Sanpo II: The Tyranny of Managed Consent
The statist ideology that came to be known as ‘Asian values’ had its trial run in postwar Japan. Any attempt to cast this illiberal growth model as ‘normal’ for Japan will run aground on the nation’s labor history. Activistic unions staged more than 250 strikes per year in the 1920s. Even the military dictatorship that took over in 1938 — disbanding all unions and funneling workers into Sanpo, the all-embracing Industrial Patriotic Society — could not extinguish the spirit of social democracy that drove unionization. Its robust survival was demonstrated by the tidal wave of re-unionization that swept Japan after its surrender in September 1945. Any political process that did not reflect this liberal-left voting bloc could hardly be called democratic.
For a fleeting moment Japan did have its ‘Tokyo Spring,’ the liberal democratic interlude that showed how different Japanese development could have been. The 1947 ‘reverse course’ erased all that, restoring much of the same power structure that had taken the nation to war. This reactionary turn was in line with America’s geopolitical agenda, and could be described as the indigenization of US policy; but even more so it was spawned by a Japanese elite that was more threatened by ‘Tokyo Spring’ reformism than by US hegemony. This resurgent ruling class successfully enlisted America in its private war on democratization.
Shigeru Yoshida (who became prime minister in May 1946 and again in October 1948, remaining in office until December 1954) traced the tragic blunder of the war to the failure of Japan’s prewar leadership to march in step with prevailing international power relations. Yoshida’s grand strategy was to couple conservative elitism with Washington-directed internationalism. By focusing all its energy on economics and very little on defense, Japan could turn the terms of defeat into victory. The advent of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1955 put the old warlords in control of a new model of authoritarianism: the tyranny of managed consent. By the late 1950s some Americans already thought the postwar econo-state of Japan was getting too good a deal, and the Eisenhower administration was starting to regret the inclusion of Article 9 (which de-militarized Japan) in the 1947 Constitution.
In fact, as Francis Fukuyama observes, the legitimacy of America’s vanguard role in the Far East rested largely on Article 9. Japan’s interests were also well served, since its neighbors would never have flocked behind the Japanese ‘lead goose’ if its wings had not been clipped militarily. Thus Washington and Tokyo struck a win/win alliance: the Yoshida Deal. This ‘1955 system’ not only turned Japan into a permanent military bastion on Russia’s eastern flank, but provided a blueprint for another kind of containment: the supplanting of liberal Left reformism by ‘Asian values’ economism. This dual containment, whereby ‘stability’ became a codeword for US-sponsored repression, would be duplicated throughout the Asia Pacific over the next forty years. The apolitics of the Japan model — with oppositional democracy suspended and national security outsourced to the United States — remained in place throughout the recovery era and the subsequent ‘miracle’ years.
Stability on these terms was of course unpopular in many quarters, and would be fiercely contested. The elites first impulse was to get tough. The infamous Nobusuke Kishi, grandfather of the current prime minister Shinzo Abe, was brought in by high-placed members of his family (Yoshida’s daughter was married to Kishi’s cousin, and his brother, Eisaku Sato was the Secretary-General of Yoshida’s cabinet) as conservatism’s pit bull. He had the perfect resume in terms of both nationalist zeal and sheer ruthlessness. During the war he had directed the abduction and mass transport of Chinese forced laborers to Japan. A large percentage of them would die en route, and over one in six who survived the transit would perish in the slave labor camps that awaited them.
For this, and for his ‘Albert Speer’ role as Commerce and Industry Minister in Tojo’s war cabinet, Kishi spent three years in prison awaiting trial as a class A war criminal. Yet, by order of US intelligence, he was summarily released and planted into the thick of postwar politics. Part of his task was to marshal the support of Old Guard elites for the LDP agenda. Within this recycled ‘Tojo club’ he passed for a man of reason, if only because in 1944 he had finally resigned from Tojo’s cabinet over his insistence that Japan should sue for peace if American forces reached Saipan.
