There seemed little to choose between Nakasone’s would-be successors. Only Miyazawa stood out as being something of an intellectual with a broad international point of view. He was, in fact, the first prominent politician since the early postwar years to have a truly usable command of any foreign language, which in Japan normally means English. However, his support in the Diet was probably the weakest. Since there was a deadlock among the leading candidates, they agreed to leave the choice to Nakasone. Shortly before the expiration of his term, he chose Takeshita, who accordingly was elected party president and then prime minister on November 6, 1987.
Takeshita was an astute politician, adept at handling domestic politics, but his knowledge of foreign affairs was considered to be especially weak. There was a change of faces, but policies, both foreign and domestic, continued to flow smoothly in the directions already well established. The LDP’s long decline had bottomed out in 1976, and the party appeared stronger than at any time for more than a decade. If it should again slip in the polls, the centrist parties still appeared prepared to help it out in an informal or formal coalition. No opposition party had won more than a fifth of the popular vote for almost a decade. Political issues that once were violent disputes had lost most of their venom, and typical Japanese compromise and consensus had increasingly become the rule. The LDP provided few leaders who caught the popular attention or served as dynamic leaders in the Diet, but an endless line of less colorful, consensus-minded leaders stood patiently in line waiting their chance at the prime ministership. Nakasone showed signs of hoping to recapture the position, but this seemed improbable. Younger generations of politicians might someday bring a more dynamic sort of leadership, but that seemed a long way off. Short of some international catastrophe, Japan appeared to be politically more stable than any other major country in the world—in fact, more stable then it had ever been at any time since the days of Tokugawa rule.
AP/Wide World Phones
President George Bush calling in Tokyo on Akihito, the emperor of the Heisei Period, the day following the funeral of Hirohito, the Showa Emperor, on February 24, 1989.
Although shifts in prime ministers brought few changes, a new emperor, some thought, might bring a more significant shift in direction. Emperor Hirohito died on January 7, 1989, in the sixty-fourth year of his Showa year period after the longest reign in all Japanese history. His son Akihito took his place at once under his new year period of Heisei, which might best be rendered as “Peace and Achievement.” Many non-Japanese wondered if this change would not be used to revise the American-made constitution and swing Japan back toward old traditions and militarism. This, however, seemed entirely improbable. Almost all Japanese were opposed to anything of the sort, and postwar Japanese institutions had hardened into a strongly progressive, pacifistic mold. Akihito himself was a forward-looking man of 55, imbued with the democratic, peaceful ideals of postwar times and devoted to an international point of view. He and his gracious commoner empress, Michiko, were well-suited to bringing the imperial family into closer contact with the Japanese people and establishing warmer ties with foreign leaders, both roles they were eager to perform. George Bush, the new American president, underscored the strong American relationship with Japan by attending Hirohito’s funeral in Tokyo on February 24, 1989.
Japanese society, tied directly as it was to the economy, was greatly affected in the eighties by the country’s economic surge. Politics may have drifted with prosperity toward lessened tensions and increased stability, but society was vigorously stirred into greater diversity and liveliness. All sorts of new possibilities were opening up, which people seized upon with zest. The Japanese were also beleaguered by new problems, which baffled them but did not smother their vibrant energy. By the 1980s they seemed a different breed from the impoverished, anxiety-ridden people of a few decades earlier. For all their homogeneity, they were swept by a great many new life styles.
Most Japanese owned cars and were less bothered by their cost than by the difficulty in reaching their destinations on Japan’s hopelessly overcrowded roads. They were surfeited by a plethora of wondrous electric and electronic devices, some of which were still unknown in other advanced countries. A wapuro, short for wādo-purosesā, or “word processor,” was as familiar to many as a pen and pencil had been to their parents. They were living in a new world. The cities throbbed with life and cultural creativeness. People were fascinated by new styles in clothing, architecture, and objects of daily use. Probably no other people in the world spent as much of their income on fashionable apparel, decorations, and ceremonies. A Japanese insurance firm made the rest of the world gasp when it paid $44.6 million for a van Gogh painting to help decorate its corporate headquarters. Japanese travelers roamed widely abroad for business or pleasure, or simply to see what the outside world was like. In 1988 over a half million Japanese were stationed overseas, primarily for business purposes and mostly in the West, a third of the total in the United States alone; Japanese tourists had become the most numerous and richest world travelers; and nine-tenths of honeymooners made frenetic trips abroad to Hawaii, the American West Coast, or, for the less affluent, nearby Pacific Islands or Asian countries. Much did remain unaltered in Japan, but for most people life styles had changed immensely.
One simple but revealing measure of Japanese life was to be found in the statistics on longevity. Already in 1973 Japan had achieved the lowest rate of infant mortality in the world, and by 1985 it had the highest longevity for both men and women, 74.54 years for men and 80.18 for women. As with many other social phenomena, this situation had its adverse side. The population was aging rapidly. This “graying of Japan” meant a declining percentage of workers to support the aged and a larger percentage of people requiring expensive medical care and special facilities. The problem was common to all the advanced nations but was particularly marked for the Japanese, who traditionally had cared for the aged within the household or in an attached or nearby apartment. Urban crowding, however, made this solution no longer possible, and the nation faced the problem of creating a whole new system of special housing and medical care for the old.
