Over ten years ago, I published a joint paper with Rob Steven entitled Is Japanese Capitalism Post-fordist? (Japanese Studies Center, Melbourne, May 1991), in which we criticized the tendency to admire the Japanese economic system as an ideal model after fordism. We especially focused on arguments represented by Martin Kenny and Richard Florida in their paper 'Beyond Mass Production: Production and the Labor Process in Japan' (Politics & Society, Vol.16, No.1, 1988).
At that time, Japan was at the peak of its bubble boom and many American scholars interpreted 'Toyotism' or 'Fujitsuism' with excitement as a more rational and flexible system of production and management than American Fordism. Many European scholars also responded positively to the 'flexible production' or 'lean productionﾕ, which they found in the Japanese system.
We organized an international debate in the Japanese journal Mado and edited a book with the title Is Japanese Management Post-Fordist? (Both in Japanese and English, Mado-sha, 1993, Tokyo). Some famous Regulation theorists, including Alan Lipietz, Benjamin Coriat and Kiyoaki Hirata, took part in this debate and the other commentators were Andrew Gordon, John Crump, Luis Alberto Di Martino, Makoto Itoh, Roh Sung-Joon, Yuukichi Takahashi, Bernard Eccleston, Stephen Wood, Bill Taylor, Karol & John Williams, Colin Haslam, Michio Goto and Taro Miyamoto.
The main point at issue was the evaluation of the Japanese economic system. Martin Kenny and Richard Florida argued that the Japanese system was 'post-fordist' because it displayed such characteristics as:
Against the arguments advanced by Kenny & Florida, Rob Steven (who at the time was based in New Zealand) and I insisted that the reality of Japanese corporate society is very different and should be called 'ultra-fordist'. Our reasons were:
Ten years later, the situation regarding the Japanese economy has changed completely. In the international context, the Japanese economy cannot revive because of its huge burden of bad debts. A decade after the collapse of the asset-inflated economy, the IMDﾕs World Competitiveness Yearbook Ranking 2002 has evaluated Japanese economic performance at the 30th in 49 countries, under almost all European countries and Asian Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Korea (while the USA was rated at the top with 100 points, Korea got 56.8 at the 26th, Japan 54.3 at the 30th, and China 52.1 at the 31st). Although it recovered slightly in 2004 and the Japanese GDP occupies still 14 percent of the world total and keeps the second scale, the rank of Japan in 2004 is 71.9 points at the 23rd of 60 countries. It is slightly above China at the 24th with 70.7points or Chile at the 26th with 69.9 points, and Mexico is at the 56th with 43.2 points (see the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook: http://www01.imd.ch/documents/wcy/content/ranking.pdf).
On May 30, 2002, the U.S. rating agency Moody's Investors Service cut the yen-denominated Japanese government bond (JGB) rating by two full notches. The new rating was A2, five notches below the highest Aaa rating. Hungary, Chile, the Czech Republic and Botswana all have rank A1, one notch above Japan. Japan had the same ranking as South Africa, Israel and Poland. As the major reason for its downgrade, Moody's cited the massive 700 trillion-yen ($5.8 trillion) combined central and local government debt as of the fiscal year ended March 2003. According to Moody's, this debt problem seems to be worsening, and there seems to be no solution in sight. The Japanese government debt amounts to some 140% of the nation's GDP (http://www.moodys.co.jp/ssl/list/sovceiling.pdf).
This debt ratio was about 60% for the United States in the 1980s, when the "twin deficit" issue was a subject of controversy. It was 120% for Italy in the early 1990s, when that nation was assigned an A1 rating. Recently, however, Italy has been raised to Aa, three notches above Japan. At the end of 2001, Japan's external assets rose by some 34% over the previous year to 179 trillion-yen ($1.5 trillion), the highest ever. For the past eleven years, Japan has ranked as the largest creditor nation worldwide. In addition to the government's official foreign currency reserves and foreign debt, there are corresponding balances for corporations and households. So long as the government does not tax the public, the nation's foreign reserve balances cannot serve in redeeming JGB(see the MOF website: http://www.mof.go.jp/english/jgb-e.htm).
In the domestic context, the expression 'a lost decade' was very popular. What this refers to are such features as the highest unemployment rate in the postwar period (about five to six percent); very slow progress of restructuring to adapt to 'global standards' either at the macro or the micro levels; delayed introduction of 'Information Technology' to offices and schools; no resistance by unions to the cutback of middle age workers; reduction and abolition of wage and fringe benefits by management, again with little resistance; and so on. The Prime Minister Koizumi must thus always speak out his slogan, the ﾒRestructuring [Kozo-Kaikaku].ﾓ
Japanese management, which was once admired as post-fordist by many foreign scholars, is now seen as a major domestic barrier to reviving the economy. Instead of being regarded as post-fordist, it is now frequently perceived as old-style fordism or even a pre-fordist system. As a consequence of historical developments, I believe that our criticisms of the post-fordist arguments and our perspective on the incipient crisis of Japanese system were relatively correct and that we can be proud of this.