Compared to Kishi, Yoshida could pass for a moderate. Kishi wanted an all-out war on the Left by a recycled hard Right, and saw Yoshida as an obstacle in that path. The irony is that to defeat Yoshida he first had to enter an alliance with the Socialists. His attempt to run the country the old fashioned way made him a lightning rod for mounting opposition after his election in 1958. By the spring of 1960 hundreds of thousands of protesters were demonstrating against his pet project, the revised US-Japan Security Treaty. To get it ratified, the Diet had to meet late at night with no opposition members present, an action that helped solidify resistance across class lines. When violent mine strikes erupted that summer, they were joined by thousands of Security Treaty protesters. It took 15,000 police to crush these demonstrations, which targeted the same Mitsui Corp. coal mine that 15 years before had played host to thousands of Kishi’s slave laborers, including allied POWs.
Continued unrest forced Kishi’s resignation. That would be the last significant barrier to the ‘1955 system.’ From then on the undertow effect of economic growth would doom all real resistance. Henceforth the Japan model could operate more on the side of carrot than stick, since by 1960 the Japanese were better off than any other Asian populace. This de facto political bribe was effective so long as the economy was booming, and the boom would last so long as Japan was an essential piece on the Cold War chessboard. It is no accident that the 1955 system started to unravel as the Cold War waned. Without this geopolitical buttress, the Japan model was on borrowed time. Prolonged recession would shred the economic carrot that kept the system running.
That unraveling has been the nightmare of all export-driven ‘miracle’ regimes on the Pacific Rim. Japan’s brand of repression has been different only in that it has been less centered, not bearing the stamp of any single dictator. Thus LDPism was better camouflaged than most authoritarianisms. Ironically it was Kishi’s ouster, which seemed to be a victory for the liberal Left, that entrenched the power of the Right by concealing its total triumph. Although the Japan model was mimicked throughout the Rim, this degree of manufactured consent was an act other Asian nations could not follow. Japan would have no political equivalent to Chiang Kai-shek, Marcos, Park Chung Hee, Lee Kuan Yew, Suharto or Mahathir, not to mention Mao or Deng.
To snuff out liberal opposition, LDPism had no need of dictators. It could buy the votes it needed through a combination of high growth and sweeping job security. Ordinary workers and middle class salarymen were seduced by a system that by every non-political measure was moving Japan into the First World. Hereafter popular resistance was out of the question. For the next several decades, so long as the Cold War lasted, Japan’s democratic façade would meet no serious challenge. Sanpo was effectively reborn under a democratic cloak.
A New Reverse Course
By the late 1980s the idea of ‘Japan as number one’ had started to wash over from economic into geopolitical discourse. Increasingly there was talk of Japan’s ability to say ‘no’ to its US guardian. Deputy Finance Minister Eisuke Sakakibara spoke for much of the nation’s elite when he proclaimed that Japan had ‘surpassed capitalism’ — meaning Western liberal capitalism. The Japan model took false consciousness to such heights that class divisions lost their political edge and labor/management disputes became tea parties. Not even Huxley or Orwell could have imagined a more complaint working class, or a country happier to be kept on another’s geopolitical tether. When Japanese talked of saying ‘no’ to America, what they actually wanted was a more cushy Yoshida Deal, as opposed to no Deal. They wanted, in short, global primacy without much military spending.
At that very moment, however, Japan began the economic slide that would suspend all talk of paramountcy. This timing was no accident, for Japan was becoming geopolitically expendable. In 1991, when it grudgingly and belatedly donated $13 billion to the Gulf War coalition, Japan found it could not buy international respect. Having contributed no manpower to the cause, it was seen as little more than a camp follower. Nor would the world forget that Tokyo’s original offer of assistance was a piddling $10 million.
