by Ian Buruma
This reading of Hideyoshi’s motives is questionable. The “barbarian-slaying generalissimo” was driven less by fear of outsiders than by his obsession with personal power. The Jesuits were converting too many Japanese, which led to dangerous thoughts. Hideyoshi worried less about barbarian attacks than about subversion and social unrest at home. And his attempt to conquer Korea, and China too, is seen by most historians as the result of his megalomania and lust for power. These are not just pedantic points: Fallows’s reading of history is typical of his tendency to confuse the politics of rulers with the alleged mentality of nations. “Japan” did not feel vulnerable (who was or is Japan?). Hideyoshi wanted to rule Japan, and Korea, and China. A considerable difference.
Fallows thinks that “Japan’s” fear of barbarians then turned the country inward during the almost three centuries of virtual isolation, until the gates were blasted open in the 1860s. There is something to this, although again I would emphasize the desire of military strongmen to control Japan, more than their fear of foreign invasion. This period of isolation, he believes, produced some of the main elements of the Japanese/Asian System: among other things, suspicion of outsiders, cartel-mindedness, centralization and standardization. The last characteristic is illustrated by the observation that modern Japanese cities all look the same. This is, however, not so very surprising, since every city in Japan was reduced to charred splinters in World War II. Still, you get the drift.
Then, still following the course of history, Japan opened up in the Meiji period, and the Japanese became frantic learners, racing to catch up with the West. This national penchant for systematic learning, Fallows tells us, “leads to excesses,” and there follows a charming traveler’s tale to illustrate the point: “At the barber shop, individual strands of my hair were measured, and the lengths recorded, before and after the cut.” I do not doubt his word. I’m sure he did meet such a barber. But I have had enough haircuts in Japan to know that either this barber was an eccentric or there must be something remarkable about Fallows’s hair.
This anecdote leaves the reader with the impression that the Japanese are seriously weird. My objection to this line of reasoning is not that there are no seriously weird Japanese. The problem is that by conflating popular attitudes, cultural habits and the behavior of individuals with trade policies and official propaganda, and then calling it a System, you cannot escape from the conclusion that this System is both natural and immune to change. Fallows writes:
Western ideas more generally are being called into question in Asia, ideas as basic as the primacy of free speech or individual rights. After centuries of having to listen to Western rulers and look up to Western technology, more and more Asian leaders—the politicians, scholars and business titans who would talk about such subjects—now say that the Western model is breaking down and that they have found a better way.
What he is referring to here, quite accurately, is the official propaganda, spouted by politicians, progovernment scholars and some business titans. Calling this an Asian System is to take the propaganda at face value, for there are very different views in Asia too. The people who died in Bangkok and Beijing (at the feet of a model of the Statue of Liberty), after demonstrating for free speech, human rights and popular sovereignty, had no truck with an authoritarian Asian System. Nor did the people who voted for Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma in 1989. The main reason Burmese students protested en masse in 1988 against the military dictatorship was not, as Fallows has it, “economic desperation.” Yes, they were economically desperate, but they demanded a more democratic system, free speech, human rights. Large numbers of middle-class people in South Korea, who were not at all economically distressed, supported the student rebellion in 1986 for the same reason.
None of this means that these people wish to be just like Americans: they only wish to be free of despots. Only neo-Orientalists who cannot distinguish between politics and culture think otherwise. And, by the way, the 1948 UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights was signed by a committee, which included a Chinese. In the words of Dr. Nihal Jayawickrama, a law professor in Hong Kong, quoted in the London Sunday Telegraph, “The problem [with Asian countries] is that their systems of government are not compatible with their constitutions, not that their cultures are incompatible.”
If the Asian System is so natural to Japan, because of “its” fear of outsiders, “its” cultural attitudes, and so on, why did a book entitled Blueprint for a New Japan, by the politician Ozawa Ichiro, become a huge best-seller in 1994? Ozawa is no student rebel, but a former chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party—the very heart of the Japanese/Asian System. He argues in his book for more open government, more popular sovereignty, laissez-faire economics, free trade and fewer social controls. And his main model is British parliamentary democracy. The book sold more than 600,000 copies in a matter of months.
To be sure, another book by a Japanese politician, Ishihara Shintaro, published in 1989, was also a best-seller. This book, A Japan that Can Say “No,” was a nationalist rant, and did indeed extol a superior Japanese Way. Japanese high technology had become vastly superior to anything produced in the U.S., Ishihara said, because of Japan’s unique cultural tradition. Many a gratified reader presumably nodded in agreement. But all this shows is that public attitudes are fickle and thus an unreliable component of any purported System. Fallows moved to Japan just after a Japan Airlines Boeing crashed, and this was not long after the space shuttle Challenger crashed too. This, he says, reinforced the “general [Japanese] perception of shoddy American production.” He quotes a Japanese pollster who said in 1992 that “the Japanese people think we should make ourselves whatever concerns human life.”
