A New Japan for the Twenty-First Century

An Inside Overview of Current Fundamental Changes and Problems

Rien T. Segers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134054077
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Many people in the West portray Japan as being fixed in its ways, and unable to change, and consequently risking national decline and international loss of prestige. However, in fact, Japan is at present in a significant transition period, comparable to the Meiji Restoration of 1868 or the period immediately after the Second World War. This transition period comes with a mixture of events and situations which are difficult to interpret both for foreign as well as domestic commentators and decision makers. In this book a range of senior experts from inside Japan outline the many considerable changes currently taking place in a wide range of fields, including the economy, business and technology, politics, governance and international relations, and a wide range of social issues - the media, the position of women, nationalism and national consciousness, and religion. Overall, the book provides a corrective to misplaced Western and Eastern views; it aims to redirect stereotyped thinking about contemporary Japan both inside as well as outside the country. In addition it gives a summary overview of contemporary Japan, its current changes and problems– in short the inside story of the second strongest national economy in the world which is in the process of fundamental re-engineering and which will continue to have a huge impact globally going forward.

Part I
Introduction

1 A new Japan in the twenty-first century

Introduction to a changing nation

Rien T. Segers

Japan is reinventing itself on earth—this time as the coolest nation culture.

(Washington Post, 26 December 2003)

The gap between the identity and the image of contemporary Japan

Some time ago I visited Toyota Motor Company in Toyota City close to Nagoya, as briefly described in the Preface to this book. I was briefed on its corporate strategy, on the progress made on its hybrid vehicles and on its advanced initiatives taken in innovative electronic controls. It was impressive. In that very week The Economist carried an article about Japanese car makers in the US, ambiguously titled ‘Twenty years down the road’.¹

The article, which carries the names of the cities of Tokyo and Detroit as at its head, starts by praising the strategy and quality of Japanese car makers and poking fun at former Ford chairman Harold Poling, who thought, twenty years ago when Japanese cars were still only manufactured in Japan, that the secret of efficient Japanese car making was ‘superhuman labourers working like crazy apes on the assembly lines back home’. The article in The Economist continues to talk about ‘the most efficient car factory in the world’, which is Nissan’s plant in Smyrna in Tennessee. In addition, there is an analysis of the Japanese successes in the US in terms of such basics as product quality, inventory control and market research.

Then, there is a sudden, rather unexpected turn in the tone and colour of the article, unexpected at least for those not familiar with the type of discourse used by The Economist vis-à-vis Japan until about September 2005. The bridge from positive to negative discourse is constructed by a stereotype: ‘But the Japanese cannot afford to be complacent’. This almost automatically invokes the reader’s question: which business can afford to be complacent nowadays? Then there comes a quick, superficial listing of things that should support that stereotype of non-complacency, based on the failure of the Indiana factory in the US of Isuzu and Subaru, the initial flop of the Toyota T100 (later a great success as the Tundra) and the fact that Mercedes and Volkswagen are expanding on the American market.

The article concludes as follows:

All this means that the Japanese have little room to make mistakes. Being bigger, Toyota can afford to run more risks than Honda. But it is vulnerable to the fact that, although its cars delight and its factories astound, its management remains distinctly old fashioned and Japanese.²

What is ‘Japanese’? Based on The Economist discourse until recently, and its subsequent subtexts in most articles on Japan, it means: ‘on the road to ruin’.

This article in The Economist is not highlighted because of its content or because Japan or the Japanese car need to be defended or even rescued, but I draw attention to it for two reasons. First of all, it was published in a serious, prestigious and highly influential magazine, implying that it is one of the major agents in constructing a contemporary global image of Japan. Second, because of the nature of its discourse, which touches on the very heart of the aims of this book, namely to show that the existing ways of looking at Japan and interpreting and evaluating this country are outdated due to a number of significant developments, which will be outlined in this chapter. These developments will detect a great discrepancy between the identity and the image of contemporary Japan, between self-image and outside image.

As mentioned, The Economist is a very influential magazine—for boardrooms all over the world, for government officials, investors, journalists, and even for some professors. In short, it is a magazine that is highly decisive for the image construction of the socio-economic sector of a nation, both inside and outside that nation. One negative article does not hurt, but if the subtext of articles concerning a particular country appears to be systematically based on a somewhat ambivalent, not to say negative, discourse that does not correspond with the ‘reality representation’ of that country, then there is something structurally wrong with the perception of that reality, with the so-called reality itself, or with both factors.

