So it was that Nissan was finally ready to join in Japan’s challenge to the West. Japan was ready for that challenge well before most Westerners could imagine. What looked to most Westerners like a poor, ravaged, helpless society was becoming, by the early fifties, a disciplined one with a singular sense of national purpose. Its leaders’ vision had been surprisingly consistent. Even as World War II was ending, they were planning the nation’s future. The dream of Japanese greatness through military power had proved a false and destructive one. The ashes of that dream were all around them. There had to be another path. Quickly a consensus evolved: Japan was so limited in size and natural resources, so vulnerable—as seen at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to modern weaponry, that it could become strong only if it focused all of its energies on commerce and completely avoided military solutions.
In the dark days of the end of the war, Saburo Okita, who was to become one of the principal architects of the postwar Japanese economic miracle, remembered an old Japanese legend. It was about a man who wanted to become a great warrior. He spent all of his money on arms and shields instead of food; more and more burdened by the weight of his armament and ever weaker from lack of food, he was easily slain in combat. The moral was clear: Little Japan in a world of superpowers like the United States and the Soviet Union must conserve its energies and derive its power solely from its human and commercial strengths. It could waste nothing, and for any nation, particularly one so devoid of resources, military expenditures were a waste. Because he used an economist, Okita had known since 1941 that Japan’s industrial production was declining every year, and thus had understood long before almost anyone else in the country that defeat was inevitable. As the war wound down, Okita and others, mostly young economists, had held clandestine meetings, slipping past the military police of a dying empire to plan the new Japan. Among the lessons of the immediate past, they realized, was the fact that the American victory had been based not on greater valor, though the Americans had fought bravely, but on technological supremacy. The new Japan must be highly modernized and mechanized. There might be some blessing in all the tragedy of defeat that was around them, Okita thought, for a new, highly industrialized, far more pragmatic society, one less burdened by ancient vainglorious myths, might rise in its place.
Most of the parts—at least the nonphysical parts—were already there. Japan was not like most other Asian nations, trying to escape a colonial past; it was fiercely independent, likelier to colonize than be colonized. It was well on its way to becoming an urban rather than an agricultural society. Its people adapted well to modern times; there was no problem, for example, in adjusting the birthrate to urban conditions. In addition, Japan had a highly developed public educational system, as good as those of the leading industrialized nations, and it would be easy enough to add on an additional element, a far greater engineering component for university students. The religion, unlike religions in some parts of the underdeveloped world, was not a hindrance to a society trying to enter a modern scientific world; the basic religion, Confucianism, was almost an educational system itself. It strengthened the role of teachers and helped confirm the power of the hierarchy in all aspects of daily life. The idea of nation, albeit badly shaken by the experiences of World War II, was still powerful, almost a religion itself, for Japan was innately cohesive; it was in truth a nation that, because of language, history, and geographical separation, thought of itself as a race. Thus all Japanese were apart from everyone else, and connected to each other and dependent on each other. In Japan, foreigners were not Russians or Americans or Frenchmen; they were first and foremost gaijin, not one of us. Though Japan might look ravaged to the Westerner, the essential tissue of the nation remained largely undamaged. If anything, postwar Japan was more cohesive, for the reforms imposed by the Americans made it more egalitarian, heightened the sense of economic and political justice, and diminished the often suffocating power of the old order. By the early fifties it was clear that the postwar Japan was a more equitable one. Men like Honda, with his own auto company, were unlikely to have emerged as major entrepreneurial industrialists in the prewar era.
The essential cohesiveness—the shared condition which bound all Japanese together—allowed economic architects like Okita, planning for the next ten years, to assume considerable sacrifices on the part of ordinary people, sacrifices that they unfailingly made. Certainly Japan was a country that at that moment lent itself to serious economic planning. But this was not just because the Japanese were dutiful and obedient. Rather it was because what Okita was planning—a kind of shared economic growth, good for the state, good for the citizen—was what the average Japanese wanted. Japan as a nation needed to be made strong and viable again, yet on the same agenda was a desire to let people lead better lives. That life for ordinary people soon improved in many small increments helped Okita and men like him immeasurably. Yet Japan often seemed perplexing to Westerners. By Western standards, it did not feel like a democracy. The Japanese seemed more cautious in their exercise of personal freedom than Westerners. Was this then a mock democracy, an essentially authoritarian country? How much free will was involved in all this?
The answer was not that the government of Japan was authoritarian, for it was not, but that the condition of Japan was authoritarian, harsh, unsparing. There were too many people on too small and unsympathetic a piece of land, there was too little to go around if individuals became too selfish. Given the contradiction between its physical condition and its intense ambitions, Japan would have to be either a carefully controlled communal society or a bitterly divided and selfish one. The only way the society could achieve greatness was if the average Japanese accepted considerable limits on his own possibilities. He had to give as much as he could and not ask for too much in return. What really restricted personal freedom in Japan was not so much the written laws as the unwritten covenants. For many talented Japanese these convenants were not always easy; one of them compared it to having a racing car but spending your life in a forty-five-mile-per-hour speed zone.