No doubt this reflected polls taken then. In 1994, however, the Japanese papers were full of reports on the superiority of American high-tech products, particularly computer software. All of a sudden, America appeared insuperable. These moods, expressed in the mass media, of smug superiority or fear of failure, are whipped up by politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen in order to create or preserve the conditions that suit their interests. These interests can change as swiftly as public moods.
Fallows, like all neo-Orientalists, has much too mechanistic a view of the differences between East and West. Sometimes it results in utter incoherence. One of the basic differences between what he calls the “Anglo-American model” and the Asian System is the “view of power in setting economic policies.” The “Anglo-American ideology,” he writes, “views concentrated power as an evil (‘power corrupts, and absolute power …’). Therefore it has developed elaborate schemes for dividing and breaking up power when it becomes concentrated. The Asian-style model views concentrated power as a fact of life. It has developed elaborate systems for ensuring that the power is used for the long-term national good.”
I am uneasy about the idea of models and systems having “views,” as though they were human beings. Still, I take his point. But, a few pages later, we learn that the “deepest critique of Japanese politics, made by the Dutch writer Karel van Wolferen, is that it lacks a centre of political accountability. In the French or American system, a president must finally make big choices, whereas in the Japanese system (in van Wolferen’s terms) the buck keeps circulating and passing and never stops anywhere.” Fallows does not express any disagreement with this. And it has become a commonplace in Japan too. Politicians and editorial writers are constantly pointing out that the sogginess of Japanese politics, with nobody apparently in charge, is causing political paralysis. It is precisely planning for the long-term good that is lacking in Japan, according to most experts and commentators.
What about this business, then, about the Asian model viewing “concentrated power as a fact of life”? Fallows has an answer: “whether the very centre of politics has been weak, as in Japan, or strong, as everywhere else, the political system as a whole has generally been authoritarian in Asia.” Well, yes—and in Africa, much of South America, large parts of Europe and vi
rtually all of the Middle East too. So what does this prove about the specificity of the Asian System? It is a little ironic that the model for this Asian System was supposedly developed in the least authoritarian country in Asia (with the exception, perhaps, of India). And one which lacks concentrated power to boot. If the buck keeps circulating in Japan, it is precisely because no one trusts any center of power: various centers—ministries, political factions, gangsters—circle one another like hawks.
About politics, culture and history, then, I find Fallows shallow and unconvincing. Perhaps economics provides him with firmer ground. He certainly knows his theory. The question is whether the application of economic theory strengthens his case. The case, as I understand it, is not just that Japan has practised mercantilism. Or that Japanese postwar mercantilism has been largely a legacy of the allied Occupation, which—remember—is “the fundamental source of the endless trade frictions between Japan and the rest of the world.” No, the case is that Japan provided the model for the Asian System, which reflects deeply entrenched historical and political attitudes. Economically, so the thesis goes, the Asian System not only breaks all the rules of “Anglo-Saxon” free-market, free-trade theory, it also works better, in terms of building national strength. And, if we fail to understand it, the System might gobble up the West.
This makes slightly peculiar reading at a time of economic malaise in Japan, with banks sinking in bad debt, and government-led high-tech projects, such as high-definition TV, in tatters. And even as Japan is in recession, the U.S. economy is growing at a good clip. Still, a robust critique of neoclassical economics, or any other dogma, for that matter, can be a bracing exercise, and the growth of East Asian economics raises interesting questions.
As his paradigm for the basic difference between the “Anglo-Saxon model” and the Asian System, Fallows has chosen the rise and fall and rise of the semiconductor. First, American companies led the world in semiconductor technology. Then, in the 1960s, Japanese companies began to compete, and by the 1980s they led the world in some areas, notably DRAM chips. Some people—Fallows being one of them—began to worry that the U.S., and particularly its security, was becoming too dependent on Japanese technology. In 1986 Japan and the U.S. signed the Semiconductor Trade Agreement, forcing the Japanese to buy 20 percent of their semiconductors from U.S. companies. And within a few years some U.S. companies, notably Intel, did well, even in Japan. In fact, Intel does very well indeed: its X86 family of microprocessor chips has about 80 percent of the world market.
Fallows explains the Japanese success in terms of the Asian System: government support of Japanese corporations, a rigged domestic market, endless credit lines, business cartels and so on. In his words:
If the American approach boiled down to “getting prices right,” the Japanese approach boiled down to something different. Its essence was “getting enough money”—not worrying about theoretical efficiency, not being concerned about the best rules for competition, but focusing only on getting the nation’s money into the hands of the big manufacturing firms. If companies could get more money to work with than their competitors, then in the long run they would prevail.
The Japanese approach, in other words, is akin to the Pentagon’s support of certain American industries.
