Book Review: Japan and the Shackles of the Past – R Taggart Murphy
Ford, G. (2015). Japan and the Shackles of the Past by R Taggart Murphy, Asian Review of Books, 3 June.
This is a book that grew like topsy from an initial inclusion as part of a series “What Everyone Needs to Know about XYZ” before being promoted to stand-alone status by the OUP. Japan and the Shackles of the Past is by far more than an epitome of Japan’s history and culture, yet its beginnings explain its shape as a somewhat uneven compendium. It has the beginnings of a summary volume and the ending of a full-blooded contemporary history of Japan. Early history is concertina’d neatly into the opening chapter. We arrive at the “revolution” of 1868—actually more a “coup d’état” with one section of Japan’s ruling class supplanting another—after just 58 pages. In contrast, the final 74 pages scarcely span four years from 2009 as they describe the irresistible rise and inexorable fall of the first—and likely last—Democratic Party Government.
Murphy tells a good story with history ancient and modern. There is a school of thought that the root of the United Kingdom’s problems lie in the fact that as the locus of the first industrial revolution it was never really forced to complete the process. By avoiding the necessity, for those that followed, of the total destruction and rebuilding of its political institutions the UK left itself hostage to being perpetually hamstrung by the feudal remnants of Royal Family, House of Lords and the aristocracy. Japan and the Shackles of the Past argues a similar case for Japan. The rebels realized if they were to escape the fate of China and much of the rest of Asia and avoid colonization and dismemberment by the rapacious imperial powers they needed to modernize fast. Appearance was an expedient stopgap for reality. A patina of western-style institutions covered continuity of clan and culture. Japan was the World’s first state-capitalist economy—subsequently copied by many in East Asia—and as such was also able to live the lie.
The act played well. Japan learnt from Europe that a potent mix of tariffs and subsidies created an appropriate “hot house” environment behind which it could nurture industrial development sector by sector. They needed at the same time to look after their strategic interests and the three-way battle for position on the Korean Peninsula with China and Russia had its logic, as did the US’s acquiescence in Japan’s takeover of the Peninsula in the Katsura-Taft Agreement of 1905 in exchange for Tokyo’s recognition of the US annexation of the Hawaii and US interests in the Philippines. The “Gentleman’s Agreement” three years later swapped a cessation of Japanese immigration to the US for acknowledgement of Japan’s special role in Manchuria.
But as Murphy emphasizes, Japan’s problems were domestic not foreign. The Clan leaderships that had guided the transition were losing control to the “young bloods” by the 1920s. In the streets, Japan’s working class was brutally kept in place while the Clan “warlords” fought their civil wars with the anarchy of assassins sword and clandestine military adventurism. Any semblance of democracy and political control gave way to a regime of competing military juntas. Domestic peasant penury was to be solved by foreign conquest. The fight was not over whether to colonize but where. The sole direction of travel excluded was North after Tokyo’s crushing defeat by the Red Army at the Battle of Nomonhan in 1939.
As Japan and the Shackles of the Past explains, the attempt to find an answer to domestic problems abroad set Tokyo on a collision course with the US. Washington realized that its Asia-Pacific interests were under threat from this expansionist drive. Consequently it waged an undeclared “cold war”, tightening the economic screws on Tokyo with restrictions and embargoes on petroleum products, finance etc. Japan’s only two options were to fight or fold. Both sides badly underestimated each other. War was inevitable with no one in Tokyo having the brakes to stop it. For Murphy, the aftermath saw Japan escape facing reality by escaping into victimhood. Forgotten by the West—but never remembered by Tokyo—were Nanking and Unit 731, “comfort women” and forced labor. For Japan Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the “Show Trials” of the International War Crimes Tribunal of the Far East and an US-imposed Constitution offered absolution.
Thus having failed to reform after a short interregnum, it was business as usual with only the names changed. Tokyo was obligated to pay—and pay well—for its own subordination. The zaibatsu reappeared and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)—representing rural areas and small shopkeepers—became what I would call a CIA joint venture dedicated to keeping the hands of the left off the levers of power. The bureaucrats ran the economy with a sense of mission that imbued the Ministry of Finance and MITI with purpose. They and the demands of the Korean War kick-started the economy, while Article 9 of the Constitution fortuitously prevented them from spending their surpluses on the military.
While Japan’s political institutions continued to live the lie, its industry boomed. Japanese goods moved from perceptions of shoddy to desirable in barely two decades and exports drove the economy. Premium blue collar workers got lifetime employment. Salarymen got endless work, expense accounts and “escalator” careers where year on year one moved seamlessly towards the top. Both got baseball as the Yomiuri Giants became the national team with only the “ingrates” down in Kansai supporting the underdog Hanshin Tigers. Women fared badly. They got absentee husbands, and childcare based in minuscule apartments out in the sticks and a collapsing birthrate. For a brief period the G2 meant Tokyo and Washington. Nevertheless, by the early 1990s the Japanese miracle was beginning to look shabby.
Japan had its crash early. But the system saved itself with debt and cheap money. This led to massive speculation and over-heating. Conspicuous consumption was the order of the day with Government spending billions building bridges or tunnels between remote hamlets and consumers having gold flakes sprinkled in their coffee. When the authorities finally slammed the brakes on, the price was the largest cumulative fiscal deficit in the developed world. Yet, in what was the greatest financial collapse in history, not a single depositor in a Japanese financial institution lost money. The Government engaged in deficit spending but along politically pre-determined lines—no makeover of urban housing that would have created thousands of jobs—airports practically in sight of each other in declining rural areas or elaborate museums and galleries in rural towns with minimal exhibits. For Murphy the cost of continuity with the past was stagnation with Japan suffering fifteen years of continuous deflation.