However, theoretically speaking, we also have to recognize that our estimation of the Japanese system in the 'post-fordist' debates was somewhat one-sided.
First, our position at that time tended to postulate a single line of development within 20th century capitalism. This envisaged from pre-fordism, fordism and post-fordism as successive historical stages followed by 'socialism' or at any rate a more desirable system for ordinary people. However, the reality after the collapse of the existing socialism and the end of the Cold War has been not the peaceful development of capitalism without a socialist alternative, but struggles between capitalist economies, or more exactly speaking, among multiple 'capitalisms' within a global world market.
Second, when we argued about the impossibility of transferring the Japanese system to other countries, we mainly had in mind the advanced countries of the West, like the USA or EU states, with their long tradition of unions. On the other hand, we reserved our judgment on Asian and Latin-American countries because these middle-developed economies were still developing in the 1980s and some countries (South Korea, Singapore etc.) deliberately imported parts of the so-called Japanese system. In the 1990s, the mainland China opened the market to the world and developed the huge production system of Chinese style fordism with cheap domestic labor and communist political support.
Third, the world system after the Gulf war was more complex than we saw in the early 1990s. In economics, so-called the Information Technology Revolution and Globalization of capitalism extended to the developing countries. The trade and financial capitalist centers in global contexts, i.e. the WTO/IMF/World Bank system became more important than the lineal development of national economy from fordist to post-fordist production system. For example, Asian middleﾐdeveloped economies experienced the big financial crisis in 1997-1998, and the WTO was a big arena of the conflicts between advanced capitalist countries and developing countries.
Fourth, the global situation at the beginning of the 21st century faced new problems. From the September 11, 2001, the United States began a new global war. The attack against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC symbolized the world-wide frustration against the US-lead Globalization or the Americanization. But the so-called ﾒwar against terrorismﾓ by the United States clearly cut the international politics to two camps, the pro-American coalition group and the other countries which see the United Nations as the most important institution of global governance and multilateral relationship.
After a decade of Japanese post-fordist debates, we have to reconsider these problems more seriously. I will discuss on the first and the third points first as the restructuring of Japanese political economy, and the next on the second and fourth points as the problem of the Japanese constitution.
On the first point mentioned above about the historical stages and types of capitalism, I will engage with the Regulation approach, and then with the globalization and Asian capitalism.
The Regulation approach has a threefold explanation of the historical stages of capitalism. At the level of the 'accumulation regime,' there was an extensive regime of accumulation in the 19th century and an inclusive regime in the 20th century. At the level of the 'mode of regulation,' there was the development from a competitive mode of regulation to a monopoly mode in the middle of the 20th century. At the same time, at the level of the 'mode of development,' there was a change from pre-fordist to fordist patterns, and in the 1970s and 1980s many advanced countries began to pursue new models of after-fordist development (not only post-fordism, but also neo-taylorism, volvoism, toyotism, fujituism etc.). Such historical developments and/or changes accompany particular combinations of institutional forms, including the wage relationship, the monetary system, competition among capitals, the state form, and the form of enrollment into international systems.
While this theoretical model is useful for understanding the advanced economies in Europe and the USA, especially during the age of competition between capitalism and socialism, its drawback is that it essentially presupposes a single line of capitalist development. Bearing this in mind, some other approaches might be useful for understanding the Japanese system. For example, A. Gerschenkron's so-called 'late-development effect' (Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Harvard University Press, 1962) was sometimes used to explain Japanese and Asian development.
Even today, Ronald Dore, a famous British specialist on Japan, sometimes compares British-American capitalism with Japanese-German capitalism. He says that the British-American company belongs to the stockholders and is financed through the stock market, while Japanese-German capitalism is different because the company signifies a community of employees, including workers and managers, and is mainly financed by banks, based on mutual shareholding among 'group' corporations. He also compares the work ethic of British-American individualism, which puts priority on the pursuit of profit, with the Japanese-German emphasis on harmony, entailing respect for industry itself and a tendency to look down on money. As a consequence, Dore's conclusion is that two different capitalisms exist.
My former co-author, the late Rob Steven, made a more sophisticated model of Anglo-capitalism versus Japanese capitalism just before his death on April 18, 2001, in his final draft paper on 'Competing Capitalisms and Contrasting Crisis: Japanese and Anglo-Capitalism,' ( the full text of which can be found in my homepage: http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/katori/RobSteven.html). In this testamentary paper, he first argued that we have to recognize the difference between 'capitalism' and 'market economy,' and said that the essence of capitalism refers to the relationship of ownership and control over production. He then introduced five indexes to differentiate capitalisms from one another:
By means of these five points, he made a comparative chart between Anglo- and Japanese capitalisms:
Anglo-Capitalism Japanese capitalism
Steven also showed the different form of crisis found in these two capitalisms. He wrote:
Anglo-capitalism is pre-disposed to what might be called 'crises of individual greed and fear' which are transmitted rapidly and violently through market mechanisms and which can produce very powerful political reactions. These reactions are more explosive because Anglo crises affect the fortunes of individuals much more devastatingly than do Japanese crises and because the ways classes are formed tends to mobilize groups of individuals into collective political action more easily than in Japan.
