Japan culture and politics — A superpower’s future: change for women is the hope for Japan

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Tremors in Tokyo

The Sunday Times, August 7 1994
Culture Essay

By Brian Deer in Tokyo

On the day, late last June, when Japan got its fourth prime minister in less than 12 months, Tokyo and its adjacent cities were rattled by a quake. It was strong on the Richter scale – 5.3 – and for a moment the nation’s capital paused to assess this natural event. Eyes flicked to the safety of doorways, and at main railway stations the ultra-reliable shinkansen bullet trains that hurtle along the spine of this Pacific archipelago were held past scheduled departure times as the earth thumped and buildings trembled.

The shaking stopped, however, in a matter of a few seconds, and the epicentre was way offshore. Sophisticated anti-quake devices intended to protect Tokyo’s international markets and business centres, barely had time to kick into action before the ground again became still. Across the warren of high-density housing and clusters of modest skyscrapers that make up the metropolitan area, life cheerfully resumed its hurried rhythm with a sense of renewed hope. It was not the Big One that has long been expected and, thankfully, some tectonic pressure had been relieved along subterranean faults.

If only other shifts in Tokyo that day were half as reassuring. On the parliamentary scene, Tomiichi Murayama, the 70-year-old chairman of the country’s Social Democratic Party, emerged to take the premiership – sending a shudder through those who wanted to see change in the world’s second biggest economy. Meanwhile, on the financial markets, the mighty yen (already so absurdly overvalued that it is severely eroding competitiveness) continued its relentlessly upward drift against both the dollar and the pound. Unlike the shudders of geological rearrangement, human affairs seemed uniformly bad.

Until less than a year ago, when Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) finished an astonishing 38 years in office, people said the country was like a one-party state. Now, in a mood of profound soul-searching provoked by the first home-grown economic slowdown since the war, the prime minister’s office has become like a karaoke bar: almost anybody can get up and sing. Succeeding three more substantial occupants, Murayama was a virtual unknown before assuming the post and, amid the primetime jungle of game show television, had impressed the electorate most effectively to date as “that guy with the bushy eyebrows”.

His appointment was all the more striking in that it appeared to lack any principle. At face value, Murayama was a man of the Left, but in order to take the reins in parliament, he was obliged to form a coalition with the right-wing LDP. A poacher turned gamekeeper, and worse. Within days, he packed his cabinet with conservatives and signalled that his party’s long-standing programme would be unceremoniously junked. Over recent weeks he has made a string of jingoistic statements, proposing a firmer status for the armed forces, the singing of the national song in schools and for the controversial “rising sun” Hinomaru flag to be restored to widespread use.

But street vox-pops and public opinion surveys revealed no sense of unease. In this culture embedded in residual Taoist philosophy, Buddhist and Shinto religion and Confucian ideology, the Western logic of Aristotle et al simply doesn’t apply. That a man could spend his entire adult life as a socialist and then form a right-wing government just went to show that Japanese thinking is situational rather than dogged. In Japanese thought, something can be and also not be, at the same time. Here, “yes” or “no” can mean the same thing, or sometimes mean nothing at all. So nobody much took it as an unchallengeable fact that things were the way they appeared.

The political system itself is perhaps the best example of this perceptual illusion. Part of the lack of concern over Murayama’s side-switching stems from the universal feeling that an incumbent prime minister is not truly important to Japan. Like the traditional bunrakyu puppet theatre, politicians may be what you see, but they are worked by invisible hands. Manipulating from beneath and behind is an elite corps of crypto-Confucian bureaucrats, whose fingers have long tugged every lever.

Having more in common with the old Soviet central planners than Western public servants, the authority of the people who hold such posts has no parallel outside the East. After the new prime minister made a statement in which he was ambiguous about Japan’s claim to a seat on the United Nations security council, for instance, the chief foreign ministry mandarin publicly corrected him – unthinkable in, say, the US or Britain. It is an authority, moreover, that extends beyond politics to business, social affairs and even the arts.

In business, the bureaucrats intervene as if presiding over nationalised industries. Japanese law is often drawn vaguely, leaving huge scope for administrative interpretation. Through elaborate planning arrangements, civil servants step in to ensure that unprofitable enterprises do not go to the wall, but are defended until fit again. And with the corporate bosses of household name corporations, they conceive national plans that, through Japan’s international influence, are global in their economic impact.

This all-pervasive involvement by the unelected, moreover, is not just a matter of style. “These bureaucrats are running the whole show and will continue to run the whole show,” Masao Kunihiro, a member of the San Giin – parliament’s upper house – and an ally of Murayama’s, explained to me last week. “Some of them say, almost shamelessly, ‘Elected officials are nothing but a bunch of passers-by. How could we entrust to them the fate of the nation?'”