It was during this period that the political settlement started to unravel. This is the core of Murphy’s book: the attempt to break with Japan’s nineteenth century past and its ultimate failure.
This desire for radical political reform, which later came to be called a demand for a “normal” Japan, manifested itself in a number of ways. For some, the reasons lay in the constraints of the Constitution that united both social democrats and neo-conservatives.
The ostensive trigger for the collapse of the LDP hegemony were the corruptions of money politics and the “gerrymandering” of constituencies that made some rural voters six times more influential than their peers in Tokyo. The self-confidence of Japan’s rising economic power created tensions within the LDP’s factions between those satisfied to reform and those younger generation modernists and conservative traditionalists wanting, for different reasons, a revolution. Both wanted different “normal” Japans unhampered by the “Peace Constitution” that would take its appropriate place on the World’s political stage.
The first—the reformists—wanted an end to the morganatic marriage between Washington and Tokyo where the latter did all the heavy financial lifting and the former got the credit. The second— the “national revolutionaries”—wanted a Japan capable of making its own decisions in its own interests rather than serve as a branch office of the HQ in Washington.
This political churn and dichotomy was symbolised by the publication in 1994 of Hashimoto Ryutaro’s (a future LDP PM) Vision of Japan and Ozawa Ichiro’s Blueprint for a New Japan (the latter was a former challenger for leadership inside the LDP whose response to failing to reform the LDP from the inside was to bring down of the Government in 1993 leading to the first non-LDP Administration in 45 years.) This challenge to the establishment had been pre-figured in Manga form in the very popular series Sanctuary (1990-95), to be found on Dietman’s Office shelves, where a reformist politician and patriotic yakuza boss combined to deliver the necessary break with the past.
Temporarily normal service was quickly resumed with Hashimoto as PM in 1996, but the legacy of electoral reform left by the “opposition” Government fatally weakened the LDP’s factions and consequently its hold over the electoral machine across the country. The 1996 election saw the LDP get 48% seats on 39% of the votes. Still the economy stagnated. The LDP’s next iteration was a charismatic populist and right-wing nationalist Koizumi Junichiro, a mild economic reformist but US loyalist. He wanted no truck with a Japan standing alone. He sent Japanese troops to Iraq although they were held under guard by the Dutch as battlefield curiosities rather than combatants. His successor was Abe Shintaro, in his first incarnation, who shared Koizumi’s right wing populism, but failed to provide the patina of reform and the LDP changed its PM twice more as it finally staggered helplessly to electoral annihilation.
The 1993-95 experience had taught the Japanese voters there was an alternative to the LDP. In the interim, the anti-LDP forces had coalesced into the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). A broad church that ranged across from Ozawa to the large majority of the Socialist Party—the remnant forming the vanishingly small Social Democratic Party of Japan that along with the Japanese Communist Party went its own way.
The September 2009 election saw the worse defeat for the conservatives in Japanese electoral history with the DPJ winning 308 of 480 seats and the LDP languishing on 119. The DPJ leader Hatoyama Yukio becoming PM under the watchful eye of the Party’s “éminence grise” Ozawa Ichiro. The DPJ had real alternative political programme that differentiated the now two mainstream parties, with the DPJ bringing a balance to the urban—rural divide, an internal political architecture where the bureaucrats were on tap, not on top, a Japan capable of standing up to the US and one that would build its own economic and political accommodation with an emerging China.
As Japan and the Shackles of the Past tells us in its very title, the whole reform venture proved an unmitigated disaster. Despite their individual flaws, it wasn’t entirely Hatoyama and Ozawa’s fault. There were people out to get them. The US was infuriated that Japan was threatening to go it alone. Obama and Clinton—Hillary—were determined, writes Murphy, to put them back in their place. They deliberately picked a fight. They choose US base re-locations in Okinawa. Okinawa is Japan’s poorest and most remote Prefecture. 50% of the US military based in Japan are on the islands cheek by jowl with a civilian population who strongly resents their presence. This poor benighted prefecture was also unique as it is here that the LDP has almost no purchase. It was all so easy as the DPJ grew to challenge the LDP to slip in the DPJ’s Manifesto a pledge to remove the Futenma Airbase near Naha as long demanded by the local population and long planned but without specifying where it was to go. Washington, relaxed on the issue under the LDP, suddenly demanded quick decisions from the DPJ. In response Hatoyama solemnly promised a decision by May 2010. It was then that I wrote less than six months into the new Administration,
Miyuki—Hatoyama’s wife who he met at Stanford University—believes she was once abducted by Aliens. If Hatoyama gets this coming decision wrong it may well be that many will think they got the wrong one of the couple.
He did, and they did. He dithered, tried to hawk the base off to mainland Japan triggering massive local opposition wherever was mentioned as a possible alternative and finally fell on his sword after a US-induced crisis with North Korea that had Futenma conveniently central to its resolution forced him to back down entirely on his promise. In Okinawa one local DPJ Senator, the rock star Kina Shoikichi, said he would do all in his power to destroy Hatoyama. He didn’t need to: it was already done.
Nationally the DPJ were seen as a mixture of indecisive and duplicitous. Two further DPJ PMs followed in Kan Naoto and Yoshihiko Noda. But the experiment was already dead. Fukushima merely delayed the funeral.
Murphy makes a powerful case in terms of the deep history of Japan’s shaping of the present. The question is whether it’s doomed to shape the future as well or whether the LDP can make the transformation itself when the opposition so spectacularly failed.