the classic political ‘discovery’ of foreign travellers to Japan for centuries.

The earliest example of this arch feature of Japanese statecraft is probably the Fujiwara family’s usurpation of imperial prerogatives throughout most of the Heian period (794–1185). Imperial powers lost to the Fujiwara were subsequently seized by the Kamakura shoguns and the Hojo regents of medieval times, the warlords of the Warring States period (1482–1558), the Tokugawa shoguns of the long Edo peace (1600–1867), and the Meiji oligarchs, who ruled on behalf of the nominally absolute emperor, the formal apex of the 1890 Meiji Constitution. Since the Pacific War (1941–5), there is much evidence to suggest that the bureaucracy has often dominated, though the postwar constitution has officially assigned that function to the Japanese parliament or Diet. There is the conspicuous example of ex-Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei who dominated ruling party politics from disgraced retirement. Recent proponents of the theory that the most senior leaders of the so-called policy ‘tribes’ (zoku) set state priorities in the name of these much larger interest groups subscribe, certainly by implication, to the same ‘shadow’ or ‘dummy general’ (‘kagemusha’) theory of Japanese political power.

This is one of the conceits of Japanese political sensibility. Take, for example, the 1980 film by Kurosawa Akira, Kagemusha (shadow warrior), which is a meditation on the medieval exploitation of the idea. Arthur Stockwin crystallizes the point in his observation on the 1890 Meiji Constitution: ‘According to that document, sovereignty resided in the emperor, but the emperor did not rule personally, and it was not at all clear who was supposed to.’¹

Nor did the replacement of the Meiji Constitution by the 1947 MacArthur Constitution cure such obscuring tendencies. This is how The Economist, in a 1992 article, attempted to discover who takes decisions on setting interest rates on behalf of the Bank of Japan:

In appearance, the Bank of Japan is less free [compared to America’s Federal Reserve Board]. It operates under the Bank of Japan Law of 1942, which placed it firmly under government control and gave the minister of finance the right to overrule BOJ policy. A 1949 amendment, however, set up a Policy Board as the top decisionmaking body…. The board sets the discount rate. But open-market operations are decided by an Executive Committee, equivalent to the FOMC [the Federal Open Market Committee in America]. This consists of the governor, the deputy governor and seven BOJ executive directors, appointed by the minister of finance. Thus, on the face of the law, it is unclear who really holds the monetary reins. Supposedly, the Policy Board takes the decisions. But the finance minister can overrule it. The relationship between the bank and the ministry is therefore uneasy.²

These examples demonstrate not Montesquieu’s ‘separation of powers’, but a divide between power and legitimacy. The Japanese Diet, as the representative body of a constitutionally sovereign people, is the legitimating organ (just as the emperor was in the Meiji Constitution) of the Japanese state. Whatever the claims of the Japanese Diet also to be a working parliament, legitimation is its prime constitutional function.

No defence of parliamentary power can credibly insist that the higher Japanese bureaucracy is composed of pliant ‘yes, minister’ civil servants. Since the war, the bureaucracy has normally dominated the legislative process, and in this narrow sense can be said to have ruled while the Diet reigned. Similarly, Tanaka Kakuei brought his formidable political skills and patronage to bear on the legislative procedures of the Diet, in the pursuit of very different goals, but was rarely constrained by them. The Diet, as opposed to the political parties, has been above the often sordid struggle for party advantage, and this has preserved its prerogatives despite the evident imperfections of Japanese democracy.

Behind Western probing to discover the true nexus of power a misconception is sometimes at work. The Japanese do not share, to anything like the same degree, Western exasperation with institutional ambiguity. Their attitude towards power bears greater affinity with the key notions of French deconstructionist theory. Thus, just as the deconstructionist of a poetic text holds that meaning is a momentary weakness in the play of semantic markers, so the exposure of the true circuits of power and policymaking within a political system is a temporary failure of sheltering ambiguities, instructive but unlikely to persist.

But even French theory falls short of the Japanese reality, because an institution such as the Bank of Japan is a not a semantic marker but a powerful organ of government. Despite the ambiguities, or perhaps because of them, the BOJ succeeds in a way untrue of the Federal Reserve Board. It is the success of Japanese monetary policy that demonstrates that, pace Roland Barthes, Japanese government is more than ‘an empire of signs’. It works. Hence the suspicion that the Meiji Constitution did not fail because it was ambiguous, but because Japanese policymakers, habituated to such ambiguities, could not manipulate them with sufficient skill. Western insistence on organizational clarity and constitutional lucidity may be entirely beside the point when applied to Japan. The anti-liberal character of the Meiji Constitution is of course another matter.

The distinction drawn in the Japanese language between tatemae (principle) and honne (motive) is relevant here. Tatemae is often rendered, in a rough and ready way, as ‘surface’ and honne as ‘reality’. This will sometimes do, but not here. The distinction between Diet and bureaucracy or emperor and shogun, viewed as an example of tatemae and honne, is closer to the English contrast between ‘form’ and ‘content’, that is, between the legitimizing, and therefore indispensable, form and the substance of power. In talking about the location of Japanese political power, the proper rendering of honne might be ‘the always obscured locus of true power’ and tatemae as ‘the indispensable legitimacy of certain necessarily conspicuous political forms’. The notion of honne is well developed in Japan not because the Japanese have a penchant for mistaking appearance for reality, but because they recognize political ‘forms’ (tatemae) as being anything but superficial.