Unlike the earthquake, a symptom of movement, Murayama’s rise to the karaoke mike, then, was not taken as evidence of a shift. But if Japan remains politically in a state of lockup, worrying pressures continue to build. The rising yen, which surged to a post-war high at the new prime minister’s ascension, has reached the point where exporting industry may no longer be able to compete. This drift (mainly caused by huge trade surpluses with the West), moreover, is not a temporary phenomenon – a mere blip on the business chart. In 1971, one US dollar would have bought you 360 yen; in 1985, it would have bought 245; and on July 12 just 97.

The strains that such rates are creating are hard to exaggerate – as is their long-term impact on international affairs. Mirroring the export price rises, the strength of the Japanese currency is causing capital to flee the country as businesses that for years were able to absorb the rising costs of domestic production rush to switch investment elsewhere on the Pacific rim. For the price of a couple of coffees in a Tokyo hotel there are people in China, South Korea or Vietnam who would gladly work all day.

Such thoughts are ominous for the new prime minister, but they bring smiles of relief in Washington. Last year, the United States’ trade deficit with Japan stood at a staggering $60.4 billion – $10 billion greater than in 1992, and although both President Clinton and Lloyd Bentsen, his treasury secretary, have denied that the administration has sought the yen’s rise, its strength may produce a historic moment for which Washington has long been waiting. For not only could the currency pressures cut Japan down to size, but they could win for the West a secret battle to advance the American Way.

According to six of the Group of Seven biggest economies, the solution for Japan’s problems is simple: set the market free. Similar currency shifts and capital movements have, after all, occurred in other developed countries without earth-shattering consequences. If Japan took serious steps to open itself to imports, they say, domestic prices could fall and relieve some pressure on the yen. If Japan cut costs, restructured industry and shed surplus labour, productivity would benefit. And, above all, if the bureaucracy took its fingers off the levers, no end of reform might ensue.

It’s an approach, however, that assumes that Japan is either just the same as a western economy – or, inasmuch as it may be different, that it ought to find a way to make itself more similar. After the collapse of communism, doesn’t the argument for American liberal capitalism seem unassailable, if not inevitable? In the resurgent US, moreover, where even the once-ailing General Motors just posted record profits, where Silicon Valley has bounced back to supremacy in high tech, and where talk of Japan as a future number one is now laughed at by entrepreneurs, there seems to be only one model of economic organisation for the way the whole world will go.

But here comes the snag: Japan is different and doesn’t want to be the same. Under the watchful eye of its ruling bureaucracy, and with the support of corporate and political power brokers, it isn’t really a market economy at all, at least as we would know one. Despite its membership of the Group of Seven, its familiar products and its men in western business suits, this is a culture, it mustn’t be forgotten, that works along alternative lines.

Whether those lines will survive, much less find emulation elsewhere, however, is the of the great current issues of world affairs. In the same way that the massive geological plate movements need relief beneath the Pacific, so Japan needs remedies to ease the tension, or it risks facing a terrible shock.

*****

In Kanji – the ancient Chinese ideographs which are Japan’s main writing system – there’s a two-part compound character which translates as meaning “busy”. Like thousands more in this complicated script, it’s a compilation of simpler symbols, joined in a more elaborate idea. On the left are three strokes that denote the heart. On the right are three more for “die”. To be busy, then, literally in written Japanese, means dead-hearted. Not a positive thought.

Since the genesis of words say a lot about culture, this Kanji may surprise some westerners. We assume, after all, that Japan’s phenomenal post-war achievements are somehow rooted in a frenzy of work. Indeed, it is almost our first assumption about Japanese life – and that the giant corporate groups – such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Kango – thrive precisely because of this powerful ethos of toil that more workshy nations lack.

Nobody can doubt that in the manufacturing sector there is discipline, dedication and effort. And Japan’s pre-university education system entails one of the most gruelling learning-curves anywhere. Elsewhere, however, the opposite is true: there’s a prevailing sense of “nothing doing”. Although company employees may quickly rally to urgent tasks, in the white-collar sector especially, the semi-idle atmosphere can be amazing to behold. Hundreds of thousands in unskilled work, moreover, are employed in jobs that don’t need doing.

They do them, however, with a loyalty and dedication that would be hard to match in the West. A combination of unique ancient forces have come together in the twentieth century to make the Japanese company the prime psychological unit. White-collar “salarymen”, who set the benchmark for appropriate behaviour, will think nothing of staying in the office until midnight, of sleeping under their desks, and of taking only three or four days annual leave.

But these same people spent much of last month watching the national sumo basho live from Nagoya when they were theoretically supposed to be working. They love to go to work, but in a spirit of recreation. Work is where you live. Rather than pushing paper, holding business meetings, or taking decisions, many get through much of the day reading comics, chatting to pals or booing the Hawaiian Ozeki Musashimaru as he stormed through the wrestling bouts. This relationship to employment – part of what is described as “Japanese group mentality” – lies somewhere near to the living heart of the world’s economic number two.