Japan was evolving its own unique form of state-guided communal capitalism. It was not the American variety; its roots were in Japanese communal traditions, and the obligation of the individual to the larger group. It reflected the belief that a largely uncontrolled capitalism such as existed in America might be ruinous for Japan, that without sufficient controls too few men would become too rich in too poor a nation. That would create intolerable tensions and divisions, so the state and the capitalists themselves had to regulate it. It was the job of the key government ministries to concentrate the nation’s limited resource in areas where it could best serve Japan. Japan would be an industrialized capitalist society, but the capitalism must fit the needs and specifications of Japan.
In the postwar years, the leaders of Japan relied on this tradition, the communal nature of the nation, to build an extraordinary industrial base. The economic good of the nation was deftly balanced with the economic good of the individual. The good of the state would not deprive the individual of all personal expectations.
In Eastern Europe, as the state bureaucrats reinvested relentlessly in their own heavy industries, the workers felt that they were the servants, not the beneficiaries of the state, and the Communist economies, shorn of any true community on the part of the workers, began to stall of their own sluggishness.
By contrast the men running Japan knew that consumer goods must eventually be available, there must be some material rewards and some incentives. The workers must also become good consumers. So it was that, starting in the early fifties, there was a sense of Japan’s slowly entering into the middle class. The early postwar years, however, were ones of industrial rebuilding and of immense human sacrifice. The smokestack industries came first. All material comforts and pleasures had to wait while the railroad system and the steel, shipbuilding, and petrochemical industries were rebuilt.
The Japanese, like the Americans upon whose society they intended to m
odel their own, wanted to belong to the oil age. That was a considerable challenge for a nation so poor that it could in the beginning barely afford to buy its first postwar barrels of oil. There was a time right after the war when Japan seemed caught in a vicious circle: To make steel the Japanese needed coal, and they were capable of mining just so much coal. The economy was barely able to sustain itself. Okita thought of Japan as a sick man with just enough food to stay alive but not enough to get well. Finally Yoshida, the prime minister, asked Okita to draft a letter to MacArthur asking for the right to buy twenty thousand tons of heavy oil to make steel. That would allow them to break out of the vicious circle. For several months they heard nothing from MacArthur’s office. Then the word came back: Yes, the oil was available, and they could have it for the steel industry. It was, thought Okita, the first Allied decision on behalf of the new Japan. Until then there were fears that the Americans might require Japan to be a backward agrarian society and nothing more. This decision on the oil was the first signal that the Americans might allow Japan to industrialize.
In the beginning the state put its efforts into steel. Steel was essential to a developed industrial society. In 1853, Commodore Perry had sailed into Tokyo Harbor aboard what the Japanese forever after called “the black ships,” and the era of Japan’s isolation had ended. The black ships were made of steel, and they symbolized the gap between the mighty, advanced West and the backward, feudal Japan. For Japan was a shipping nation, and yet it lacked these powerful steel vessels, which were both carriers of trade goods and awesome new weapons of war. Perry’s arrival meant to the Japanese that they had lost their most precious thing, their shipping rights. From then on the power of the steel men in Japan was unquestioned. Steel is the nation, went a Japanese saying. If the nation had a strong steel industry, then it would have a strong shipbuilding industry, and it would be a powerful, respectable nation again. Thus the efforts in the postwar years centered first and foremost on steel. The recovery did not come easily. At the end of the war only three of the nation’s thirty-five blast furnaces were in operation, the others closed down as much from lack of raw material as from American bombs. The nation was poor, hard currency was limited, but the government poured much of its treasure into steel. By 1949 Japan had reached its prewar steel-production figures. But the steel was not yet of a particularly high grade, nor was it inexpensive; the postwar inflation kept the cost high. Yet the Japanese steel executives, supported by both government and banks, continued to put money into new plants; the result was an extraordinary modernization of an entire industry, gradual lowering of the price, and raising of quality, all of which would serve the Japanese well in international competition.
The key to this was something American executives, in competition with the Japanese, would come to hate. The great dependence of the Japanese companies on their banks, the high debt-to-earnings ratio that became a mark of Japanese business. As far back as 1949 some of the steel men had built new plants ahead of what the director of the Bank of Japan wanted; that of itself was remarkable, for defiance of the bank was rare indeed. But the steel men were different. It was as if they had even in those terrible years retained absolute belief in themselves and the future of their industry. Later that very same confidence was often perceived as arrogance, but at that perilous moment it was judged to be courage.