The second form that Japanese political polycentrism takes is even more important. The power of the Japanese polity, even when conspicuously concentrated, has been divided between more than one centre. Though it often subtly blends with kagemusha polycentrism, this division of power has been a notable feature of Japanese politics in modern times. All generalizations are vulnerable, and this is no exception. Thus it is not being claimed that Japan is unique in this respect nor that the meticulous historian could not find much that would make this generalization fray at the edges, but it is to insist that the polycentric quality of the Japanese political system—ancient, medieval and modern— is one of the most remarkable features of Japanese governance.

This emphasis on the polycentric character of the Japanese political system should not encourage the shallow conclusion that there is no such thing as the Japanese state. Modern Japan is not only a state, it is a unitary state: a political system that admits few of the federalist or decentralizing or devolving impulses that have so influenced the nature of the American, British, German or Canadian polities. The Japanese state admits no constitutional dilutions of its authority. By the standards of Canada’s powerful provinces or America’s fifty states, Japanese prefectures, the largest constitutional units of local government, have until recently tended to be mere shadows that more closely resemble French départements at their most feeble. As a capital, modern Tokyo is the twentieth-century answer to nineteenth-century Paris. It rules.

Japan has no equivalent of the devolutionary demands pressing on unitary Britain or its well-developed traditions of independent local government. Rather, most political actors in Japan acknowledge that central government, particularly the bureaucracy, remains the prime agent of innovation and reform within the system. There are no exact analogies to the Japanese state among English-speaking democracies, but the unchallengeable power of central administrative initiative within the Japanese system may be usefully compared with the strong centralizing thrust of the British state under Thatcherism at its most dynamic or with the role of the US Department of Justice, particularly under Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, in overturning the reactionary legal structures of racial discrimination in the old Confederacy.

But Japanese centralism is not an occasional feature of the political system; quite the contrary, it has been true of the higher state bureaucracy for the entirety of Japan’s modern experience as a nation. On balance, the Western student in search of a model of constitutional and policy practice will discover that, on this count, modern Japan more closely resembles Britain under Thatcher or France under de Gaulle, both unitary states, than any post-war federal system. Imperial and Weimar Germany also offer arresting analogies to the modern Japanese experiment in centralized rule.

Yet given the fundamental orientation of Japanese statecraft, including its pronounced weakness for dispersing power or for obscuring the actual loci of power, why is Japan not a federal state? The regime before the Meiji Restoration has been described, to the irritation of historians of medieval France, as a bureaucratic feudal regime. The emperor in Kyoto was nominally responsible for the affairs of the country, the shogun in Edo (Tokyo) actually in charge as the emperor’s vicar, but with a substantial amount of wealth and power retained in a string of semi-autonomous domains outside the immediate jurisdiction of the shogunate government (bakafu).³

Given such an experience, why did Japan not adopt a federal structure after 1868? Why did not one of the more cohesive of those semiautonomous domains, Satsuma or Choshu, emerge as the Japanese equivalent of California, which is rich, powerful and a long way from Washington?

The answer is complex. The Japanese view is that the country’s survival as an independent polity was endangered by the late-nineteenth-century thrust of Western imperialism (American, Russian, British and French) into the Far East, and that only a centralizing nationalist solution provided an adequate defence against the threat of Western colonialization or commercial domination.

National vulnerability gave the statist campaign among a significant section of the samurai elite a persuasive urgency, and encouraged a break with traditional Japanese assumptions about how power was to be organized and for what purposes. Thus the most important of the Meiji nationalist reformers moved rapidly and decisively from the view that Japan was endangered as a nation to the conviction that only a unitary state could ease the foreign threat; from the conviction that the emperor had to be revered and the Western barbarians expelled (sonno-joi) to the assumption that the only final cure for national vulnerability was to achieve economic and miltary superiority over those nations that threatened Japan (‘o-bei ni oikose’ or ‘overtake Europe and America’); and, finally, from the view that traditional polycentrism was untameable, to one that embraced the German imperial model. This followed a brief flirtation with the French system, until the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) demonstrated the superiority of Bismarck’s approach. The British and American models were never serious contenders.

The nationalist spur was crucial. It encouraged the belief that the Japanese, as a race, were inherently superior to the peoples of the West, and this quality would manifest itself in a competitive struggle. The Meiji reformers were also convinced that this inherent superiority would become apparent only if the state, and therefore society at large, could be reorganized along effective lines. Just the same, the attractiveness of a unitary polity housing a nationalist state suggests a historic reorientation of mind, in many ways out of step with both Japanese historical practice and the impoverished realities that defined Japan at the end of the Edo era.

Reflecting on Japan’s long modernization drive, it is clear that the nationalist programme was responsible for winning many of the key battles to reform Japanese consciousness and to foster state power on a scale consistent with the ambitions of the late Edo and Meiji periods. Nevertheless, polycentrism continues to define the Japanese experience of government.