This “groupism” is as well accepted among the people I spoke to as is any trait nations admit of themselves. When a Japanese doctor, Masao Miyamato, recently returned from abroad and wrote a book caricaturing the domestic workplace as a bed of ludicrous idleness, it sold half a million copies and made him a star. “The Japanese group mentality has a very great deal in common with Communism,” he explained to me. “In Japan, everybody stays late and they don’t take vacations, as an act of saying: ‘We are the comrades’.”

The spin-offs from this trait, however, are not all as bad. There is much to be said for Japanese life. There is little crime (apart from high-level corruption and police-supervised gangsterism), not much drug misuse and next to no teenage vandalism. Lose your wallet or handbag in Tokyo and you can be fairly sure it will be handed-in without as much as being rooted-through. Even in the concrete jungle of Tokyo, there’s an ordered courtesy to human relations that is barely a memory in small Western towns.

Take this summer, where a serious social problem erupted in the capital. Such a storm was raised about young people joy-riding on Tokyo’s Oi pier, that riot police were drafted in to put a stop to it. Sometimes more than 100 cars were involved, speeding through the streets and throwing on the brakes to put them into a skid. This is familiar in the West – perhaps a sign of convergence – but what we might find it hard to get our heads round is that the kids drive their own vehicles in these dangerous pursuits. They don’t steal other people’s.

*****

At least since the Reagan-Thatcher era, it has been an unquestionable axiom among western leaders that there is just one way to promote prosperity: the Anglo-American way. And with Japan more than ever in conflict with the American economic model, the time is approaching when the West expects some figure like Murayama to step up and foster real, not karaoke, change.

Many Japanese accept the need for reforms, but whether those reforms mean ending its planned economy, throwing hundreds of thousands out of work and accepting the accompanying social alienation, looks less likely to me in Tokyo than it might from Washington. Although some in the West argue that the country’s success is based on American generosity during the 1950s and 1960s, followed by a mean-spirited protectionism from thence to today, this society has its roots too deep in history to be the subject of easy alteration.

The first obstacle to a swift about-face is that crucial “group mentality”. Accompanying the laid-back life of the salarymen, hanging-out with his friends in the playroom office, is a lack of what we might think of as individual initiative or discontent to trigger change. With the company as family and the workplace as life’s focus, this is a society that wouldn’t agonise over a prime ministerial appointment, if it were Tomiichi Murayama or a monkey.

It would take more than a few social shake-ups to change that mentality – more like a cultural tsunami. Groupism is inherited from this society’s first base: the conditions once needed to grow rice. Only 16% of these islands is open to agriculture, which more than anything demands communal water and the social relations to secure its supply. Upset the village, or fall foul of a feud and to survive you used to sell your daughter to the geisha house and have your next baby killed.

The next obstacle to reform that would need to be overcome is the legacy of totalitarian regimes. Until 1945, when emperor Hirohito finally owned-up that he wasn’t a god, Japan had never known a government that wasn’t brutal, arbitrary and absolute. In particular, under the fearsome shoguns, who ruled for 250 years from 1603, the general public was liable to execution for displaying the slightest sign of attitude. Villages were divided by local Samurai into disciplinary sub-units, each of which could be collectively punished for the transgressions of individual members.

A third obstruction lies in Japanese family relations, deeply rooted in its unique psychology. While the Western tradition of Homer et al boasts hero legends symbolising separation of a child from its mother, Japanese culture stresses retaining that bond as part of what makes it strong. Boys commonly sleep close to their mothers until they are three or older and often sustain a powerful attachment throughout their adult years. This creates what Japanese psychologists call amae, a deep-seated and lifelong need to be dependent – which can attach to the group, the company, or even the state.

And if all of this is not enough to inhibit western-style change, there is also the influence of kanji. To master the basics of this writing system (and there are four others in use, including English), children are taught more than 7,000 characters – inevitably crowding-out opportunities to question with a need to get a grip on hard fact. And where those ideographs build up to more complex meanings, ancient cultural assumptions may be absorbed. Every Japanese, for example, has been drilled at school to think of “busy” as “heart” and “die”.

*****

Another revealing dip into the language of this country retrieves the expression sodai gomi. Literally, it means “large garbage” and refers to big items of domestic waste, such as broken furniture, worn-out futons and old TV sets. But a different, colloquial, usage of the words is a self-reference by Japanese men. In this context, sodai gomi means the sad identity they feel obliged to assume when they finally leave their beloved workplace and go home to their wives and kids.

