Europe’s leaders hedged their bets. While Watergate was gaining momentum, they saw to it that every meeting with America ended inconclusively. As a result, an initiative that was intended to culminate fairly rapidly at an allied summit meeting slid into the bureaucracies, which were much more interested in preserving a sacramental liturgy than in reaffirming the values of the democracies. European procrastination was made easier by our domestic vacuum. The President was speaking largely for himself, a fact not lost on our European critics. They could count on a more sympathetic hearing for even their most unworthy complaints about American policy than would have been conceivable in ordinary times. They could be sure that even their pettiest maneuvers were unlikely to be challenged.
When all is said and done, I have to conclude that, though the immediate attempt was doomed, it was right to try. We had posed the correct questions, of which the best proof is that most of them are still with us today under much more difficult circumstances. What finally defeated the effort was the inability of the key countries to mesh their domestic politics with the plain needs of the future — revealing the deepest challenge to modern democracy.
Japanese Perspectives
WE had comparable problems with our key ally in the Pacific, Japan. But Japan was going through no identity crisis; it launched no philosophical challenge. Our disagreements never reached the acrimonious. For Japan’s national style was quite different.
When I first came into office, there was no major country I understood less than Japan. Like most Americans, I admired its extraordinary recovery from the devastation of World War II. But I did not grasp Japan’s unique character. In the West, feudalism was gradually destroyed by industrialization in a process lasting over a century and a half. Japan modernized by merging feudal values of reciprocal obligation with the new ethos of industrial efficiency in less than a generation. The West developed a system of government based on a concept of authority: the right to issue orders that are accepted because they reflect legal or constitutional norms. Japan relies on consensus. A leader’s eminence does not imply a right to impose his will on his peers, but the opportunity to elicit their agreement — or at least give the appearance of doing so. High office in Japan does not entitle the holder to issue orders; it gives the privilege of taking the lead in persuasion.
Almost anywhere else, such a system of government would lead to stagnation. But Japan is not like anywhere else. It has built a great civilization on its constricted islands almost in isolation from all other countries. Receiving a cultural impetus from China, Japan endowed it with its own subtle and special forms, blending it into a heritage that has made Japanese society more like a family than a state. In its complex style, meanings and intangibles are understood the same way, enabling decisions (that anywhere else would be made by the political process) to emerge from a social consensus. Whether Japanese culture was imposed by the requirement of coexistence on crowded islands poor in resources, or whether Japan thrived as a result of its culture, is a subject for the anthropologists.
In any event, there is no doubt that the symbiosis between social values and political structure has produced an extraordinary record of achievement. Like many countries that later were colonized, Japan in the late nineteenth century faced what seemed to be a harsh choice between Western modernization and traditional ways. Japan was “opened up” by force of arms. But this did not elicit submission. On the contrary, the Japanese ruling groups opted for whatever was necessary to maintain control over their national destiny — which meant contemporary science and industry. That Japan managed to do the seemingly impossible, that it acquired a universal technology and conventional political institutions and yet remained culturally distinctive, was unforeseeable at the moment of decision. Japan risked its identity to be able to assure its independence — an act of extraordinary courage and devotion.
By contrast, Imperial China, facing similar pressures, did not dare to risk what had seemed to make life worth living; it relied on diplomatic skill to manipulate foreigners even from a position of impotence. At the cost of constant humiliation it avoided total colonization by giving the maximum number of nations a stake in exploiting China and preserved a margin of autonomy by playing off competing greeds against each other.
Japan had no such confidence in its cultural preeminence or diplomatic skill. It decided first to become so strong that no foreign nation would dare to impose its will. In time Japan achieved a position from which it could impose on other nations what it was determined to resist for itself: It launched itself on the road of colonization.
All this was achieved in one generation by methods that were to become standard for Japan. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, study missions were sent abroad to learn the techniques of the most successful nations in all fields: military affairs, government, business, education, the arts. Britain was emulated for its navy and parliamentary institutions, Germany for its army, America increasingly for its technological know-how. The lessons were assimilated by a leadership group of amazing cohesiveness, deftly expert at combining the experience of the West with the essence of Japan.
After the debacle of World War II, Japanese leaders set about with characteristic tenacity to restore Japan’s position. They brought Japan to superpower status economically and to democracy internally. Until now they have refrained from claiming a corresponding international role because of the shrewd judgment that an assertive foreign policy would exceed the world’s tolerance for unbridled economic competition and might jeopardize the inexpensive military protection provided by the American security guarantee.