This would not have surprised the Meiji modernizers. They were the products of the polycentric Japanese tradition. The modernizing experiments carried out by Satsuma when Okubo Toshimichi served the han government were only possible because the han was relatively free from interference from Edo. Such leaders knew the political realities of their country. Experience told them that the most powerful commercial families were not going to be brought to heel. The peasantry was profoundly unpolitical in any modern sense. The Japanese elites had long displayed a pronounced weakness for cabals and group in-fighting. Even the future loyalties of the samurai class were uncertain. The Meiji oligarchs were furthermore divided among themselves. All this meant that modernization was going to be very difficult to accomplish.

These constraints shaped the Meiji compromise between the fact of polycentrism and the need for an effective modernizing state. Just as James Madison, aware of the constitutional dangers of factions, tried to fashion a political system that could finesse them, the Meiji modernizers designed a state powerful enough to overcome Japan’s obvious weaknesses.⁴

Nationalist attempts to combat polycentrism are responsible for many of the anti-liberal features of modern Japanese government. Only a strong state had any chance of overcoming the fractured nature of Japanese politics. Liberalism was a virtue that nationalists believed Japan could not afford. The propagandizing schoolroom, the episodes of police repression, and the tireless pursuit of elite consensus are all part of this effort. The Meiji pioneers suspected that a federalist solution would make their task infinitely more difficult because federalism would encourage the deeply rooted polycentric tendencies of the regime that they had inherited from the Tokugawas. Only a unitary state would do.

In this contest between national weakness and reforming vision rests the answer to the conundrum: Why is the Japanese state at once strong and weak? The Meiji state and its Showa successor are manifestly strong states with certain domestic powers and prerogatives unavailable to more liberal Western states, especially since 1945. The divided character of the Japanese political system is such that the state has to be strong in the public-policy sphere to get anything done. The fact that the state is frequently thwarted by other political forces merely underscores the kind of resistance that central bureaucrats must contend with. In such a political context, it should be obvious why state officials work so hard at networking and nurturing elite consenses.

It is the first business of the state to bridge the chasms that divide national and private interests. Many examples of bureaucratic paralysis, of policy immobilism, are the direct consequence of the fractures in carefully constructed consensus at the highest level. The campaigns of successive American administrations to restructure Japan have failed because all the main Japanese elite groupings are aware that such reforms would invite dangerous tampering with the main fault line in Japanese politics: the gap between corporate and state or bureaucratic interest. This is the feature of Japanese political geology that the great American diplomatic efforts of the 1980s and 1990s—the Plaza Accord, the Maekawa Reports, the semiconductor market-share battle, the Structural Impediments Initiative (SII) and President Bush’s ill-starred effort to win the 1992 ‘Tokyo primary’—have stumbled over.

If US policymakers had done their homework, they would have known that Japanese policymakers and nationalist opinion leaders have repeatedly struggled to compensate for the polycentric and sometimes destabilizing proclivities of other political actors, whether interest-group-corrupted politicians, romantic idealists with a weakness for political violence or grasping businessmen keen to line their own pockets at national expense. Centralized solutions, in the eyes of such nationalists, were indispensable. Nevertheless, all the key elite actors recognized that, if national goals were to be achieved, such objectives had to be consistent with the character of the polity as it already existed. The chief lesson of the modern Japanese experience of government is that aberrant tendencies were overcome only with difficulty, and without eliminating the polycentric character of Japanese government.

This may beg another important question: In what sense did the Japanese nation exist in 1868? The Japanese may have been conscious of themselves as a cultural, linguistic, religious, even racial collectivity, but were they a nation in the modern sense? In what sense were the Meiji ruling elite ‘nation-builders’?

Meiji nationalism was an invented ideology that had its roots in the growth of patriotic consciousness during the eighteenth century. But the Meiji elite sought new methods to channel and shape this national consciousness. This meant taking a largely apolitical peasant population and turning them into nationalist-minded soldiers, savings-minded housewives and patriotic schoolchildren, all willing in spirit to make sacrifices for the nation. Before 1945, this involved anchoring national loyalties in the person of the emperor, the concept of the nation-state being too abstract and unreal for such purposes. After 1945, the idea of being a Japanese acquired a persuasive unchallenged quality long sought by nationalist policymakers. For better or worse, Japan has opted for a nationalist solution to her problems. The resulting vessel of statecraft has proved to be one of the most formidable in modern history.

THE LONG REVOLUTION

The impact of the Japanese political system on the outside world has been one of the great themes of twentieth-century history, from the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), through the First World War, the imperialist assault on China, the Second World War, to Japan’s new status as an economic superpower since the early 1980s. The domestic story has been as remarkable. This nationalist dynamic has been a response to the turbulence of twentieth-century global politics. But it has also given modern Japan its goal-driven coherence, even if the process has sometimes shaken the foundations of the Japanese polity.

The leading players of late Edo society included the imperial court at Kyoto, the bakufu with its capital at Edo, the principal daimyo (including the descendants of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s most important opponents at the decisive battle of Sekigahara in 1600) and the wealthiest of the country’s commercial class. The Me...