Based on the above argumentation it will be evident that the representation of Japanese reality by The Economist has resulted in the construction of an inadequate image. In this article The Economist demonstrates a discourse convention vis-à-vis a leading industrial sector in Japan that is based on a misrepresentation of the real developments in that sector. This misrepresentation is subtle, especially for superficial readers and non-specialists. It can be detected only after a careful analysis and if one has some knowledge concerning the actual situation. The essential meaning of the misrepresentation is to be found in the subtext, which makes its effect even more dangerous.

Many examples of that same discourse could be given. To mention just one additional example: former prime minister Koizumi could not do much good in the eyes of The Economist, at least not until his overwhelming victory in the snap elections of September 2005. Even the things The Economist has already been urging Japan to do for a long time—for instance to become more involved with Asian affairs—are cited against him. A case in point is the visit of the prime minister to North Korea in 2002. The magazine carried an article under the heading ‘Roads to Ruin’, starting as follows: ‘Which map is Junichiro Koizumi using? Having wandered a long way from his initial reform pledges, he is now trying to redirect himself by straying overseas, with a trip to North Korea…’.³ The word ‘straying’ is the key to the subtext: the construction is that Mr Koizumi is a failure: he lost his way and the new way he found for himself is leading to just to ruin.

If content analysis is applied to The Economist issues concerning Japan during the years 2001–2005, the general discourse construction is that of a country that really is on the road to ruin, headed by a prime minister who is ‘a dashing disappointment’. It is high time ‘to abandon any remaining hope in Junichiro Koizumi’.⁴ Obviously, this statement concerns only the perception of The Economist for the period mentioned. No claim is made here that this is the American image or the British image. This is simply the construction of Economist journalists covering Japan in Tokyo, maybe in consultation with or influenced by what kind of articles and discourse the London-based headquarters would like to see. However, somewhat unfortunately for Japan, articles appearing in The Economist carry a lot of weight when it comes to making dominant image (and investment!) constructions.

Obviously, the above stories concerning Toyota, Koizumi and The Economist are more than just anecdotes; they provide two cases on the basis of which the perception gap between the identity and the image of contemporary Japan can be clearly demonstrated. They also form a justified point of departure for the claim that a reinterpretation of Japan is highly necessary. There is a major reason for this necessity, for the urgent need to bridge the gap between the identity and the image of contemporary Japan. That reason is based on the structural inadequacy of currently existing interpretive models.

The structural inadequacy of existing interpretive models concerning Japan

Since the Second World War a great number of Western journalists, observers, politicians, business people and scholars, as well their Japanese counterparts, have been active in describing, interpreting and evaluating Japanese society. Their texts are being circulated and reproduced, in the press and in academic work, as the dominant discourse on contemporary Japan. Two observations should be made concerning the status of the methodology on the basis of which many of these texts are written: the interpretive methodology itself and—more specifically—its Eurocentrism and Japanocentrism.

A first observation concerns the status of the interpretive methodology, where the question could be asked as to whether it is possible to distinguish some interpretive categories among the large volume of journalistic and (popular) academic articles, book publications and news items on radio and TV since the 1970s that have as their aim to explain what happens in Japan and how to look at Japan. The aim here is not to construct a categorization based on the contents or the themes of those publications. This would lead to the rather trivial conclusion that the interpretations of the 1970s and 1980s are mainly concerned with explaining Japan’s economic success and underlining the specificity and uniqueness of its culture, whereas the publications since the 1990s are looking for arguments and evidence to interpret Japan’s supposed fall from grace. In this way it would be possible to plot each of those hundreds of publications and news reports on a scale, running from the fawning Japan as Number One to the vilifying Japan as-Anything but—Number One.⁵ The argumentation here is lined up based on a discourse which constructs Japan either as a success or as a failure.

Much more interesting and revealing than simply looking at the contents of media coverage of Japan, is focusing on the methodology and the implicit points of departure that constitute the basis of all those interpretations. In principle, there are three methodological positions that can be distinguished: a mainstream, a revisionist and a culturalist perspective.⁶

The mainstream perspective is based—implicitly or explicitly—on a comparative stance, where Japan is being contrasted and compared with another country, which means in most cases the USA. The reason for this comparison with the USA is not so much the striking similarities these two cultural systems share, but simply because most foreign specialists on Japan can be found in that country.