Japan’s economic slump can be traced to the G-7 Plaza Accord of 1985, where the Bank of Japan was pressured to shift its monetary policy dramatically, raising the yen’s value against the US dollar. The idea was to force Tokyo to reduce its reliance on exports while expanding domestic demand. Interest rate cuts and currency appreciation would theoretically encourage purchases of US goods. By 1987 the Bank of Japan’s rate had dropped to 2.5, where it remained until May 1989. But things did not go as planned. Taking advantage of easy credit, export industries hiked capital spending. This compounded the dilemma of overproduction that haunted all Asian ‘miracle’ economies, but Japan most of all. Meanwhile low interest inflated stock and property prices, which was expected to stimulate domestic consumption. What it mainly stimulated was inflation, property speculation and a stupendous market bubble. Too late the Bank of Japan tried to cool the market, raising rates from 2.5 to 6 percent in 1990. Soon the banking sector found itself inundated with non-performing loans, and was all but forced to seek more lucrative investments in South and East Asia.
The ensuing slump and deflation suspended Japan’s geopolitical aspirations, paving the way for China’s emergence as the region’s economic and military debutante. And what did America get for its effort to curb Japanese excesses? Briefly the strategy did seem to work. In the late 1980s Japan began to open itself up to higher imports and lower trade surpluses. But these gains quickly disappeared once the bubble broke. Trade surpluses returned with a vengeance in the 1990s. The unequivocal winner in this post-Cold War reshuffling would be China, and that would mean a geopolitical as well as geoeconomic sea change.
Japan, however, was still the world’s second richest country and its largest exporter of capital. It continued to play a huge role in global development, and its role in Asia would actually be greater as a result of its domestic woes. This is because its post-bubble banking crisis (some estimates put the bad loans held by Japanese banks as high as $1 trillion) prompted investment in Asia’s ‘tiger’ and ‘tiger cub’ economies, where labor costs were low and currencies had the advantage of being pegged to the US dollar. More and more Japanese exports also went to Rim neighbors.
This of course set Japan up for another fall. The Asian Crisis of 1997-98 threatened to turn prolonged stagnation into full-fledged depression. Meanwhile Japan’s integration into an increasingly neoliberal global order produced great social trauma, as evidenced by a rising suicide rate. Nonetheless the general economic malaise has been exaggerated. If the economy had suffered as much as is commonly reported, there would have been more pressure for sweeping political change. The largely cosmetic reforms that were ushered in by Junichiro Koizumi could not have sufficed.
It must be asked why, in stark contrast to China, Japan has tended to understate its economic might. Likewise it must be asked why Western observers would fall for this subterfuge. The answer to the first question is that Japan’s glittering image as ‘number one’ was becoming a liability. Without any Cold War rationale, American tolerance for Japan’s export engine was bound to wear thin. As for the second question, neoliberalism’s claim to being the only sure path to prosperity inclined the mainstream media to accept Japan’s self-inflicted demotion in global standing. The highly regulated and centrally-planned Japan model — which accomplished many of the things that fascism had vainly attempted — gave the lie to the incontestable superiority of so-called free markets.
The real issue no longer seemed to be which was a better growth engine, neoliberalism or ‘Asian values’ economism. The salient question had become which Asian economism would take the lead. There is no denying that compared to China’s boom, or to Japan’s own ‘miracle’ years, the 1990s were lackluster for Japan. The root of the problem, however, was more political than economic. The diffuse power structure that had served Japan so well in masking its authoritarian elitism now prevented it from executing a concerted strategy for economic reform.
Koizumi’s predecessor, Yoshiro Mori, epitomized the country’s bureaucratic morass, and Koizumi did not depart from him nearly so much as his hair style would suggest. Aside from his ‘cool biz’ look, Koizumi was little more than a paper henjin (maverick). The real thing, Ichiro Ozawa, had been expelled from the party long before. Likewise, when Koizumi chose Makiko Tanaka (daughter of the ex-prime minister Kakuei Tanaka) as his foreign affairs minister, it was not so much to chart a new foreign policy as to tap the popular appeal of her acerbic style. Like her boss, she seemed refreshing after the humdrum 1990s But she lacked experience in world affairs, and will be remembered primarily for her penchant for breaking appointments with top foreign diplomats, including the US Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, who at that moment was carrying an urgent message on security strategy from President Bush. While Koizume himself was less abrasive than Tanaka, he was also less iconoclastic. He rose out of Mori’s LDP faction, and stayed within its orbit. For him the word ‘reform’ meant little more than a neoliberal shedding of government social responsibilities.