For Japanese capitalism, in which the power of capital is institutionalized much more thoroughly, where it takes much longer for individuals to be affected and where class formation is blurred, the crises tend to be much more systemic, with the major contradictions occurring more between different parts of the system than between groups of individuals.
Since Anglo crises are more likely to result in organized political struggles, they are also more able to produce major social changes. Japanese crises, on the other hand, do not produce the same degree of social conflict and therefore tend to result in much less social change. (See the full text: http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/katori/RobSteven.html)
Although I do not say that Ronald Dore's and Rob Steven's analyses are completely right, I accept their idea that Japanese capitalism should be seen as a different type of capitalism from the orthodox Western model. The corollary of this is that capitalism should be seen not in purely economic terms but also as a socio-political complex of various institutions.
And an important point here is that the end of cold war or the collapse of socialism did not mean the victory of (singular) capitalism. It was not the end of history but the beginning of the plural capitalisms, or the global world with strong competition between capitalisms (capitalism vs. capitalism). Within the global capitalism or the so-called ﾒAmerican Empireﾓ, the relationship between economy and politics and the distance to the hegemonic power, namely to the USA, become crucial.
To turn now to the second problem, for Western scholars, many Asian economic-political systems are seen as a deviation from standard capitalism. Even in the Regulation approach, Alan Lipietz raised the concept of 'peripheral Fordism' and Bob Jessop sometimes refers to 'Atlantic Fordismﾕ. The line of thinking here is that, while Fordism with the Keynesian Welfare State might be realized mainly in the Atlantic area, how should we describe 'Pacific Fordism,' which has now become the world center of mass-production but with very limited social welfare. In 'Atlantic Fordism,' especially within the countries of European Union, scholars can easily identify deviations or, to put it another way, a periphery in contrast to the European center. On the other hand, when we turn to the Pacific, how are we to define the 'Pacific standard'? There is no fixed organization or regional center, which could serve to combine Asian economies in a way that would incorporate Mainland China and India. Even in the case of the US system, one can legitimately ask whether a division might exist between the Atlantic East system, dominated by the WASP elite, and the Pacific after-fordist system in California, where Silicon-Valley exists but incorporated the Mexican cheap labor economy. Basically, the spatio-temporal condensation and configuration are very different in the Atlantic and the Pacific regions.
Here I concentrate on the 'Japanese Fordism,' which flourished from 1955 through the 1980s. I will stress that the Japanese financial system and management are the historical products of the postwar era. They were neither the simple product of market mechanism nor of the dictatorship by the US occupational force. Rather, their origin lay in the particular social relationships in postwar Japan.
The key aspects of what Ronald Dore calls 'Japanese capitalism' are not derived from the long tradition of Japanese industrialization. Indeed, historically one cannot find very strong loyalty to the company in prewar Japan, at least from the workers. Many records of strikes and absenteeism exist, even though the Emperor system mobilized national loyalty and oppressed the union movement. At the center of the capitalist economy, there was very strong control by stock holding companies (Zaibatsu) like Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo etc., and not by managers.
The key characteristic of prewar Japan was not the lack of a wide stock market or bank financing, but rather the strong combination between the Zaibatsu and the Emperor state, including the military clique. Even after the 1945 defeat, Japanese capitalism has had a strong tendency towards close connections between the business world and the state bureaucracy. Furthermore, official economic and industrial planning played an important role in its development.
We can interpret this, in the context of the Regulation approach, along the lines that the state structure was crucial for creating the new wage relations and the monetary system as institutional forms. Moreover, the postwar stage of Japanese capitalism, namely Japanese fordism, was the result of changes in the state form, from the Emperor (Tenno) system to Japanese-style democracy with a constitutional symbolic monarchy.
I will say a little about the relationship between economic regulation and political (or hegemonic) governance. In Asian developing countries, the economic system is strongly combined with the political system. Especially in the first stage of industrialization, the state played an important role in establishing the market mechanism, the monetary system and even wage relationships. After the take-off from the colonial or semi-colonial stage, state building encompassed both nation building and the creation of a national market. Thus, political governance by the state is very important for understanding Pacific or Asian capitalism (or capitalisms).
The term I employ here is governance, not government. The former can include not only the central state but also regional or local government, civilian control of the military clique, the autonomy of civil society, international and regional organizations, NGOs and NPOs, the social tradition of mutual aids in the community, so-called corporate governance and family ties, etc. According to the Antonio Gramsciﾕs flame, political society plus civil society. Governance appears as an arrangement of various institutional forms. As such, it exerts effects on economic institutions and performance. From this standpoint, we can see the 1946 Japanese Constitution as a national hegemonic project, which aligned both economic and political institutional forms during the process of fordist development.