The problem of crowding, of course, was one that affected all Japanese. Those who happened to own land in urban areas acquired great wealth, but this was not the case for the vast majority who found it virtually impossible to purchase a house or condominium and who found rentals very expensive. They were forced to live in very cramped quarters, so small that they were limited in the number and size of the excellent and relatively cheap household goods they would otherwise have bought. To find even such modest living space, millions of Japanese were forced to commute long distances, often up to two hours each way. Because of a desperate lack of space on the roads, the city of Tokyo passed a law that no one could own a car for which he did not have off-street parking facilities. The result was that many Tokyo homes came to resemble a garage with living quarters tucked behind or on top.
Despite the new wealth of landowners, most of which was soon absorbed in inheritance taxes in any case, Japan remained on the whole an economically egalitarian society with relatively small discrepancies in income. More than 90 percent of the people considered themselves middle class, and most led very similar lives. They lived closely packed together, largely in huge metropolitan areas or at least large cities. Greater Tokyo covered the whole southern half of the Kanto Plain and then trailed westward past Yokohama along the Pacific coast, turning into a great line city that stretched with only occasional small breaks of mountains or farmland through the great urban area of Nagoya and on to the Kansai, the vast metropolitan area embracing the major cities of Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto. From there the heavily urbanized area followed the northern shore of the Inland Sea to the metropolitan region surrounding the straits at its western end and then continued on down the north coast of Kyushu to the city of Fukuoka.
Michal Heron/Woodfin & Associates
A typical Japanese family (parents and two children) at the dinner table in their crowded kitchen.
Japan’s dense urban population accustomed most Japanese to being in crowds. To an average Japanese the almost deserted sidewalks and widely spaced houses of the suburbs or small towns of America seemed almost like a depopulated countryside. Used to living close together, they were forced to crowd even more closely when commuting to work, and even in their free time they seemed to prefer to be in crowds. Amusement centers in cities teemed with people drawn by a great variety of recreations, countless specialty restaurants, and, in particular, hundreds of bars, piled one on top of another in high-rise buildings and each with its loyal but exclusive clientele and special attractions, such as karaoke singing, in which the patrons took turns at singing individually to electronic music. Sightseeing was pursued avidly by large herds of children on school outings, members of village organizations, and women’s groups, which at the proper season seemed to all but obliterate the historic site or beauty spot being visited. Ski slopes in winter and summer beaches and swimming pools were inundated by great waves of humanity. Even traveling abroad, Japanese preferred to stick together in tight bands led by tour guides provided with little distinguishing flags and effectively cut off from contact with the people they were ostensibly visiting. The Tsukuba International Science and Technology Exhibit, held in 1985 in the new academic and science town of Tsukuba near Tokyo, drew over 20 million visitors, and Tokyo Disneyland, which was opened on April 15, 1983, on the outskirts of Tokyo, was larger in area than either its California or Florida prototypes and from the start drew larger crowds.
Peter Menzel/Stock, Boston
Youth culture, Japanese style.
Working and playing en masse can, of course, be a personal preference, but few Japanese liked their cramped living quarters. Small urban streets usually lacked sidewalks; limited-access highways normally were only two lanes wide each way and consequently soon became even more clogged with traffic than the normal roadways; and the bulk of residences were still without proper sewerage facilities. The Japanese had perhaps the highest incomes in the world in monetary terms, but in living accommodations they were still a relatively poor people. Space, though not figured in a nation’s GNP, is a form of wealth, and this the Japanese lacked. A rough guess would be that the average American has three to ten times as much living space as a Japanese of comparable economic and social status. The Japanese might tend his space more carefully, but no amount of work could make up for the great difference in size.
Lack of space led to the side effect of increased costs for many things. With less than 20 percent of the land suitable for agriculture and much of that being gobbled up annually by urban sprawl, Japan could not possibly feed itself. The overall cost of food was greatly increased by the long-established policy of government supports for rice and some other agricultural produce to keep the income of farmers in line with rapidly increasing urban wealth. This policy was in large part the result of the LDP’s heavy dependence on the rural vote, but in Japan, as in almost every country, there was also a strong nostalgic feeling that the farmer and his family constituted the moral backbone of the nation. This attitude has become absurd in countries in which agriculture accounts for less than 10 percent of the GNP or population and most people are several generations removed from the farm, but, if Jeffersonian ideals can still run strong in the United States, it is not surprising that they are even more deeply entrenched in Japan, which historically is much closer to its rural past.