Ian Buruma suspected from the first that Koizumi was not so much primed to be a Japanese Gorbachev as a Berlusconi. Hope for more egalitarian reform would have to come from outside the LDP network. By 1998, deepening economic crisis had inspired a merger of previously independent parties under the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan) label. But it was not until 2003, when the DPJ incorporated Ichiro Ozawa’s center-right Liberal Party, that it gained enough seats to pose a real threat to the LDP establishment. While this might give Japanese voters a two-party choice, it also diluted DPJ progressivism. The contest would now be between the LDP Right and another Right — specifically that of Ozawa’s more ardent remilitarization. Only after his efforts to reunite with the LDP were spurned did Ozawa merge with the DPJ.
This dismal choice was still an improvement over the 1955 system, and the LDP was determined to roll back the clock. It turned to a man who had what it took to look radical without threatening the system nearly so much as Ozawa did. Koizumi convinced the public that he was at odds with the LDP establishment when in fact he was its chosen savior. Though he took office in April 2001 on the promise to break Japan’s political deadlock, his real mission was to prevent the kind of substantive reform that had been in the air in the early 1990s. In education, for example, the idea had been to boost Japan’s competition within the New World Order by stressing creativity and individualism. After the lost decade, however, more and more parents and politicians blamed ‘individualism’ for an ongoing decline in test scores. To them ‘creativity’ simply meant a lack of discipline.
In foreign as well as domestic affairs, Koizumi was part of a new reverse course. This Elvis-loving prime minister was walking a political tightrope as the Yoshida Deal entered its sixth decade. To do Washington’s bidding he of course would have to affirm Japan’s US alliance. It was Washington’s paradoxical wish that Tokyo prove its fealty by breaking free of the abject military dependence that had been imposed in 1946 by Article 9. Although Japan had begun rearming in the early 1950s, its Self Defense Forces (SDF) had been too fettered by Article 9 and the Yoshida Deal to allow much geopolitical maneuvering or real political discourse — two sides of the same ‘abnormal’ coin. Dissident voices were muzzled on both sides of the political spectrum: left pacifists as well as nationalist reactionaries. Far from being a manifestation of native Japanese values, this bracketing of democratic discourse was a bargain struck between elites on both sides of the Pacific.
The ‘abnormalization’ of Japanese foreign policy had its flip side in an equally truncated domestic politics. Until the 1990s the LDP system had kept its end of the Yoshida bargain: affluence in return for silence. That silence was finally broken when the post-miracle malaise combined with a major scandal to suspend the LDP’s thirty-eight year grip on power. Meanwhile the Gulf War put a spotlight on the dysfunctional side of the whole econo-state concept. The Japan Renewal Party took the helm temporarily, but cracks soon began to form in its ruling coalition. The 1955 system was back on track by 1996, after the Japan Socialist Party showed its true colors by cutting a deal with the LDP.
The only lasting benefit from this oppositional interlude was the electoral reforms of 1994, but neither they nor Koizumi’s later revisionism would do much to remedy the political inertia that has been the bedrock of the Japan model. Indeed, it is arguable that Koizumi’s success in renovating the political décor of the LDP constituted a democratic setback by giving one-party rule a new lease on life. His landslide victory in the snap election of September 2005 gave him a mandate to refreeze the system, putting the DPJ out to pasture. As Brad Glosserman wryly put it, Japan was going boldly backwards.
The Japan That Will Say Yes
Two opposite forces propelled Japan’s foreign relations under Koizumi. After the very unmiraculous 1990s, more and more Japanese shifted their focus to the simple enjoyment of life. Many began to look back on the feudal past as a time of enviable stability in contrast to a capitalism where ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ This recoil could take two antithetical forms: the apotheosis of nihonjinron (the innate superiority of all things Japanese), much like the ethos celebrated in The Last Samurai, or a more pastoral, flower-child-like retreatism.
In the latter case, the reigning cultural icon would no longer be the salaryman, but rather the ‘freeter,’ a youth who is content to take odd jobs to sustain an easy lifestyle. Where international commitments are concerned, the ‘freeter’ attitude discourages international commitments. This collides, however, with rising defense imperatives in East Asia. While the Chinese threat looms larger in the long run, North Korea takes center stage in terms of sheer bluster. Either one, however, is enough to give policy-minded Japanese second thoughts about Article 9.