Despite amae, the family (at least in the way that we know it) is poorly-developed and the source of much discontent. In the homes of men who spend their waking lives at work, women commonly bring up children more or less in the style of lone parents. Marriages often seem emotionally empty (about one quarter are still arranged by parents) and the traditional roles of cook and child-rearer weigh overwhelmingly on one sex. This may sound familiar, but in Japan it’s extreme: the wife is meant to behave something like a hotel-keeper, serving an honoured guest.

At face value, the economic downturn has made this problem worse. Although the country has not yet experienced a recession in the Western sense, poor growth has put large numbers of women out of work and stopped many more from getting in. Here, too, Japan seems locked tight, without any relief from stress. Two weeks back, there was a protest in Tokyo by female graduates demanding more access to jobs. But the turnout was in dozens, rather than in thousands, another sign of the Japanese way.

But here is a further example of how appearance can sometime prove an illusion. Just as the rise of Murayama to the prime ministership appears to signal change but is actually a sign of constancy, so the position of women looks hopelessly stuck while in reality it’s surging ahead. Far from tiptoeing three paces behind their husbands and tittering behind their fingers, wives and mothers are increasingly educated, worldly – and openly critical. Always the hinge in the folding fan of the family, they are now using this fulcrum to become a social force for the sodai gomi to reckon with.

This force is arguably pressing for change more powerfully than anything else. In the face of a political vacuum at the heart of the state, an immovable bureaucracy guiding national affairs, great dependency-creating corporations and a male populace idling at work, women have emerged with the competitive buzzword for efficiency and progress: choice. Despite inequality more blatant than in other advanced economies – and without even an organised movement in the sense that many Western women would recognise – they are gracefully taking to the stage to help shape Japan’s social and economic affairs.

Their advance is occurring everywhere, from politics to space research. Among Murayama’s cohort of conservative cabinet appointments was Makiko Tanaka, who was immediately tipped herself as set to become a potential future prime minister. And among her first public duties last month was to welcome the return on the Shuttle Columbia of a Japanese woman astronaut. These are taken as potent symbols of social progress, shedding the kimono image for good.

“A change among mothers creates change within the whole family,” Sumiko Iwao, professor of psychology at Keio University, explained to me. “When I was growing up, mother always said nice things about father in the front of the children – how he should be respected and so on. Now women are so highly educated that they will critique their husbands bitterly – and the children are listening and learning from those remarks.”

Such a change, moreover, is not just of consequence for private domestic lives, but feeds through economics and world affairs. By undermining the salaryman’s lifestyle (and convincing their children to do the same), women threaten to provoke a profound and potentially transforming shift in the culture. If they have their way, the office may soon be seen as a place of work, not primarily an emotional refuge. As a consequence, love of the big corporation might wane – and men might go home for leisure.

In an economy dominated by the voice of producers, this change would could prove overwhelming. An increased demand for leisure inevitably sparks consumer awareness, forcing more price competition and demand for imported goods. More imports will change the trade balance and take pressure off the yen. And was it not western anxieties about the strength of the currency where those deep earth rumblings began?

Of course, it would need a lot of imports to keep America smiling. Its huge deficits with Japan are caused less by cheating – which is what US negotiators claimed last week – than by the same bureaucratic and laid-back arrangements by which this society runs more generally. And no increased volume of Detroit’s automobiles (currently grabbing a puny 0.6% of the Japanese market), or Louisiana’s rice sales will quell Washington’s implicit assumption that the world economy ought to run in a uniform way.

But whatever mountains of consumption Japan might scale, responding to the current stresses is a test of the nation’s spirit. The offshore drift of capital will not be stemmed much by a boost in holidays and TV dinners, and poses crucial challenges for political life. Will changes in the bureaucrat’s Confucian code, the nation’s group mentality and the aspirations of women see the proceeds of overseas investment enjoyed more widely by everybody at home? If so, then change could spell a remarkable era of calm and prosperity.

Success, moreover, could mean emulation among Japan’s East Asian neighbours. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam and even mighty China all look anxiously towards Japan for ideas about how to proceed. If the land of the rising yen can ease the pressures and achieve some modest rearrangement, there may be new choices for other nations. And as a new millennium begins – a post-industrial, information, era – it may be that we have a lot to learn from life lived the Japanese way.

There are, however, other routes for the country – which need no involvement of women. When Murayama stepped up to the karaoke mike, the song the bureaucrats had chosen for him to croon was selected with a chorus of nationalism to every verse. Appearances, may be deceiving, but his talk of armed forces, the song and the flag were not-too-difficult codes. It could be that Japan will not move forward, but will seek to withstand the strain.

The great plates that shift underneath the Pacific touch East and West alike. There are jolts here, tremors there every day of the year. But if Japan stays locked, when it finally gives, the convulsions could rock the world.

Read another Culture Essay by Brian Deer, The Life & Death of Leisure, on “Athens without the slaves”