The huge debt assumed by the steel industry placed it under great stress, but by the middle of the decade the investment began to pay off. In the five years beginning in 1949, when Japanese steel regained its prewar volume, production doubled, and the plants were so modern that the steel was of very high quality. As productivity increased, the price went down. The Japanese, who always took a long-term view of their markets—selling at low prices in order to seize a maximum share—pushed ahead. For the first time the Western giants going against them realized what relentless competitors the Japanese could be. Given an advantage, they did not slow down but poured money back in and pressed even harder. By 1957, a mere eleven years after its devastation, Japan not only had the most modern steel mills in the world but was the foremost steel producer in the world. But that was just the beginning: In the decade following 1957, Japanese steel production grew by 170 percent—while the American steel industry grew only 20 percent. The American steel industry, believing itself invulnerable, was headed by a complacent and insular management which was slow to bring in modern technology and which, even as the challenger grew more proficient, locked the industry into ever costlier labor agreements. By 1964, 28 percent of Japan’s steel exports was going to America. In Japan, a thrust in shipbuilding followed closely upon the success in steel; by 1956 Japan had replaced Britain as the world’s leading shipbuilding nation.
A decade after the end of the war, Japan had created the base for the strongest and most modern core economy in history. The force of that economy was not yet obvious to ordinary Americans purchasing consumer goods, but anyone attuned to trends in heavy industry saw the surge as enormous. To the Japanese, the sacrifices seemed worth it.
From the start, even as the decisions had been made that steel and shipping must take precedence over all other industrial needs, the Japanese establishment had also decided to funnel its best young people into careers in engineering. The future, as World War II had proved, belonged not to a nation of artisans but to a nation that could mechanize its production. So men like Okita decided to create a great new university system with special emphasis on graduating engineers. Someone who wanted to study the liberal arts needed wealthy parents; someone who wanted to study science needed little help from his parents, for he had the friendship of the state. The basic educational system was already there, and Okita and his colleagues simply added the final dimension, a great new engineering complex which offered thousands and thousands of Japanese a chance to become the first college-educated members of their families, and to serve the nation at the same time. The nation’s educational system, said the historian Frank Gibney, describing the rise of industrial Japan, was “the key that winds the watch.”
The war had made the Japanese more eager than ever to accept outside ideas. What class restrictions there had been, subtle and powerful, had been somewhat loosened both by the loss of the war and by the egalitarian emphasis of the Americans. Perry Miller, the distinguished Harvard professor of English who taught a course on the Puritan past, went to Japan as a visiting professor in the summer of 1952 and was impressed by the degree to which the American occupation experience had intensified a puritan instinct already powerful among the Japanese. The occupation policy, he wrote, “was an effort to make of Japan, a new Middle West—not, of course, the Middle West as it is, or in fact ever was, but as it perpetually dreams of being.” The Japanese respected work, respected their elders and their superiors, were thrifty, and wanted desperately to get ahead. Education was the primary channel for that ambition. Since the Meiji era, beginning in 1844, there had been a strong tradition of poorer families using the educational system to climb in status. Where upper-class elites in other societies were wary of giving lesser classes access to education, Japan was different. In modern Japan the good of the nation was more important than the good of the class. A poor but talented and diligent boy had a chance to rise as high as he could. The status of an elementary-school teacher in a village was, in the postwar years, far greater than that of a teacher in a comparable American small town. The educational system was critical to the rise of modern Japan: It crystallized, legitimized, and modernized values already existing. It removed a great deal of potential class resentment on the part of the poor, and it provided Japan with an extraordinarily well-qualified, proud, amenable, and ambitious working class. If the modern postwar Japan was perhaps the world’s most efficient distillation system, in which remarkably little was wasted, in human, material, or capital terms, then a vital part of it was the educational system: It supplied the nation with the right number of workers, the right number of engineers, and the right number of managers
for every need of a modern society, but, equally important, it brought to the poorest homes the sense that there were better possibilities for the children.
Not only did these new workers have very good basic schooling, particularly in mathematics, on a level well above their counterparts in American industry, but they were much more driven by social ambition. George DeVos, a Berkeley anthropologist who did psychological testing of workers throughout the world, was impressed by the results of his tests on the Japanese and other East Asian workers. They were astonishingly like the immigrants, particularly the Jews, who had been successful in America; they were strivers, their children reflected the immense hopes and ambitions of their less privileged parents, they sought achievement in a society where achievement was honored, and they had been taught in their homes from a very early age that education was the key to their success. They were exceptionally well prepared for an industrial society that had become increasingly, if somewhat involuntarily, meritocratic. The values of these Japanese workers in the fifties and sixties were like the values which had been passed on to the children of American immigrants, values that these Americans, in their affluence, were no longer so successfully passing on to their own offspring.
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