Koizumi had little choice but to return nationalism to mainstream Japanese politics. His inflammatory visits to the Yasukuni war shrine, which did so much to antagonize China and South Korea, was mere window dressing. A more substantive nihonism was broached in December 2001 when the Japanese navy trailed a suspicious ‘fishing’ vessel bearing Chinese markings out of Japanese territory and deep into Chinese waters. When the boat opened fire, Japanese naval vessels returned fire and sank it, killing all its crew. This was the first time Japan had sunk a foreign ship since World War II, and Japan watchers took note of the fact that such an action would have been unthinkable ten years before.
This ‘Chinese’ boat turned out to be a North Korean spy ship, and the next year North Korea gave Japan a much greater jolt by announcing its intention to develop nuclear weapons. Early in 2003 Tokyo reciprocated by threatening a preemptive strike, and added that it might also develop its own nuclear weapons. The then Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe put himself on the short list for Koizumi’s successor by announcing that it would not be unconstitutional for Japan to use tactical nuclear weapons if need be. Just two years before Japan’s No. 2 defense chief had been fired for simply mentioning nuclear weapons. Since the 2001 incident, the Japanese navy has fired on other North Korean ships, and has confronted Chinese naval vessels in a conflict over oil reserves in the East China Sea. Only the far Right would have advocated such behavior in the past. The shifting public attitude is suggested by the curious spectator cult that arose as 10,000 Japanese a day went to ogle at the salvaged North Korean spy ship.
Notwithstanding these rumblings, most analysts continue to view China and Russia as the big players in Asia’s emerging ‘great game,’ giving Japan little more than honorable mention. Early in his administration President Bush lavished praise on Putin and refused to be distracted by local events such as the Chechen Holocaust. The same president who famously screamed ‘evil’ whenever he encountered global friction, in this case was determined to ‘see no evil.’ This ghastly indifference was reinforced by the President’s ever-expanding ‘war on terrorism,’ which ironically moved him closer to many of the world’s worst state terrorists.
Had Russia and the US continued their romance, Japan could have been pushed even further off the geopolitical map. But Putin’s mounting animosity, plus the geopolitical bonding of China and Russia within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), forced a tacit reassessment in Washington. For once America and Europe were moving in the same direction. Even France came on board this time, as Chirac’s pro-Russia tilt was replaced in 2007 with the unabashed pro-Americanism of Nicolas Sarkozy. These tectonic shifts put Japan closer to the epicenter of Asian power politics.
Along with Russia’s rogue-state assertiveness, China’s rise challenges Japan as nothing has since World War II. Beijing used Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine as an excuse for not accepting Tokyo’s repeated invitations for high level talks. But the real issue was mounting geoeconomic competition. Deng-era terms of endearment no longer applied. Japan had been giving Official Development Assistance (O.D.A.) to China since its opening in 1979, a time when China was a net oil exporter. Buying from China was a way of reducing Middle East energy dependence. Now, however, China has become a major oil importer and Japan has been reducing its O.D.A.
During Japan’s miracle years and before China’s rise, it was easy for radical nationalists like Shintaro Ishihara — the testy author of The Japan that Can Say No (1989) and later the governor of Tokyo (reelected in 2007) — to broadcast a double-barreled strategy for Japanese supremacy. Ishihara stood ready to confront Washington and Beijing alike in the name of a Japan that dared to stand alone. But after the deflated ’90s, and under the shadow of a fully awakened Chinese dragon, few Japanese could muster such hubris. Ishihara, however, has not budged an inch. He sees the overheated Chinese economy as a disaster waiting to happen, and still considers Japan the real sleeping dragon. His case for Japanese re-militarization is based as much on America’s relative decline as on China’s putative clout. In his view the US is not the reliable guardian it once was.
