Molding Japanese Minds

The State in Everyday Life

Sheldon Garon

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400843428
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Japon

How has the Japanese government persuaded its citizens to save substantial portions of their incomes? And to care for the elderly within the family? How did the public come to support legalized prostitution as in the national interest? What roles have women's groups played in Japan's "economic miracle"? What actually unites the Japanese to achieve so many economic and social goals that have eluded other polities? Here Sheldon Garon helps us to understand this mobilizing spirit as he taps into the intimate relationships everyday Japanese have with their government. To an extent inconceivable to most Westerners, state directives trickle into homes, religious groups, and even into individuals' sex lives, where they are frequently welcomed by the Japanese and reinforced by their neighbors. In a series of five compelling case studies, Garon demonstrates how average citizens have cooperated with government officials in the areas of welfare, prostitution, and household savings, and in controlling religious "cults" and promoting the political participation of women.The state's success in creating a nation of activists began before World War II, and has hinged on campaigns that mobilize the people behind various policies and encourage their involvement at the local level. For example, neighborhoods have been socially managed on a volunteer basis by small-business owners and housewives, who strive to rid their locales of indolence and to contain welfare costs. The story behind the state regulation of prostitution is a more turbulent one in which many lauded the flourishing brothels for preserving Japanese tradition and strengthening the "family system, " while others condemned the sexual enslavement of young women.In each case, we see Japanese citizens working closely with the state to recreate "community" and shape the thought and behavior of fellow citizens. The policies often originate at the top, but in the hands of activists they take on added vigor. This phenomenon, which challenges the conventional dichotomy of the "state" versus the "people, " is well worth exploring as Western governments consider how best to manage their own changing societies.

PART ONE

State and Society before 1945

The Evolution of “Japanese-Style” Welfare

THE MIDDLE of the twentieth century was a heady time for the proponents of state-sponsored welfare throughout the industrial world. By the 1960s the trend toward comprehensive, universal coverage appeared unmistakable. Reflecting the era in which they lived, historians scoured the past for the “origins of the welfare state” in various nations.¹ Although few non-Western states had developed welfare programs on the order of Western Europe and Australasia, scholars presumed that they would do so as their societies reached comparable levels of urbanization, industrialization, and national wealth. The history of welfare was thus bound up with the universal process of modernization, whose take-off points and end points seemed clear. Put simply, societies “progressed” in their responses to hardship and poverty in many aspects: from laissez-faire to state intervention; from viewing destitution as the result of individual failings to recognizing it as a “social problem”; from familial and communal support to public assistance; from fiscal conservatism to the guarantee to all of an established minimum standard of living; from charity to the citizen’s entitlement or “right” to welfare benefits; from the social stigma of poor laws and poor-houses to unconditional, universal coverage by means of national health plans, old-age pensions, and various forms of social insurance; and from an emphasis on the moral reform of the poor to emphasis on the provision of material assistance.

This story of progress appealed to many Japanese during the 1960s and early 1970s. Optimists applauded Japan’s achievements in “catching up” to the West, while more skeptical scholars pointed to aspects of modern welfare programs that the Japanese state and society had yet to accept fully. Yet both sides agreed that the European “welfare state” represented the standard against which Japan’s welfare policies should be measured. When the Diet passed a slew of social legislation during the early 1970s, the media proclaimed 1973 “the first year of welfare.” The process of convergence appeared to have entered the final stage.

The fragility of Western welfare states in the late twentieth century, however, forces us to rethink not only their future, but their past. It has become clear that welfare has not necessarily progressed, irreversibly, from premodern charity and relief to the modern welfare state; rather the various polarities presented above constitute arenas of ongoing contention, whose outcome is far from obvious. In the United States, politicians and the public have reacted angrily to “entitlements” and the alleged moral debilitation inherent in public assistance programs. Thatcherism in Britain revived the message of “self-help” as an antidote to dependence on state welfare. And many polities—notably France in 1995—struggled over how and whether to pay for increasingly expensive social programs. In Japan from the mid-1970s, the ruling Liberal Democratic party and the bureaucracy openly rejected the trajectory of European welfare states. They sought instead to build a “Japanese-style welfare society” (Nihongata fukushi shakai), in which families and communities provide the bulk of social welfare.