During the occupation (1945–1952), the American government seems to have tried to turn Japan into a kind of forty-ninth state (Alaska and Hawaii had not yet joined the union). Seen superficially, in the period directly after the war this seemed to work nicely. Thus Japan’s constitution is indeed, for all its intents and purposes, a copy of the American. Mainstream specialists follow this lead: they view Japan as democratic, as a free-market economy and in fact as a Western nation, naturally with its own character variations, which, however, do not fundamentally deviate from its role model, the USA. Approached kindly, Japan is often interpreted as a nation deserving of emulation. It is not astonishing that the mainstreamers had their heyday in the late 1970s and 1980s when Japan was at the peak of its economic power and unchallenged in Asia. A number of them also took the position that Japan stood at the threshold of overtaking the USA’s leading position in the world. Noteworthy representatives of the mainstream interpretation, whose publications have had a great deal of influence on Japan’s image in the USA are, for example: Gerald Curtis, Edwin O. Reischauer and Ezra F. Vogel.⁷

Whereas the mainstream perspective focuses on Japan’s similarities to the West and takes a (very) positive stance towards Japan, the revisionist perspective, on the other hand, is directed at constructing a fundamental difference between Japan and the West, and sometimes even between Japan and the Rest. This methodology leads to a rather negative view of Japan, in many cases based on the same data that the mainstreamers used to construct a positive image. As McCargo observed:

[They] view Japan as operating according to distinctive principles of its own: typically, they regard it as undemocratic, and as characterized by a deeply flawed political system that features a considerable degree of structural corruption. They view Japan’s economic system as far more state-led and far less open to outside competition than analysts typically acknowledge. Some revisionists go so far as to see Japan as a kind of ‘soft authoritarian’ state, characterized by repressive elements of social and political conformity. Revisionists typically view Japan’s relations with the rest of the world with a skeptical eye, arguing that Japan cynically manipulates its trade, aid and defence policies for its own advantage.

(McCargo 2000:4)

The heyday of this kind of Japan-bashing was during the 1980s, when Japan and the USA were at odds over trade. The final decade of the last century was a particularly good period for revisionists. Japan’s economic stagnation, the large-scale outsourcing of production, the inadequate assistance after the Kobe earthquake (1995) and its limited international role were grist for the revisionist mill. Not surprisingly, their conclusion was that the enormous economic prosperity of the 1970s and 1980s was more the product of good luck than of wisdom. Representative authors of this position include Chalmers Johnson, Gavan McCormack and Yoshi Sugimoto, Clyde Prestowitz, James Fallows, and Karel Van Wolferen.⁸

The third perspective, the culturalist, explains the Japanese socio-economic system on the basis of an inherent cultural distinctiveness. Originally the domain of American anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict, this perspective was received by Japanese academics and journalists with open arms. For centuries the Japanese have believed that the character of their land, its inhabitants, the climate and the language were so specific that Japan boasted a unique identity. Belief in the myth of Japanese uniqueness found fertile soil last century in Nihonjinron, the study and theory of Japan by Japanese scholars, which reached its height in the 1970s.

In the introduction to his highly critical book on Nihonjinron, Peter Dale (1988) observed that the pseudo-academic Nihonjinron scholars argue three points. First, that the Japanese people are culturally and socially a homogeneous race whose core has remained unchanged since prehistoric times. Second, it is supposed that the Japanese radically differ from all other peoples. Third, a conscious nationalism generates great hostility to any analysis of Japanese culture by foreigners.

Since the mid-1970s, when Japanese science was internationalized, a growing number of Japanese sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists have rejected much of what Nihonjinron publications have put forward as speculative humbug. This, however, has not purged years of intense education in their culture’s uniqueness from the minds of most Japanese. Nihonjinron writings employ cultural constructions consisting of many artificial oppositions between Japanese culture on the one hand and other (principally Chinese and Western) cultures on the other. For example, well-known social oppositions are: society versus community; individualism versus groupism; equality versus hierarchy; private orientation versus public orientation; rights versus duties; independence versus dependence. The first element of those oppositions is ascribed to Western culture, whereas the second element applies to Japanese culture; it is implied that the positive term refers to Japanese and the negative to Western culture.

The explanations offered for these oppositions are striking. For example, as is well known, Tsunoda (1985) hypothesized that the Japanese brain structure is unique, as stimuli are processed in the left hemisphere, where thought processes are aimed toward producing harmony with nature. In the West, however, stimuli are processed in the right lobe, which is considered to be more rational and less harmonious.

A wide range of culturalist publications can be mentioned here; maybe the most influential ones were written by people from vari...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Business and technology
• PART III Politics, governance and foreign policy
• PART IV Social issues
• PART V National identity
• PART VI Conclusions