Either way — whether because China is a greater danger or because America is a lesser protector — the case for Japan’s ‘normalization’ is now front and center. For this task the new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, came rather ill prepared, having had little foreign affairs experience. What swung the public behind him was his tough rhetoric concerning North Korea’s ballistic missile tests early in 2006. He has followed in Koizumi’s footsteps — not to mention his grandfather’s — by raising the Japan Defense Agency to ministry status and announcing plans to revamp its whole concept of security. Japanese and US interests are so tightly intertwined that both sides see Article 9 as redundant and obstructive. The point is that a remilitarized Japan will still say ‘yes’ to America.
It has little choice, given its new geoeconomic situation. Abe’s staff has made it clear that Japan is ready to play ‘a huge great game’ in resource competition with China and Russia; and in January 2007, while visiting Europe, Abe drove home the point that under him Japan would be a steadfast partner on NATO’s Eastern flank. So too he is seeking closer security ties with democratic India and Australia. Accordingly he has spoken of an ‘arc of freedom and prosperity’ extending from Japan through India and into Europe.
Abe recognizes that the global competition is dividing between camps of development with and without freedom. The question is which side Japan is actually taking. For years Abe himself has supported nationalist propagandists who pushed for revising textbooks to deemphasize Japan’s wartime horrors, and recently he drew fierce criticism from South Korea by questioning the degree of coercion that was used in recruiting ‘comfort women’ for Japan’s wartime brothels. Given his grandfather’s record, he has a stake in this national amnesia, which is akin to European Holocaust denial. But none of that concerns Washington, since Abe has no problem reconciling radical nationalism with a sweeping affirmation of America’s strategic vision.
Koizumi set the stage for this Yoshida II hybrid with the December 2003 creation of the US-Japanese Security Consultative Committee. Its ‘2 plus 2’ meetings (involving US secretaries of state and defense and their Japanese counterparts) have moved the security alliance beyond Cold War asymmetry, whereby Japan served as a passive ‘shield’ for America’s Asian ‘spear.’ A common liberal argument for keeping Article 9 is that it helps Japan resist pressure to join America’s infamous ‘coalitions of the willing.’ However, by sending Japanese support forces to Iraq, Koizumi broke that taboo already. Japan was now more of a spear carrier. All that remained was to give its participation some real teeth. That would mean a Japan that can and will say ‘yes,’ and as a full-fledged spear thrower.
Nihonism Goes Global
The payoff for this transformation could be enormous. First, Japan’s offer of $5 billion and 2,000 peacekeeping troops in support of the Iraq occupation bought it cover for a currency policy that was sure to dent US exports. The tactic worked: the Bush administration fell silent on the whole issue. Second, part of Japan’s geopolitical normalization is the likely lifting of its self-imposed ban on arms sales. That restriction was invoked by Prime Minister Takeo Miki in 1976, and thanks to it Japan’s arms production has been extremely costly in per unit terms. However, this and other normalization measures carry the risk of unnerving Asian neighbors. Such ‘2 plus 2’ logic can therefore equal ‘5’: de-stabilizing rather than balancing the Rim. And in the case of arms sales, there is a further domestic risk: since this military-industrial upgrade requires no constitutional revision, it could be slipped through without much democratic input.
Beneath the surface of ‘2 plus 2’ parity, Japan is fully aware that it cannot afford to say ‘no’ on any issue that Washington deems vital to its interests. A repressed need to say ‘no’ to something may account for Japan’s opprobrious practice of whaling. Essentially this is an emotional escape mechanism that lets Japan say ‘no’ without major repercussions. So long as the international community is not prepared to spill geopolitical capital over whales, Japan can have its whale meat and its ‘normality’ also.
Nonetheless there is a hidden price to pay for this atavistic indulgence, and for the sake of the whales one hopes Japan’s elite will get the point. As a New York Times editorial put it, the protection of whales is ‘one small, bright spot of global consensus …’ Stepping outside that ethical boundary will label Japan a pariah nation at heart. If it is utterly untrustworthy on this rare common ground of international decency, its reliability on other issues is thrown into doubt. The moral high ground that Japan seeks by supporting the Kyoto Protocol (as of 2002) and by encircling China and Russia with an arc of democracy is sacrificed with every whale it kills.