I thus take the Japanese Constitution as the core of governance, which made Japanese economic growth possible, because the Constitution is the longest living institutional form and framework found during Japanese development or modernization.
In addition, it was made by the strong pressure of the American occupational force and the amendment of 1946 Constitution now becomes an important issue for the restructuring of the national state in Japan.
This summer, I discovered one secret document of the US government at the time of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the US National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) in Washington DC, and openly published it in a journal ﾒSekai[world]ﾓ in Japanese just before I came here to Mexico. The document has a title ﾒJapan Planﾓ by the Psychological Warfare Branch of Military Intelligence Service, War Department USA on June 3, 1942.
It was an official strategy of the US ﾒPsychological Warﾓ against Japan in 1942, only after 6 months from the beginning of US-Japan Pacific War. In this document with a stamp ﾒsecretﾓ, the US government had a plan to ﾒuse the Japanese Emperor as a peace symbol.ﾓ Propaganda against the Emperor Hirohito and the Imperial House was strictly prohibited and controlled by the US army/navy, the State Department, and the wartime intelligence organizations of OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and OWI (Office of War Information).
It also said that the propaganda of the United Nations should concentrate only against the Japanese military leaders (not against the Emperor) and said that they ﾒpromise Japan postwar prosperity and happiness, if we winﾓ.
This means that the United States had a framework to make postwar Japan with ﾒSymbolic Emperor systemﾓ and the recovery of capitalist economy, already when they struggled against Japan in the Battle field of Midway, early June 1942. It was not a private proposal from an officer of the Far East section of State Department (so-called ﾒJapan Handsﾓ group such as Josef Grew or Hugh Borton) but the official strategic plan coordinated among the Army, Navy, the State department, OSS, OWI and the PWE (the Political Warfare Executive of the British Government). Even General Douglas MacArthur, later the Supreme Commander of the General Headquarter (GHQ) already knew the ﾒJapan Plan,ﾓ three years before he arrived in defeated Japan in 1945.
This document suggest that the basic occupation policy by the United States against Japan was to destroy the military government, to rebuild the constitutional monarchy with Emperor as a symbol and to make more open capitalist economy for the United States. Although there were many conflicts among the United Nations, the Far Eastern Commission, the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers, and even in Washington between ﾒChina handsﾓ and ﾒJapan hands,ﾓ this basic line was achieved by the occupation. While most Japanese welcomed the new constitution 1946 and the economic growth after 1955, the result was within the American framework of democratization to remake Japan as the key partner in Far East. The 1946 Constitution worked as the core of the governmental institutions for the postwar development.
I intend to show here only the economic effects of the Constitution (see The 1946 Japanese Constitution: http://www.oefre.unibe.ch/law/icl/ja00000_.html).
Of course, the Constitution was at times only a paper document, which had no direct effect on economic policies and performance. Nevertheless, for the people who wanted peaceful development and democracy in the workplaces, the Constitution was a powerful weapon for getting better working conditions and 'wholesome and cultured living.'
During the late 20th Century, there has been a big debate on the Article 9 of Japanese Constitution. Although it prohibited the war of intervention and the rearmament for the war, the existence of the possible national right of self-defense was ambiguous. Japanese government once interpreted the Article 9 as the absolute disarmament, but soon changed the official interpretation to reserve the right of self-defense and to hold the Self-Defense Force, just when the Korean War began. The United States forced Japan to have the National Police Reserve in 1950, which became to the Self-Defense Force in 1954 under the new condition of Cold War, with close relationship to the US-Japan Security Treaty and the US military bases in Japan.
Many Japanese received the Article 9 as the Ideal of future world, and admitted the US power and the Self-Defense Force in reality to defend the country against communist neighbors. But the idealistic constitution had sometimes real power. It was a veto power against the nuclear armament and established the so-called three non-nuclear principle (ﾒnot hold, not make and not admit to be brought in ). It was a barrier against the militarization of the state, checked the public expenditure for the Self-Defense Force under one percent of the GDP, and enabled the strict civilian control of the Self Defense Force.
But after the end of Cold War, the Self-Defense Force began to take part in the UN Peace Keeping Operations outside Japan. When the ﾒWar against Terroristsﾓ by the United States began, Japanese government decided to support the USA and to send the Self-Defense Force to Iraq for the Iraqi reconstruction in the ﾒnon-battle field.ﾓ
In the new conditions of the 21st century, Japan faces a turning point for maintaining the 1946 Constitution. It relates to the restructuring of governance for a new global order.
One important element contributing to the prevailing mood of doom and gloom and leading to calls for restructuring of the system is the widening social gap since the 1990s. Until the 1980s, Japan was well known as a 'middle class society.' There were not marked differences of income between 'rich' and 'poor' and over 80 % of the people felt that they belong to the 'middle strata.' Even blue-collar workers lacked class-consciousness, typically seeing themselves not as belonging to the 'working class' but as 'a member of my company.'