Contemporary Japan’s ideological challenge to the “welfare state” suggests that a nation’s shared values and history powerfully conditions how it defines “welfare” and formulates social policies. Indeed, during the first half of the twentieth century, government officials and many in the social work community strove to devise “Japanese-style” solutions to the growing problem of poverty. The authorities actively intervened to alleviate poverty, yet emphatically avoided major commitments to European-style public assistance and costly social programs. To those like the influential Home Ministry bureaucrat Inoue Tomoichi in 1912, “relief work” did not revolve around poor laws, but rather constituted “the most important task in managing a nation.”² As he and others made clear, the successful management of relief lay in “improving the morals of the poor,” organizing private social work, and preventing the growth of dependency on the state for assistance.³ Between 1868 and 1945, the state and private groups combined efforts at managing society with various concrete programs to cope with destitution.

EARLY MODERN ANTECEDENTS

In a study of modern social politics in Britain and Sweden, Hugh Heclo observes that the twentieth-century social programs of the two welfare superstates did not arise in a vacuum. Both nations inherited attitudes and interventionist policies dating back to the establishment of extensive national poor-law systems in the late sixteenth century.⁴ Much the same may be said for modern Japan, where welfare policies and moral suasion efforts were profoundly shaped by earlier ideas and the many programs that aimed at relieving destitution during the Tokugawa era (1600–1868).

The relief of poverty emerged as a central concern of the Tokugawa shogunate and individual domains. Just as municipalities and some national governments in early modern Europe assumed greater responsibility for poor relief in part to curb indiscriminate alms giving by the Catholic Church, Japanese rulers took over many of the welfare functions that had been performed in medieval times by Buddhist temples.⁵ There were, however, critical differences between Japanese and European relief systems in terms of premises, scope, and operation. Writing in 1909, the Home Ministry official Inoue Tomoichi astutely observed that early modern relief programs in England and in German municipalities were characterized both by the existence of an “obligation” on the part of local governments to provide assistance, and by their “ongoing” nature such that public bodies aided indigents on a long-term basis.⁶ Under England’s Poor Law of 1601, the central government made parishes legally responsible for granting assistance to the poor—who might include male adults and their families in cases of unemployment and inadequate wages.⁷

In Japan, on the other hand, the concept of relief was embedded in a more personal, hierarchical relationship between the lord and his subjects. Chinese Confucianism sank its deepest roots during the Tokugawa period. This intensely political ideology extolled the virtues of the “kingly way” and “benevolent rule,” by which the wise ruler ameliorated the misery of his people through timely doses of the “lord’s relief” (osukui). In the words of Ikeda Mitsumasa, a daimyo (domainal lord) renowned for his philanthropy, “the lord [shogun] is entrusted by Heaven with the people of Japan.” To demonstrate both his compassion and his moral authority the first shogun, Tokugawa leyasu, bequeathed to his son 30,000 pieces of gold and 13,000 kan of silver—the sum to be used solely for relief.⁸ Japanese authorities considered natural disasters to be the principal source of destitution, and intervened to assist victims of crop failures, fires, typhoons, and floods.

The opportunity came often enough. Tokugawa society experienced at least three nationwide crop failures, in the 1730s, 1780s, and 1830s. Confronting a bad harvest in 1783, the domain of Shirakawa, for example, spent the enormous sum of 210,000 kan of silver to purchase rice, which it distributed to the families of retainers and peasants until the crisis passed. The daimyo Matsudaira Sadanobu, who later spearheaded the shogunate’s Kansei reforms, may have financed the entire operation from his stepmother’s personal wealth.⁹ The provision of “lord’s relief” became standard by the time of the devastating Tempo famine in the 1830s. Governments set up shelters, dispensed free rice, and employed artisans in relief construction projects.¹⁰