But does this really explain the ups and downs of the semiconductor story? And is the Japanese approach really always so formidable? For there is another version of the story. Japanese DRAMs did well because U.S. computer companies were happy to buy them. They were cheap, and of high quality. The Japanese are particularly good at manufacturing faultless products on a large scale. Producing memory chips is not a question of experimentation, but of perfectionism on the factory floor. This is a strength the Japanese have cultivated. The microprocessors produced by Intel—initially in response to a request from a Japanese customer—are a matter of design and imagination. And this is where the Americans—or, rather, the people of many nationalities, including many Asians, working in American labs—do better than the Japanese. Japanese companies now buy Intel’s chips because they need them, and they would buy them even without a Semiconductor Agreement.
There are other examples of fruitful divisions of labor. The Japanese make the bulk of the world’s fax machines, but the modern chips inside the machines are provided by an American company called Rockwell. Rockwell has kept its place in the Japanese market by better technology, good luck (during the 1980s, DRAMs kept Japanese chip factories running at full capacity) and a willingness to meet the demands of Japanese customers for high quality. It is not at all unusual for small American firms in Silicon Valley, which specialize in advanced design but lack their own manufacturing facilities, to have their chips made in Japan. This kind of interdependence is not dangerous: it is profitable to both sides. As for the virtues of government intervention (in R&D, for example), the Japanese have made terrible mistakes. MITI’s $100 million Fifth Generation Computer Project is but one example.
This is not to say that mercantilism does not have its uses. As Fallows rightly points out, great powers (including Germany and the U.S.) have benefited in the past from protecting their own markets while exploiting the open markets elsewhere. This can be an effective way for developing countries to build an industrial base. As Fallows also points out, there is nothing Asian about this. Indeed, he stresses the influence of German nationalist economic thinking on Far Eastern economists. He quotes the theories of Friedrich List, as the antithesis of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith is set up as the Anglo-Saxon patriarch, as opposed to List, who is an honorary East Asian. List, like many Asian autocrats, believed in national economic power. Consumers were less important than producers. Getting the prices right was less important than boosting national industries.
This is, in effect, a case for authoritarianism. For, unless you believe that it is natural for non-Anglo-Saxons to sacrifice themselves for the nation, then they will have to be coerced through propaganda and, if necessary, by force. Propaganda extols the virtues of unity, discipline, self-sacrifice and patriotism. These can be virtues, to be sure. The question is whether authoritarianism—even the relatively soft kind—is the only, or indeed the best, route toward sustained economic success. It is possible that Fallows, dismayed by the messiness of American life, would like to feel the firm smack of discipline in his own country. He certainly thinks stern measures are effective elsewhere. One of the key sentences in his book is “The most successful Asian societies are, in different ways, fundamentally more repressive than America and most of Europe are, and their repression has so far been a key to their economic success.” I’m not sure about “fundamentally,” but the first half of the sentence is true. About the latter half, I have my doubts.
Fallows comes up with the Philippines as a negative example—an example, that is, of laxity, disunity, too much democracy. The Philippines, he says, imported from America a guiding theory of “rights and liberties first.” The poverty and decay of the Philippines, he writes, no doubt correctly, fortified “Asian governments in the view that a ‘rights-based’ society represents a failed approach.” The thing is, it also fortified Fallows’s view of the same. For what “is it that ‘authoritarianism’ has given to many East Asian countries but that rights-based, ‘American-style’ democracy has denied to the Philippines? It can best be thought of as a useful kind of ‘nationalism.’ ”
This is nonsense. Useful nationalism, in the sense of getting the best out of people, is not fostered by authoritarianism. Human behavior based on democratic participation tends to be more energetic and creative than the conformity imposed by autocrats. Open and free societies are also, on the whole, the richest. Japan is indeed in many ways a less liberal society than the U.S. or Britain, but it is freer than ever before. And its economic success probably has as much, if not more, to do with freedom of information, mobility of labor and freedom to travel as with nationalist propaganda. The decline of the Philippines, in any case, was largely the result o
f autocratic misrule. President Marcos’s kleptocracy was both authoritarian and nationalistic, and his economic advisers believed in protected home markets and industries precisely because of that.
When Fallows turns to China to make his case, his reasoning is not just confusing, it appears to contradict everything he has said before. China, he says, might become richer and more powerful than Japan. But that would require “smart” economic management by the government, and “smart management, in turn, would mean continuing to give business—and technological development—primacy over everything else.” Fallows thinks it would be smart for China’s central government in Beijing to relax its control over the dynamic coastal regions of the south. Who could disagree with that? Well, the central government in Beijing. For Fallows goes on to explain that Chinese regimes, centered in Beijing, have not traditionally favored decentralization, since they “have consistently valued matters of national pride and political control over what the outside world might say is ‘rational.’ ” This is puzzling, to say the least, for I thought that “useful nationalism,” fostered by an authoritarian central government that believed in national pride and political control, was precisely what was supposed to have made the Asian System run.