However due to restructuring of the economy after the Cold War and the rapid development of information technology, we find the growth of social differentiation. Prof. Toshiaki Tachibanaki of Kyoto University published a book on the economic gap existing in Japan in 1999. This book shocked many people in that it destroyed the myth of a 'harmonious middle class society,' demonstrating statistically that this was not so both with regards to incomes and assets. In April 2000, two popular monthly magazines in Japan, Bungei Shunju and Chuou Kouron published special issues with very similar contents. Bungei Shunju pointed to the existence of 'A New Class Society Japan,' while Chuou Kouron 'The Collapse of the New Middle Class.' Both focused on the increasing gap between 'winners and losers' and on the hereditary status of 'winners' and 'riches.'
Regarding the social elite, we now see in all fields the phenomenon of the NISEI (second generation). In the business world, there are some young executives of big companies, but they are mainly the sons of the founders or former presidents. In politics, both in the House of Representatives and the House of Councilors, seats are mainly occupied by the so-called NISEI Giin (second-generation Diet members). Not only in the ruling LDP but also in the Democratic Party (the biggest opposition party) the major leaders are the children of former Diet members or important local politicians. As such, they have inherited the constituencies from elder members of their family. The students of Tokyo University are now mainly recruited from elite families, because they are the ones who can receive sufficient favorable treatment to win in the competition for places at this foremost educational institution. All these mean the decline of social mobility, the collapse of the myth of the 'equal society,' and the widening of social gaps between 'winners and losers.' Additionally, the rapid introduction of information technology is spreading the so-called 'digital divide' between people who are computer savvy and those who are not. Using the characteristic of the Thatcher time Britain, there emerged the ﾒTwo Nationsﾓ in Japan.
While no one in Japan has a clear image of a hopeful future, it is possible to detect a number of different orientations with in the population.
First, there is what might be called the 'New Nationalism.' It is a strongly conservative feeling, found especially among aged people and embracing such attitudes as the return to more disciplined schools and workplaces, respect for the Nation, loyalty to the national government, obedience towards the elder generation, emphasis on family bonds, the belief that women should be more at home to take care of children and domestic work and that, as wives, they should be submissive towards their husbands.
Such nostalgia for the 'good old days' appears not directly in the political discourse, but nevertheless sometimes bubbles to the surface from a deep stream of conservatism. For example, when asked about the growth of violent crime among school children, Prime Minister (at that time) Yoshirou Mori expressed the view that the Kyoiku Chokugo, the Imperial Rescript on Education of the Meiji Period, should be revived. He also said that Japan is the divine nation, which has the Emperor (Tenno) at the center. Of course, he apologized the next day, claiming that his remarks had only a symbolic meaning and that he would obey the sovereign power of the people according to the Constitution. Despite this, his utterances might be interpreted as expressing his deeply held sentiment to go back to the Meiji Imperial Constitution, which described the Emperor as 'sacred and inviolable.' The public support to Mori cabinet declined sharply, and the new Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was elected.
In economic policy, the New Nationalists tend to avoid any kind of change and to depend on public expenditure. They sometimes show their feeling of dislike for American pressure, but they have no ideas to reconstruct the Japanese economy.
One important point that is worthy of attention is that even among the young generation there seems to be evidence of a widening sentiment of New Nationalism. This manifests itself as the dream of a stronger Japan, which can take up a position more clearly independent of the US. It also includes a chauvinistic attitude towards foreigners, especially Koreans or Chinese, the desire for a powerful new leader to emerge, and so on.
As an example of the first of these, the governor of Metropolitan Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, used on one occasion a discriminatory word ﾒSangokujinﾓ (literally, the 'Third Country People'), which just after the Second World War had the meaning of the criminal or inferior Koreans and Chinese. Significantly, his use of this expression evoked no widespread resistance from young people; nor did it lead to a diminution of his appeal. He now forces the teachers of public schools in Tokyo to respect the national flag ﾒHinomaruﾓ and national song ﾒKimigayoﾓ.
This orientation is of course anachronistic, and might not be realized as the official line of policy. Nevertheless, such feelings and sentiments are very strong now in Japan's current state of gloom and depression.
The second orientation might be called 'New Globalism.' It is popular among intellectuals and is the official policy line promoted by Prime Minister Koizumi and the bureaucrats. From a neo-liberal standpoint, they stress the need for restructuring and change, the reconstruction of state expenditure on a healthy basis, adaptation to the global market and global business standards, promotion of the 'Information Technology Revolution,' maintaining the US-Japan partnership, making companies more rational and flexible, reducing working hours so as to revitalize leisure industries and tourism, and so on.
A clear statement of this line is found in an official report issued by the Prime Minister's Commission on Japan's Goals in the 21st Century in January 2000. This report was entitled The Frontier Within: Individual Empowerment and Better Governance in the New Millennium. It is notable for the many beautiful words it devotes to the global society and the national identity of Japan in the future.