The most pressing issue of normalization, however, is undoubtedly the repeal or substantial rewrite of Article 9. The critical question is whether this will be accomplished through democratic or semi-authoritarian means. Under Abe serious debate on the matter has been discouraged, which was probably unnecessary, since some polls show a large majority of Japanese in favor of revising Article 9. Abe’s reactionary tilt fits a pattern: the rising current of Japanese thought — capsulated in Masahiko Fujiwara’s bestselling 2005 novel, The Dignity of a State — that denies the value of Western-style democracy for Japan and Asia in general. Fujiwara wants to restore Japan’s ebbing social capital by way of samurai ‘deep emotion’ and a de-emphasis on Western reason.
This militant nihonism is obviously not the way of the ‘freeter,’ and will not get rave reviews from neighboring Asian countries. They too well remember Japan’s last attempt to de-Westernize the region: by way of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Yet in Japan, as Fukuyama observes, there is a thriving market for right-wing fantasies. Watanabe Soichi, a collaborator of Shintaro Ishihara, draws large audiences to hear him relate how grateful Japan’s wartime neighbors were for being included in the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Manchurians, he declares, wept when the Japanese pulled out.
While the new LDP brought nihonism in from the cold, Western media took little interest. They remained as oblivious to this unsavory side of Koizumi’s administration as they had been to the dark side of Yeltsin’s. They cheered his weakening of traditional factions within the party, overlooking the fact that for decades those intra-LDP divisions were the closest thing Japan had to effective political opposition. It remains to be seen if Koizumi’s successors can match his democratic machinations. Just as Grandfather Kishi went too far in exposing his real agenda, Abe has consistently mangled his image politics. Managed consent requires a better cover. In 2004 Koizumi had faced a major pension scandal, but was able to extricate himself by posing as an anti-establishment revolutionary. In 2007, in the throes of yet another pension scandal, Abe came across as a business-as-usual LDPer.
In just three weeks in May and June 2007 Abe’s support ratings fell 17 percent, to a disconcerting 32.9. This was fast approaching the critical 30 percent line where a normally diffident Japanese press tends to go on the offensive. In an effort to ensure LDP consensus on postal reform, Koizumi had expelled dissenting politicians from the party. Abe let them back in, thus advertising himself as a faithful LDP functionary. Even the US trade representative Susan Schwab, a neoliberal who would be expected to applaud the privatization of Japan Post, openly lambasted the projects lack of transparency. This shady operation was conceived and executed by Koizumi, yet Abe is taking the heat. The good news is that his political bungling has re-opened the door for a possible DPJ rebound. If the LDP were to lose the upper house in the July 2007 elections, Abe could be remembered as the prime minister who won the game for the opposing team.
In a 2003 Foreign Affairs article, Richard Katz sounded a death knell for the LDP. In his view Japan’s protracted economic debility was first and foremost a crisis of governance. He could be optimistic about the country’s economic prospect only because he saw no hope for continued LDP hegemony. But Koizumi obviously faired better than Katz expected. By tying nihonism to the new forces of globalization, he unleashed a new Japan model on the 21st century.
It would be bad news for Japan and the whole region if this were to give the presently constituted LDP a new lease on life. Abe’s plummeting popularity lends hope to those seeking a real transformation, though (with Fujiwara in mind) the key question is what direction this will take. The lesson of Kishi’s fall should not be forgotten: what looked like a democratic milestone in fact marked the triumph of the Right. As had other Rim nations after the Asian Crash, Japan is reviving its economy at the expense of political reform. All that remains, in order to complete a Marxian passage from tragedy to farce, is for the new Japan model to be declared a democratic success story.
William H. Thornton is professor of globalization and cultural studies at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. His publications include New World Empire: Civil Islam, Terrorism, and the Making of Neoglobalism (2005) and Fire on the Rim: The Cultural Dynamics of East/West Power Politics (2002). This article is a revised chapter from William H. Thornton and Songok Han Thornton, Development Without Freedom: The Politics of Asian Globalization, due out next spring from Ashgate.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate