Ikeda had spoken of an “autonomous” foreign policy, meaning a greater sense of Japan’s making its own decisions in its relations with the United States and other countries. In the minds of some Japanese, this grew into a concept of an “independent” foreign policy that would be quite separate from that of the United States and might even involve an independent military stance. Stories and films about World War II became popular, particularly among the generation that had not experienced it. Mishima Yukio, a leading writer, became the open champion of a return to traditional values, including the militarism of the past. On November 25, 1970, he thrilled the Japanese and startled the world when, after haranguing members of the Self-Defense Forces, he committed suicide by performing seppuku. Most Japanese, for all their fascination with suicide, regarded his act as a bit of romantic idiocy. Pacifism and antimilitarism remained strong, and there was no sign of increasing what had become the traditional allotment of 1 percent of GNP to defense expenditures. As we have seen, Sato in 1971 officially formulated Japan’s three nuclear principles: not to produce, possess, or introduce nuclear weapons into Japan. These principles and the 1 percent limit on defense were accepted by almost everyone and still have overwhelming popular support. But to people in other countries, especially to Japan’s neighbors, Mishima’s spectacular suicide seemed a menacing sign of the rebirth of Japanese militarism, and it did indeed symbolize a broader sense of malaise within Japan over its seeming subordination to the United States. To many persons both in Japan and abroad, it appeared that Japan and the United States were approaching a parting of the ways.
Other factors contributed to the apparently growing estrangement between Japan and the United States. A steady and rapid rise in Japanese exports to the United States and some other industrialized countries produced many new frictions, which were soon to mount to mammoth proportions. At the same time, Japan’s underlying anxieties about its food supplies were also exacerbated by several developments. One was a trend among the maritime countries to claim wider strips of their coastal waters, sometimes up to 200 miles, thus cutting down drastically on fishing areas open to Japan.
In the summer of 1973 the United States delivered another “shock,” which roused Japanese worries about its food supply and further undermined Japanese faith in American goodwill and reliability. Fearing that unusually heavy Soviet purchases of soybeans would create a shortage, the United States suddenly put an embargo on all soybean exports, overlooking the fact that American soybeans were a principal source of protein in the Japanese diet and that the highly profitable American soybean industry had been developed in large part to meet the Japanese market. The embargo was soon lifted as being unnecessary, and promises were made to Japan that it would not be repeated, but the Japanese were appalled by America’s easy oversight of their country and its callous disregard of vital Japanese requirements.
The soybean incident proved to be merely a prelude to a far more serious trade crisis—the oil shock of 1973, which grew out of the Arab-Israeli war that year. In October the Arab countries and their allies placed an embargo on oil, which threatened the very life of Japan. Unlike the United States, Japan had scant domestic sources of energy, and it used imported oil not just for transportation and heating but for the bulk of energy to power its industry. By this time imported oil constituted roughly three-quarters of Japan’s total energy supplies, and more than 80 percent of this came from the Persian Gulf. Fortunately for Japan, the embargo did not last long, but the bulk of the oil-exporting nations, calling themselves OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), formed a cartel that quadrupled prices. This was a harder body blow to Japan than to any other major industrialized power. While the United States could reasonably talk of energy self-sufficiency, the Japanese were forced to scramble wildly to secure oil supplies wherever and however they could. The world would never again seem economically as secure to them, and doubts increased about the long-range compatibility of Japanese and American interests.
The 1973 oil shock, of course, had strongly negative effects on the Japanese economy, as it did on all the industrialized nations. Other problems had already forced the government into deficit financing and the first adverse balance of trade in several years, but both conditions worsened sharply as a result of the oil crisis. The whole economy slowed down markedly, and Japan’s GNP even contracted slightly (0.6 percent) in 1974 for the first time since the start of the postwar recovery. Inflation also soared, rising above 20 percent for a while, and shortages appeared in some consumer goods, notably toilet paper.
The Japanese, however, brought these conditions under control more quickly than did most of the other industrialized countries, even though they were not as severely injured as Japan. The rate of economic growth was restored to around 5 or 6 percent and, after a second oil shock sharply hiked prices in 1979, gradually leveled off at around 3 or 4 percent. Such growth rates were much lower than the 10 percent increases in the glory days of the Japanese “miracle,” but they were on the whole appreciably higher than those of the other industrialized countries. Being based on an already huge economy, they added up to enormous annual increases in GNP.
There were several reasons why Japan was able to surmount the oil shocks so successfully. With typical Japanese skill in cooperation, workers, realizing the situation, agreed to reduce the rate of growth of their wages, and business firms accepted government advice to take distasteful measures. Most important, the government and business agreed on shifting their emphasis from labor-intensive industries that required large quantities of raw materials and energy, such as heavy industries and chemicals, to industries requiring less of these ingredients but demanding large inputs of technical skills instead. These enterprises they called the “knowledge industries.” They not only cut down on imported raw materials and energy but moved the economy up a notch by increasing the use of advanced technology in so-called high-tech enterprises in place of the traditional smokestack industries. Japan also reduced the consumption of energy in such ways as emphasizing the production of high-mileage cars that used little gasoline and by recycling waste materials.
The spiraling inflation set off by the oil shocks proved to be the most difficult problem to get under control. A worldwide reduction in the use of oil and the catching up of other prices to those of oil eventually eliminated the pressures of the oil shocks themselves and created an oil glut, but not before a rapid increase in world prices had occurred. The rise in prices was particularly high in Japan, coming as it did on top of the inflationary tendencies of an already booming economy. Inflation rates were in time brought down from two digits to one and eventually to levels among the lowest in the world, but the cost of living kept rising. Land prices, because of the scarcity of usable land in Japan, led the way, rising to ridiculous heights. A National Land Agency established in 1974 proved largely ineffective. Because of astronomic housing costs, most urban Japanese lived crowded into minuscule apartments, and the cost of living in Tokyo during the seventies climbed steadily toward the top, until in the eighties the city finally achieved the dubious distinction of being the most expensive place to live in the world.
The slowdown of the rate of growth caused by the oil shocks, however, did have some benefits. It gave the Japanese a breathing spell in which to reflect on the ills their breakneck economic growth was bringing them. Such growth had produced not only terrible urban crowding but unparalleled pollution of both air and water. In some metropolitan areas the air had become so bad by the early sixties that some traffic police were forced to wear masks and oxygen stations were installed for pedestrians. Mt. Fuji, which once could be seen clearly from Tokyo during much of the year, was by then visible only under extraordinary weather conditions a few times a year. Rivers had become too filthy for fish, and some coastal waters were almost equally polluted. The consumption of mercury-contaminated fish caught near a chemical plant at Minamata in Kyushu produced the world-famous Minamata disease
, and other pollution sicknesses became common. Worsening traffic conditions further lengthened the already long commuting woes of city dwellers. Urban housing remained pathetically inadequate, giving rise, in the late seventies, to a casual British comment that Japanese live in “rabbit hutches,” which deeply wounded Japanese pride. Big buildings threw permanent shadows over private houses and apartments, denying residents what they felt was their right to sunshine, so important for winter heating and laundry drying in Japan. “Noise pollution,” as the Japanese called it, from superhighways, high-speed trains, and jets plagued the lives of millions of people. They lumped all these inconveniences of modern urban living together as kogai, or “public nuisances.”
There were also other more subtle problems. Hitherto Japan had done comparatively little in the field of social security, but the life span of the people had lengthened extraordinarily since the war, becoming among the highest in the world. This meant that much more money had to be devoted to the support of the retired and care for the aged. The great majority of older Japanese, some 80 percent, still lived with or near one of their children, but urban crowding made this impossible for an increasing proportion of the population. Another problem was that, in per capita terms, park and road space in cities was only a fraction of what it was in Western cities, and schools, hospitals, and many other public buildings were often relatively flimsy or dilapidated. Sewage facilities were particularly inadequate, being available to only about a fifth of urban dwellers. A massive redirection of Japanese efforts and resources was needed if the life of the average city dweller was to be improved and not deteriorate still further.
Local protests over pollution cases had occurred as far back as the 1890s, when strong opposition to the pollution of a whole river basin by the Ashio copper mines in central Honshu had finally produced some mild government corrections. But it was not until the 1960s that the nation as a whole began to become conscious of the problem, inspired in part by the rising concern among Americans over their own much less serious environmental problems. The Japanese woke up to the fact that they were literally choking themselves to death on their own industrial success. Further industrialization in the rapid and reckless manner of the past was likely to worsen rather than better their lives. Growth at any price was no longer a viable policy, and quality of life needed to be taken into consideration as much as the quantity of production.
Earlier popular movements, called shimin undo, or “citizens’ movements,” had usually been directed toward big national and international issues and had taken on strong political coloration, but now new kinds of jumin undo, or “residents’ movements,” grew up over these local issues. These sought to put pressure on local governments but tried at the same time to remain nonpartisan in politics. At first the LDP, with its strong connections to agriculture and big business, was less responsive to these movements than were the progressive parties. As late as 1972 Tanaka, on becoming prime minister, issued a much-publicized book called The Remodeling of the Japanese Archipelago, which was merely a plan to spread industrialization more evenly throughout the islands and had the effect of sending land prices rocketing. The greater responsiveness of the progressive parties to these local issues, together with the usual concentration of the opposition vote in the large cities, led to progressive victories in the late sixties in municipal and prefectural elections in the majority of the great metropolitan areas. Among the first signs of this new pattern was the capture of the Tokyo assembly by the opposition parties in 1965 and the election as governor of Tokyo in 1967 of Minobe Ryokichi, the son of the Minobe of “organ theory” fame in the 1930s and himself, too, a professor at Tokyo University of Education. By 1973 progressive mayors had been elected in all six of Japan’s largest cities. The progressive mayors and governors who had come to dominate the local governments in most metropolitan areas were usually elected by coalitions of two or more of the progressive parties, but they commonly had the support of the “residents’ movements” as well.
The sudden salience of these local “public nuisance” problems gave local government an importance it had never had before. For example, Yokohama pioneered in 1964 in pollution control agreements between local government and industry. These issues, however, were in time taken up by the national LDP too. A comprehensive social security system had been adopted as early as 1959 but was not adequately funded until 1965. Starting in 1966 the national government began to go into deficit financing to pay for the increased costs of the social security system and also began to extend health insurance coverage, particularly for the aged, who by 1973 were being given completely free medical care. An Environmental Agency was formed in 1971 to work on pollution problems, and in the next few years the budget of the Health and Welfare Ministry was greatly expanded.
After long years of generally unrewarding court cases, a breakthrough in pollution control was made between 1971 and 1973, when a series of major court cases clearly established the principle that the pollutor must pay for the damage caused. Japan quickly formulated and enforced emission and other pollution controls as stringent as those anywhere in the world, and in 1973 it also became the only country with a completely functioning system whereby factories and even private motorists were assessed to provide compensation for those whose health was injured by pollution. The results were amazing: The skies of Tokyo and other cities visibly cleared year by year, and water pollution lessened. Because of its terribly crowded cities, the problem of pollution remained relatively serious, but, in any case, efforts and investments had been shifted in a major way from single-minded industrial growth to social services and environmental controls that would improve the quality of life.
During the 1970s Japan absorbed the oil shocks with amazing resilience and handled the problems of pollution with extraordinary skill. The country clearly remained very strong and well organized economically, and in many ways a 3 to 6 percent rate of growth was healthier and easier to accommodate than the earlier “miraculous” speed of 10 percent. But politically Japan appeared to be weaker than it was economically. The LDP majority became paper thin and the opposition parties remained so fragmented as to be unable to take its place. Leadership within the LDP also became less firm, and none of Sato’s immediate successors as prime minister approached the lengthy tenures earlier prime ministers had enjoyed, averaging less than two years each. But these were merely superficial problems. Although some people feared that Japan would collapse into political immobility, basic political stability actually increased greatly. Below the surface there was a growing consensus on the part of most of the public on what had formerly been matters of violent dispute, and the once bitterly contending parties were forced by their electoral supporters to take more cooperative stands toward one another. Political changes seemed less predictable than before, but the political process of decision making continued to operate with undiminished efficiency.
One of the reasons Sato had resigned as prime minister in July 1972 was because his long anti-Peking stand had made him unacceptable to the Chinese for the establishment of diplomatic relations. Tanaka Kakuei, who succeeded him, had a very different background. Unlike his predecessors of elite educational and usually bureaucratic origin, he lacked any university education at all, a most unusual condition for a Japanese political leader. He was, however, a brashly self-confident and vigorous self-made man, who had amassed considerable wealth in the construction business. People called him the “computerized bulldozer.” A man of the people, he was widely popular, especially in his home constituency in Niigata on the west coast of Japan.
Tanaka successfully negotiated the diplomatic recognition of China in September 1972, but his position was somewhat shaken by a weak LDP showing in the House of Councillors election of July 7, 1974, when it won only 62 of 130 seats under contest and its majority in the house was reduced from 26 to 7. Two of the leading LDP faction leaders deserted his cabinet soon after the election, accusing him of too-lavish use of mo
ney in pursuing political power, and some leading business institutions dropped direct financial support of the LDP. The main blow to Tanaka, however, was the publication by a leading magazine, Bungei Shunju, in its November issue of an exposé inspired by Watergate reporting in the United States and alleging unethical activities in his use of political influence to amass his fortune and in his use of his fortune to influence politics.
Tanaka felt forced to resign, and after a standoff between his two strongest would-be successors, Fukuda Takeo and Ohira Masayoshi, a third faction leader, Miki Takeo, was selected as a compromise candidate, becoming prime minister on December 9, 1974. Miki was the ideal person for the time, because he fitted the role of “Mr. Clean” in LDP politics, represented the most liberal wing of the party, and was virtually the last active politician surviving from prewar days. Under his leadership, a new Political Funds Control Law was passed in 1975 to make parties and politicians more accountable for their political spending and to reduce the type of money manipulation alleged against Tanaka. The situation, however, remained basically unsatisfactory. Miki achieved virtually none of his real objectives. The regulations on electioneering, in some cases inherited from the election reforms of 1925, remained unrealistically restrictive, and politicians actually used far greater sums of money than the laws permitted. These contributions were donated by business firms (which is legal in Japan), trade unions, and other groups, and they were spent in large part through the politicians’ koenkai, or personal support organizations, which masqueraded as cultural rather than political organizations.
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