It started from recognition of 'the end of Japanese Model':
After World War II Japan made a seemingly miraculous recovery, achieved amazing growth, quickly joined the ranks of economically developed countries, and became a member of the Western camp. Japan achieved and has maintained peace, stability, and prosperity. By and large, the Japanese remember the postwar period as a success story. The political, economic, and social systems built up then were also accepted as components of a successful model. It cannot be denied that they contributed to political and social stability. Nevertheless, this successful postwar model or, more precisely, unquestioning belief in this model, has now leached Japan's vitality. Many of the vested interests and social conventions that grew up over the postwar period have made Japan's economy and society rigid and stale.
This model was, in a word, the 'catch up and overtake' model, followed not only in the postwar period but ever since the Meiji era (1868). Japan must now seek a better model. But the world no longer offers ready-made models. The time when answers could be sought from without has passed. Most societies face the same challenge. The globalization that is expected to envelope the world in the twenty-first century brings with it great benefits but also many problems, posing the same challenge to every country. No doubt countries will respond in diverse ways. The same can be said of the aging of society. Japan will face that challenge sooner than any other country in the world. The whole world is watching to see how Japan will deal with it.
No model of immediate use to Japan exists. While studying cases from around the world, we must find solutions to such problems within Japan. In so doing, it is more important than ever to bring the latent mettle, talent, and potential within Japan into the open. Doing so is the key to Japan's future.
Then, it focused on global issues:
The major trends that the world faces in the twenty-first century are (1)globalization, (2) global literacy, (3) the information-technology revolution, (4) advances in science, and (5) falling birthrates and aging populations.
Globalization has progressed beyond the stage of being a 'process.' The markets and media of the world have become increasingly integrated, and people, goods, funds, information, and images are moving freely across national borders on a major scale. The fences between countries have become lower, and the effects of developments in one part of the world are immediately being felt elsewhere; the world is indeed becoming an ever smaller place. This trend will accelerate even further in the twenty-first century. As a result, the universality and utility of systems and standards in various fields, including the economy, science, and academic training, will be held up to global yardsticks for questioning and evaluation. Every country will have to review, reevaluate, and adjust its existing systems and practices on the basis of a global perspective. It will be an age of mega competition in systems and standards. The effects will extend from politics and diplomacy to the economy, society, and everyday life; closed systems that are complete unto themselves within a single country will grow hollow and impoverished.
This report even talked about 'Governance' in Japanese style. It might be worthwhile citing a long sentence. In 'From governing to governance,' the report wrote:
In Japanese society so far, opportunities for examining the question of social governance have been limited. This is because the state, the bureaucracy, and organizations have always been given precedence and society as a whole has advanced in lockstep. 'Public' has been more or less synonymous with 'official,' and public affairs have been seen as something to be determined by the authorities. Citizens, too, have accepted this and, in fact, relied on it.
A top-down, or public-sector to private-sector, image of governance exalting the bureaucracy and looking down on citizens has long prevailed in Japan. It has been hard for the Japanese to see governance as implying a kind of contractual relationship between the people, who entrust government with authority, and government, which is so entrusted. Nor have they ever envisioned governance in terms of individuals acting on the basis of self-responsibility and various actors jointly creating a new public space in the context of a pluralistic society led by spontaneous individuals.
Citizens, or individuals, entrust self-realization to various organizations and institutions, but are the systems so entrusted functioning adequately? Are there equal opportunities for participation? Are the rules clear? Are the rights of the entrusters adequately guaranteed? Is self-realization fully achieved? Are those entrusted truly meeting expectations, and how is this to be assessed? Is dialogue and the flow of information between the entrusters and those entrusted a two-way process? Questions like these, which address the essential nature and quality of governance, have seldom been asked, as symbolized by the fact that no apt Japanese word for governance has been devised.
In meeting the various challenges outlined above, Japan needs to build governance in the true (but new to Japan) sense and enable it to mature. This requires new rules and systems between individuals and organizations, whether government, companies, universities, or nongovernmental organizations. Disclosure and sharing of information, presentation of options, transparent and rational decision making, steady implementation of policy decisions, and ex post facto policy assessment and review are needed so that rules can be articulated, policy distortions caused by minority interests prevented, and fair and efficient public services provided. This means, in short, establishing governance built up through joint endeavors, governance based on rules and the principle of responsibility and grounded in two-way consensus formation, rather than governance premised on one-way rule. This new governance is not adequately expressed by the Japanese word traditionally used, Tochi. While we do not repudiate everything about the old governance, we suggest calling the new governance Kyochi, a word that emphasizes cooperation (Kyo) rather than governing, rule, or control (To).
However, the hottest issues in the debates, which this report sparked off in the mass media, were to do with 'global literacy' and 'transforming education.' The report interpreted 'global literacy' as meaning to speak English as the second official language and to use the Internet. As for 'transforming education,' this was taken to mean the freeing up of education in the marketplace, with public schooling restricted to only three days per week (see The Official Report of the Prime Minister's Commission on Japan's Goals in the 21st Century, January 2000, "The Frontier Within: Individual Empowerment and Better Governance in the New Millennium" http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/21century/report/overview.html).