The methods by which that advance was achieved were well tested. The leadership group set carefully considered long-range goals. Consensus did not emerge from a compromise between individual preferences; it was based on meticulous investigation of major trends at home and abroad. Japan spent more on research into foreign practices and used it more effectively than any other major industrial country. Consensus became a method to explore the most effective way of dealing with the future rather than — as is the temptation elsewhere — a system of ratifying the status quo. Only a country of marvelous morale and cohesiveness could have managed the discipline to set social priorities without making them explicit in formal law; to define national objectives that involve shifting labor to new technologies and new products without significant social conflict.9
Japan’s economic resurgence was based on a unique set of institutions: a paternalistic labor-management relationship and social structure in which employees are hired in effect for life and are treated as partners cooperating for the common good; a public opinion that is formed by participation in every aspect of the decision-making through media that philosophically are themselves part of the consensus. (This is why the Japanese government finds it so difficult to keep secrets. Openness is inherent in a style in which government and media think of each other not as adversaries but as participants in the same process.)
The Japanese system has not been easy for Americans to comprehend. It took me a long time to grasp how decisions are made, and even after I had understood some of it intellectually I did not always perceive the application to specific circumstances. For one of the features of the Japanese system is its opaqueness to outsiders. It is not that Japanese leaders mask their intentions, though if they choose — which is not always — they can be exceptionally discreet. It is rather that there are fewer secrets in the Western sense than in the decision-making process of conventional bureaucracies. In the other industrial democracies, a problem is defined; the options are identified; someone chooses between them or compromises among them. Bureaucratic self-will and substantive concerns merge. There is either an identifiable winner and loser or else an amalgam of views reflective of a balance of forces. At every point it is possible to define the state of bureaucratic play.
In Japan, by contrast, everything is geared to avoid confrontation. There is no clear-cut elaboration of a formal position. There is a lo
ng process of consultation designed to achieve not compromise but a sense of direction. The art of Japanese decision-making is to avoid commitment in the early stages of the process, to enable a serious deliberation to go forward in which participants have the option of changing their minds and the need for decision is avoided until genuine agreement exists. Thus, even if outsiders could obtain correct information about the internal state of play — no easy matter — it would do them little good because the early stages of the process are amorphous and its subsequent evolution depends on group psychology.
Japan thereby acquires an enormous advantage. There is literally no one capable of making a decision by himself. Only amateurs would seek to pressure an individual Japanese minister; even when he yields out of politeness, he cannot carry out his promise. But when the consensus has formed, for whatever reason, it is implemented with speed, determination, and breadth unmatched by any Western country. So many key people have been involved in the decision-making process and they understand the implications of what has been decided so well, that they achieve tremendous momentum. What could be more effective than a society voracious in its collection of information, impervious to pressure, and implacable in execution?
A foreigner underestimates Japanese leaders at his peril. It is true that they are not as conceptually adept as, say, the Chinese, as articulate as most Europeans, or as boisterously open and forthcoming as Americans. They have not been selected for any of these qualities. They gather intelligence about foreigners; they do not seek to persuade them with words. They chart future actions for their society; they do not need to articulate its purposes in rhetoric.
In Japan, the key skill of leadership is the ability to form a consensus not by talking people into what they do not wish to do but by making people wish to do what is in the common interest. Japanese diplomats almost never communicate by the usual process of putting forward a proposition that then becomes the subject of negotiation. This would imply that they have the power of individual decision. It would place them in the embarrassing circumstance of implying that they can change what they did not decide, or of refusing a compromise, or of imposing their will as a last resort — all acts that would offend the legendary courtesy of a country whose social conflicts are resolved without providing a scorecard of winners or losers.
The typical Japanese leader is impelled by his culture to avoid explicitness in dealing with foreign counterparts — at nearly all costs. This creates an almost impenetrable cultural barrier in diplomacy, which in its Western version is geared to a systematic search for the common ground — a practice the Japanese ethos actively discourages. At international conferences the chief Japanese delegate rarely speaks, sometimes seems to doze, while his associates scrupulously write down every word that is being said for later study in Tokyo. The Japanese position generally is put forward once in a carefully drafted statement. Afterward, there is very little give-and-take, but neither is there an assault on the positions of other parties. The views of the other participants will be analyzed in Tokyo. They will evoke a response, but it will emerge from a careful calculation of Japanese imperatives, not from a reaction to the requirements of a conference. It is a dangerous mistake to think of Japanese leaders as unimpressive and to confuse their inarticulateness with lack of perception. In Japan, eminence is reached after a long apprenticeship that ruthlessly weeds out the second-rate. But it rewards the ability to shape Japanese decisions in a Japanese context, not in the ebb and flow of a conference whose procedures seem accidental — indeed, almost arbitrary — to Japanese leaders.
In any event, by the time Japanese leaders appear at international conferences they have usually done far more homework than their counterparts. They reason that an unprepared meeting will force someone to yield or result in a compromise serving nobody’s purpose. Japanese leaders therefore tend to make their concessions before a diplomatic encounter by preparing negotiations as meticulously as all other decisions. They obtain the necessary information through a flood of unofficial emissaries, many of high status — former Prime Ministers, or present high party officials temporarily without a ministry, for example. These have the advantage of not being able to commit the government. They cannot be blamed for failing to put forward a position because they cannot be expected to have one. But their experience superbly equips them to explore the thinking of their interlocutors, which is then incorporated in the decisions made in Japan that, to do Japanese leaders credit, usually take seriously into account the points of view of other nations.
Japanese diplomats, like other Japanese leaders, seek not victory but consensus; they know that in a society of sovereign states an imposed view offers no guarantee of willing execution. Japanese diplomats bend their efforts toward a disciplined process of conciliation. They will adjust their own position if necessary — preferably before a conference, if necessary afterward, but only most reluctantly during the course of a negotiation since the Japanese system confers on no minister an individual right of decision.
If one wishes one’s point of view to be taken into account by the Japanese government, it must be conveyed early before the consensus has had a chance to form and preferably through a technically unofficial but highly respected Japanese. By the same token, when a Japanese diplomat of high rank — and even more, a minister — asks a question, he is rarely seeking enlightenment. He is putting forward the consensus in the most tentative, hence the least demanding, manner. At that point, a meeting of minds is expected. If there is a genuine disagreement, it is important to present it gently to permit an adjustment without loss of face. And one must not expect one’s Japanese opposite number to be in a position to respond immediately; time must be left for a change of course.
The erosion of distinctions between the official and the unofficial, the oblique manner of presentation, the seeming (and misleading) imperviousness to counterarguments can confer a maddening quality on encounters with Japanese diplomats. It can also lead to grave misunderstandings. In my early years in government I ignored unofficial emissaries, misunderstanding their “official” role. I listened carefully to what Japanese diplomats said but, more often than not, missed the intangibles that they attempted to convey. When we had a problem, I sought out the responsible minister and tried to persuade him to our point of view. Nonplussed by such lack of delicacy, too polite to admit that he had no authority to make a decision on his own, the hapless minister would seek refuge in evasion or, if pressed to the wall, would agree to propositions he did not know how to implement.III
When I visited Japan in November 1973, following my trip to China, all these tendencies were being put to the test. It was a difficult time in Japanese-American relations because the same pressures panicking Europe afflicted Japan, if anything, more. The energy crisis shook Japan to its core. Like the rest of the industrial world, Japan had built its prosperity on cheap energy. It was almost totally dependent on outside sources, importing 90 percent of its requirements. The cutback in Arab oil production, the beginning of price rises (they had been nearly doubled in October), and the pressures to link oil to a pro-Arab stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict confronted Japan with a serious dilemma. Heretofore its foreign policy had been nonassertive. It had tied its security to our military guarantee, and Japanese leaders, unlike some of their European colleagues, understood that one cannot have the advantage of every course of action: If one is protected by a foreign power it is reckless to pretend that there is an unlimited margin for dissociation on key issues. Nor did the Japanese leaders feel the European need to establish their identity by needling the United States.
And yet by November 1973 Japanese leaders, just like their European counterparts, began to feel — with some reluctance — that their national interest might require them to dissociate from American policy in the Middle East. Japanese leaders became convinced that their public required a demonstration from them that they were doing something about the energy crisis — never mind what.
This did
not mean that the Japanese leaders personally disagreed with the substance of our Middle East policy. They never stated an explicit view to us and perhaps did not form one, because Japanese leaders waste no capital on matters they cannot influence. What was involved was more fundamental. A corollary to Japan’s sense of its impermeable uniqueness is an uncanny adaptability to requirements affecting Japanese survival. Japan abandoned feudalism for militaristic autocracy and the latter for democracy under the impact of shocks from the outside. In each instance, Japan decided — perhaps not even entirely consciously — to accommodate to an external pressure, in ways that would preserve Japan’s essence. The issue for Japan’s leaders was not the merit of the various points of view — to which they were largely indifferent — but a calculation of pressures that needed tending.
Japan’s initial reaction to the oil embargo and production cutbacks was its rote response of reliance on the United States. Thus Japan did not join the European Community when on November 6 the Europeans publicly affirmed objectives in the Middle East contrary to our stated policy. But by the time I reached Tokyo on November 14, there had been second thoughts. What had been reassessed was not the substance of our strategy but the impact and the likely persistence of the Arab stranglehold over oil production. If the energy crisis reflected a new trend and not an aberration, Japan could not risk being simply an appendage to American diplomacy. This was true whether the step-by-step approach succeeded or failed; Japanese leaders claimed that they were agnostic on that issue and I believed them. If our policy failed, all the frustrations of the Arab world might fall on Japan — as Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka pointed out to me. But even a successful American policy might cause Japan to appear irrelevant to the oil producers; we would get the credit while Japanese concerns were neglected.
Years of Upheaval Page 109