The primary objective of relief in the Tokugawa era was to maintain the millions of small-peasant households whose taxes were vital to the shogunate and domains. Nothing worried officials more than the specter of impoverished peasants abandoning their fields en masse. Although the lord self-consciously bestowed emergency assistance as an act of benevolence, villagers often came to expect disaster relief as an obligation of the ruler.¹¹ What Stephen Vlastos has called the “political economy of benevolence” reinforced Confucian ideology. Because of “fluctuations in yields and periodic crop failure,” explains Vlastos, “peasants could not survive without judicious adjustments in fiscal policy, and benevolence appeared to protect the interests of both lord and peasant.”¹²

As in most poor-relief systems, early modern Japanese officials attempted to set limits on seigneurial largess for moral and fiscal reasons. To this end, they designated the categories of those who merited assistance. The category of indigents requiring long-term, nondisaster relief was particularly circumscribed. Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) and other Japanese Confucian scholars urged rulers to provide ongoing assistance only to those “who have no one to turn to” (mukoku no mono) or to “the helpless” (kanka kodoku—literally, “widows and orphans”). Few favored aid to the able-bodied and their families who might be temporarily down on their luck. Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685), an influential thinker on poor relief, defined the deserving poor as orphans, the severely ill or disabled, and those old people without offspring to take care of them.¹³ Though he called on lords to relieve the “destitute” (kyūmin), Yamaga advised local functionaries to distinguish types of poverty, lest relief programs create more of “the indolent” (damin). If “idlers” (yūmin) were forced to reclaim new land, counseled Yamaga, the problem of poverty could be not merely relieved but prevented.¹⁴ Officials most commonly responded to the able-bodied poor not with relief, but with “moral suasion” (kyoka)—exhorting the peasantry to practice the virtues of diligence and thrift. “Idlers” threatened a status-based order in which peasants, artisans, and merchants were expected to perform assigned productive roles.¹⁵

Although they upheld the lord’s ultimate responsibility, the shogunate and domains further minimized their costs by delegating the primary tasks of relief to the family and community. In a formulation cited by generations of future Japanese leaders, Yamaga Sokō prescribed that, first and foremost, the poor should be helped by relatives; if one lacked relatives, the “village as a whole” bore the obligation to assist; but if the village itself were too impoverished to do so, a “magistrate should carefully investigate and, in the last resort, assistance should be granted from above.”¹⁶

Studies confirm that early modern relief systems often operated much as Yamaga described them, with many villages vigorously assisting the destitute through various forms of mutual assistance. Because Tokugawa-era peasants paid taxes collectively as a village or a “five-family group,” wealthier peasants commonly bore the burdens of less fortunate neighbors. Those with surplus land might also employ collateral relatives and other villagers. To forestall assuming an even greater portion of the communal tax burden, taxpaying peasants—like the domain itself—had a stake in maintaining the viability of weaker households. The system of collective responsibility similarly furnished a strong incentive for prosperous villagers to preach the virtues of diligence and thrift to less successful neighbors.¹⁷

Mutual assistance did not necessarily spring up spontaneously among the people. In many cases communal relief mechanisms were introduced and closely supervised by the authorities. Officials in the domain of Fukuoka, for example, were shocked by the weakness of local solidarity during the Kyōhō famine in the 1730s. In Shingū, one merchant hoarded his wealth while a third of the villagers died. By the mid-nineteenth century, donations by well-to-do villagers in Fukuoka had become commonplace, but only after the domain encouraged a sense of benevolence among them. Philanthropic commoners received official “letters of praise” and sometimes such samurai privileges as permission to wear a short sword or use a surname.¹⁸ The elaborate system of village-level emergency granaries is another case in point. Rice was accumulated in good times for the purposes of feeding needy residents in times of crop failures and soaring prices. By the nineteenth century, many villages proudly maintained the granaries as communal institutions. Nonetheless, stern directives from the ruler were often initially required to persuade peasants to contribute a portion of their rice harvest to the granary.¹⁹

The authorities of early modern Japan in large part succeeded in containing the problem of poverty within villages by means of seigneurial “benevolence” and informal, albeit managed, mechanisms of mutual assistance. Shogunal and domain officials rarely dealt with the poor on an individual and ongoing basis, preferring to grant relief to entire villages in cases of disaster, or after rich peasants petitioned that they had exhausted their own resources in helping the poor.²⁰ In the big cities, however, administrators were forced to create more institutionalized programs of public assistance and indoor rel...