This a kind of utopian globalism has become the dominant line of the Japanese government in the 21st century, but it will take a lot of time to overcome the previously summarized line of New Nationalism or Conservatism.
I would like to be able to point to the third way, which we could identify as 'New Internationalism' or 'New Reformism' to emphasize its critical distance from both the 'New Nationalism' and 'New Globalism.' However, regretfully, it has to be admitted that there is no such clear third stream. Nevertheless, we can identify some critical ideas emanating from former left or Marxist intellectuals and I will introduce three keywords, which have appeared in the discussions among left or radical academics and social movements.
The first keyword among the reformists is 'Postwar Responsibility.' We should emphasize that this is not the same as the so-called 'War Responsibility.' The responsibility for the Asian War was a hot issue in Japan in the 1990s due to the problem of Korean comfort women in the Second World War and their entitlement to compensation. The postwar responsibility means not only the responsibility of the Japanese state for what it did to Asian countries during the war, but also the responsibility of the nation for the results or the effects of the war.
Let us take the case of the division of Korea into two states as an example. Japan has no responsibility in international law for the division between North and South Korea. However, every Japanese, even the young postwar generation, has some responsibility for this turn of events because Japan supported the US in the Korean War, concluded a peace treaty only with the South, and so on. This concept of postwar responsibility thus means neither the responsibility in law or diplomacy, nor the responsibility of the government in international relations. Instead, it is more individual, ethical or moral responsibility of Japanese people as members of the global society.
Perhaps the most appropriate way of envisaging postwar responsibility is to see it as a kind of social movement to keep alive the memory of the War and to transmit that memory to the young generation. For example, students sometimes ask me why young Japanese who were born after the Asian-Pacific War should apologize to Korean people when they travel in Korea. I say: 'you are a Japanese. Koreans have some antipathy for Japanese, which originated in the history of the two countries in the 20th century. Yes, you have no obligation to apologize to them in law and you can easily leave it there. However, if you would like to communicate with them or wish to know the reason why you were asked for an apology, you have to study the history and to learn about the relationship between Japanese and Koreans.' It is in contexts such as this that we can use the expression 'Postwar Responsibility.'
The second is 'Safety Net' Theory and the New Welfare State, which seeks to defend public welfare, the education system and family ties, and to revive local communities, all in the face of the global market mechanism. This school of thought insists that the market system may be good as a means for providing competition among the public sector, private sector and the voluntary sector as well, but that a counter mechanism should necessarily be built in order to save the 'losers' or the 'weak people' and to keep the market free and flexible. The argument here is that, since market winners may get advantages from the mechanics of the system, they should also pay to keep the market free, shouldering such burdens without complaint. In this fashion, the government could then redistribute the levy on the winners to those who lose in the market and to weak people who cannot enter into competition. One could say that this 'Safety Net' school has an orientation of reviving the Keynesian welfare state against Neo-liberal restructuring.
Finally, in the field of politics, the Veto Power Movements against the war, the cut of welfare, and the political corruptions. The Rakusen Undo or 'Negative Campaign against the dirty candidates in elections' started in anticipation of the 2000 general election. This type of movement originated in the South Korean Election in Spring 2000, where many dirty candidates who were associated with criminals, corruption, discrimination, slips of the tongue and sexual harassment were defeated by the negative campaigning of citizens' volunteer movements aimed at the mass media, especially by using the internet. Some Japanese citizens' movements opened homepages for negative campaigning against Yoshirou Mori (Prime Minister at the time), or against candidates who were involved in corruption or sexual scandals. This style of politics was new and remarkable and welcomed by young generation.
What I mean new are such features as focusing not on a good candidate but on a bad one; independence from political parties; its evaluation not of the party to which the candidate belongs but of the individual political activities of the candidates; and of course the effective use of the internet to achieve political objectives in the global peoples network.
Such styles are seen more strongly in Japanese peace movements against the war after September 11. As Japanese government officially supported the US Bush policies and admitted the oversea activities of the Self-Defense Force, many civic movements and NGO/NPOs began to create their own peace network with foreign companions. Since the World Social Forum was established in January 2001 in Porto Alegre (Brazil), these new style movements have taken part in the world network.
The political potential of the Internet is well illustrated by my own homepage in Japan (URL: http://www.ff.iij4u.or.jp/~katote/Home.html). This is one of the biggest websites on Japanese politics and has already received about 700,000 hits.
Finally, I will explain what I see as the most important issue for 21st Century Japan and consider how it effects the three political orientations or possible hegemonic projects that I have been discussing. This is the problem of revising the 1946 Constitution.
In a public opinion poll, now, about 60% responded positively when asked about revising the 1946 Constitution. In both Houses of the Diet, the Research Council on the Constitution had already been established and debate between the political parties had begun. All this represents a big change from the situation of late 20th Century Japan, when the amendment of the peace Constitution was almost a taboo subject.
