Foreign Policy 24 Mar 2011
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/24/the_island_nation
“When my mother was 10, she was evacuated to Sendai and saw the whole town get bombed flat. My father experienced the big air-raids on Yokohama. Their generation started out when there was nothing left of Japan but smoking ruins. Don’t worry about us – we’ll definitely recover this time too.”
So reads an email I received a few days ago from a family friend, a professor of literature at a prestigious Japanese university. She went on to make some uncharacteristically trenchant criticisms of the lurid coverage in foreign media and the panicky behavior of certain embassies in Tokyo.
The M9 earthquake which hit Japan on March 11th may have shifted the land mass of the main island six feet, but Japan’s extraordinary social cohesion hasn’t budged an inch. The images are unforgettable. The lines of exhausted people waiting patiently for food. The deserted stores with their wares untouched on the shelves. The old man emerging from his wrecked home with a smile on his face.
In recent decades Japan has been urged to make radical economic reforms by many foreign observers, who have then been disappointed by the glacial progress. The trade-off with economic efficiency that Japan has chosen could be considered as payment for an insurance policy against just such a emergency
as it is now facing.
Americans will recall the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; the chain-mail cages used as makeshift prisons cells, the tens of thousands of national guardsmen and troops drafted in with M16s “locked and loaded,” according to the governor of Lousiana. Europeans will remember recent chaos caused by lesser events – floods, snowfalls, a volcanic eruption that grounded flights for almost a week. In China the 2008 earthquake claimed 70,000 lives. Schools, chemical plants and shoddily-built “bean-curd” apartment blocks collapsed. When parents and relatives protested, riot police confronted them and the leaders were arrested.
If the strength of a society is measured by how it responds to trauma – rather than how many billionaires it creates or how rapidly it accumulates foreign currency reserves – then the Japanese have ample grounds for pride. In fact, the dramatic events of recent days may give us cause to revise the conventional wisdom not just about Japan, but also about what constitutes success and failure for a society in today’s world.
* * *
It seems hard to credit now, but in the second half of the 1980s Japan loomed as large in the world’s consciousness as China does today and inspired a similar mixture of respect and dread. A group of academics and writers, centered on the late Chalmers Johnson of the University of California, came up with the idea that Japan had developed a radically different, superior brand of capitalism. So formidable was the Japanese industrial challenge that journalist James Fallows claimed it required “containment”, just as Soviet communism had, if American pre-eminence were to be maintained.
Almost everything these “revisionists” said turned out be spectacularly wrong. The mistake they made was in their basic analysis of Japan’s post-war success, which massively overestimated the contribution of government. The supposedly omniscient technocrats lauded by Johnson were the same people who tried to stop Honda getting into the auto market, poured public money into sunset industries, and sited nuclear power plants on a tsunami-prone coast at sea level.
What was overlooked was the social consensus that saw competitiveness as a measure of national self-respect. The generation of Japanese brought up amidst the post-war devastation was driven by a hunger to reconstruct everything – their lives, their society, their country’s standing in the world. Once Japan was strong enough to be left alone, the target had been achieved.
After the bursting of its 1980s, asset bubble Japan embarked slid into stagnation and deflation. Through this period Japan was the recipient of a barrage of advice from foreign experts. Inefficient companies should be weeded out. The doors should be opened to mass immigration. There should be Thatcher-style supply-side reform, flexible labor markets, hostile takeovers, money-printing, and so on. The advice was well-intentioned and some of it might well have worked, but the overall message could be summed as “You need to be more like us.”
Japan has gone some of the way to adopting some of the proposed changes, but selectively and hesitantly. The highly-educated internationally-minded Japanese who foreign journalists and academics are most likely to encounter are usually strong proponents of drastic change, but their views have little traction with the public. Change was glacially slow because that’s the way people wanted it. In the Japanese hierarchy of needs, social cohesion ranks higher than wealth creation.
Now we can see why. Mass immigration, for example, would have solved Japan’s demographic problem, albeit temporarily, and bought higher growth in GDP. But other less welcome consequences are almost certain. Inequality would have risen; low earning native workers would have seen their wages deflated by the new competition, while the upper middle classes would have benefited from bargain basement cleaners, handymen and baby-sitters..
More broadly the national narrative of shared experiences and values would have been diluted. This is a concept not easily appreciated in countries whose national narratives are based on immigration itself. The sudden TV appearance of the emperor – the representative of a two thousand year old institution – would not have had the same resonance to whole swathes of the population. In today’s Japan the janitor in your apartment building is not a representative of “the other.” He is you. In fact there are thousands of janitors in apartment buildings across Japan who cut the same rumpled figure as Prime Minister Kan in his blue overalls.
The question now is whether the traumatic events of the past few weeks will mark the end of this long period of drift and forge a new social consensus – an early twenty first century version of the rise from the smoking ruins. If so, the key driver will not be the “leadership” of politicians and technocrats, but once more the resilience and hunger for recovery of ordinary people.
My friend the literature professor forwarded the following much re-tweeted message, authored in Japanese by an anonymous student.
“To you guys not caught up in the disaster, just sitting around watching it on TV and getting depressed. To you guys thinking what’s the point in working or studying at a time like this. If you’re healthy and safe, get back to your normal life. Laugh and have a good time as usual. Just getting on with your life is the best way to get Japan back on its feet.”
I wouldn’t bet against them.
Peter Tasker