Price supports have become a heavy burden on most industrial countries, constituting a special tax on urban residents to support the farmer and the national myth embodied in him, but nowhere was the burden heavier than in Japan. In 1988 prices for rice, the national staple, were 6 times higher in Japan than in the United States, 9 times higher for beef, and 3.8 for potatoes. The situation was so extreme that supports were finally allowed to level off and in 1987 were reduced by close to 6 percent for rice in the first price cut in thirty-one years. Japan, however, still has a long way to go to achieve reasonable food costs. To do this further demographic changes will be necessary to move most of the remaining rural population to the cities or shift it to other means of livelihood, but at least a conscious decision to help this happen has been made at last.
Japan, like the rest of the industrialized world, became tied indissolubly to travel by cars, buses, and jet airplanes, with the resulting problems of clogged, snail-paced roads, dangerously crowded skies, pollution, and “public nuisances,” the broader term Japanese apply to dirty air and water, toxic wastes, the incessant din of city life, and a number of other things that degrade the quality of life. The Japanese were wise, however, in not allowing rail travel to atrophy. The inadequate road system and impossible parking situation in cities did not permit many people to commute by car, and as a result the bulk of commuters were carried by the excellent national and private railways, and by subways in the larger cities, with buses used to supplement the system. Though crowded, the Japanese transportation system of the eighties was vastly superior to that of any American city.
Between cities, an equally good rail system was maintained, chiefly by the Japanese National Railway (JNR). Its numerous small feeder lines were heavy financial losers, but their services were being replaced with much cheaper bus lines. The JNR, as previously mentioned, started in the sixties an ambitious system of high-speed lines between the main cities. Officially called the Shinkansen, or New Mainline, it is often referred to as the Bullet Train in English. The first section between Tokyo and Osaka was completed in 1964 in time for the Tokyo Olympics, and it was subsequently extended down the north coast of the Inland Sea and across the straits at its western end to Kyushu, eventually terminating in March 1975 at Fukuoka (or Hakata, as the railway station is named). In June 1982 another Shinkansen was completed from Tokyo to Morioka in northern Honshu and still another in December of that year from Tokyo across Honshu to Niigata on the Japan Sea.
Peter Menzel/Stock, Boston
A crowded Tokyo shopping street, temporarily closed to trucks and cars.
To extend the Shinkansen into Kyushu, the straits at the western tip of Honshu had to be crossed. This was done by constructing the undersea Kammon Tunnel, completed in November 1972. A parallel Kammon Bridge was also completed in June 1973. These were the first nonwater links ever created between any of the four main islands of Japan. Shikoku was linked to Honshu in 1977 by an island-hopping bridge system, and in June 1985 two great bridges at the two ends of Awaji Island near the eastern end of the Inland Sea were opened to traffic, permitting quick access by road from the metropolitan Kansai area to the northeastern tip of Shikoku. A much more ambitious undertaking linked Hokkaido with Honshu through the Seikan Tunnel, the longest undersea tunnel in the world at 35.5 miles (53.85 km). The first trains passed through it in October 1987, and regular service commenced in March 1988.
Another large transportation project was the construction of a large new airport for the Osaka area, placed on a man-made island in Osaka Bay, where its twenty-four-hour operation would not disturb people’s sleep. Plans for the airport gave rise to a major dispute with the United States over the participation of foreign firms in the construction work and the supplying of equipment for the airport. The American demands ran counter to deeply ingrained Japanese prejudices against allowing foreign firms to take part in any public undertakings in Japan. The work did not get under way until January 1987, by which time it had been agreed that American firms could take part, but no one believed that this would have any significant economic effect.
Ap/Wide World
Part of the bridge system crossing the middle stretch of the Inland Sea, shown just before it was opened to automobile traffic.
The 1973 oil shock and the resulting slowdown in economic growth had delayed some of the major construction projects because the government already was runn
ing huge deficits. Japan’s tax rate was slightly below that of the United States, and both were far below European averages. The result was embarrassing budget deficits for both countries, though the huge American trade deficit and the enormous Japanese trade surplus made the situation far less serious for Japan. The Japanese government, nonetheless, attempted to increase taxes but met stolid popular resistance and the reluctance of politicians, who were keenly aware of the attitude of the voters. A popular demand for lower income taxes succeeded in 1981 in cutting the nineteen brackets, which rose to a peak of 75 percent, down to fifteen brackets with a maximum tax of 50 percent. On becoming prime minister Nakasone failed in an attempt to raise government revenues through a value-added tax, which would have fallen equally on all consumers, including salaried workers, who were generally recognized as already paying more than their due share. Takeshita proved more successful in passing a value added tax but lost much of his meager popularity as a result.
A more basic budgetary problem was the heavy loss of revenue and enforced curtailment of services by the JNR and other public corporations. Inspired by the example of other advanced nations in getting rid of such costly enterprises, which were likely to be inefficient because of lack of competition, the government began as early as 1982 to give consideration to privatizing and breaking up these monopolistic public corporations. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation and Japan Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation were both made into private companies in April 1985, and the monopoly of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone was broken up in September 1987; JNR was split into eleven private companies, six of them regional passenger carriers, in April 1987; and JAL (Japan Air Lines) was privatized in November 1987, and its monopolistic position abroad was considerably diluted.
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