The New Nationalist current of course welcomes the change of public opinion and has insisted on openly recognizing the Self Defense Forces as the National Army, which is forbidden by the famous Article 9 of the current Constitution. Although they do not clearly insist on redefining the status of the Emperor from his current standing of 'symbol of the state and the unity of the people' to 'the head of the state,' former Prime Minister Nakasone, Mori and other likeminded conservatives aim for it. They use the term 'public welfare' as a reason for restricting human rights and freedom and focusing on the duties of the nation, in contrast to individual rights.
However, since they are overly concerned with the historical process by means of which the current Constitution was 'forced on Japan by the US' during the Occupation period, they cannot get mass support from the young generation, for whom such old history is a closed book. These conservatives are called the 'Amendment circle' (Kaiken-ha).
The New Globalists are not strongly opposed to the New Nationalists, but neither are they very anxious to revise the Constitution. This is because they fear that it might provoke some serious reactions from neighboring countries and from the domestic left. They believe that they can realize their policies without clearly amending the Constitution. Nevertheless, they are also sensitive to public opinion and to what the mass media have to say. If the majority of Japanese are willing to revise the Constitution, the New Globalists too would be happy to draw up a new constitution which more clearly recognized the Japanese Self-Defense Force's, or even the Japanese Army's participation in the Peace Keeping Operations of the UN and which altered for some addition to human rights in fields such as maintaining the environment, accessing public information, defending privacy etc. This dominant current will shift from time to time according to the results of elections and the drift of public opinion. The most popular slogan of this current is ' International Contribution".
One could say that they are ready to discuss amending the Constitution, but are not very active in raising this issue in politics. Those holding this attitude are sometimes called 'Discussion circle' (Ronken-ha). Their immediate target is to become a regular member of the UN Security Council.
The third alternative of defending the Peace Constitution rigidly was the majority position until the 1980s, but has subsequently become weaker both in academic circles and in public opinion generally. In the political parties, this stance is kept only by the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party, the former 'progressive' parties which have now only tiny seats in the Diet.
There is a division within this camp between the fundamentalists and the revisionists. The fundamentalists, mainly former communists and socialists, insist on the world historical significance of the Article Nine, which denies not only war but all military forces, and they oppose any kind of amendment. Those adhering to this are called the 'Maintenance circle' of the Constitution (Goken-ha).
On the other hand, some revisionists are prepared to argue about the problems (the same as Ronken-ha). Although they insist that they will not revise the 1946 Constitution, they can envisage adding some new articles and phrases (like the right of the environment or the right of information), just as has been done to the American Constitution ever since the 18th century. They sometimes characterize themselves as the ﾔAddition circleﾕ(Kaken-ha) or the ﾔCreation circleﾕ (Souken-ha).
In party politics, Komeito (Clean Party) belongs to this 'Addition circle'(Kaken-ha) or the 'Creation circle' (Souken-ha) as the governmental coalition party with the LDP. The major opposition party, Democratic Party is officially an advocate of the 'Discussion circle'(Ronken-ha), but there are inner conflicts from the fundamental 'Maintenance circle' (Goken-ha) to the conservative 'Amendment circle' (Kaiken-ha) within the party.
In the public poll, the aged people who experienced the Pacific War are mainly in the 'Maintenance circle' (Goken-ha) or the miner nostalgic 'Amendment circle' (Kaiken-ha), but in the younger generation 'Discussion circleﾕ including 'Addition circle' and 'Creation circle'are the majority.
One additional point is the division of attitude to the United States. While the official line of new globalists is typical pro-American, the negative feeling against the US unilateral hegemony and the war has prevailed widely in Japan. The September 11 strengthened this tendency and has produced both sides of fundamentalists in 'Amendment circle' (Kaiken-ha) and 'Maintenance circle' (Goken-ha).
One alternative idea to these all groups is 'Revival circle'(Kakken-ha). As the other groups admit and presuppose the big gap between its ideal and its reality of the Constitution, ﾔRevival circleﾕ simply insists the ﾔrealization of ideal.ﾕ This idea is the reverse use of the interpretation of the Constitution by the government. Because the big gap between ideal and reality has made by the long LDP dominance in the party politics, the compensation should be possible by the new government without the amendment. This group stresses to make new constitutional politics by a new party coalition rather than arguments on the Constitution.
I cannot go into further details here on the debates surrounding the Constitution. What I will say is that this problem will figure as the most serious issue confronting in the first decade of the 21st century. Not only that, but these struggles for hegemony in the field of discourse will both be reflected in and have their effects on economic restructuring.
* This Paper is a revised version of my article: Tetsuro KATO, Japanese Regulation and Governance in Restructuring: Ten Years after the 'Post-fordist Japan' Debate, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, No.34, No.1, July 2002 (see the original version, http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/katori/Regulation.html)
GO TO INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE CENTER