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by Edwin Reischauer


  The eighties were economically a period of great activity in Japan, but few important new trends emerged in the social or cultural fields, except for the extraordinary rise of interest in Japanese culture in the other advanced nations, especially the United States. As has been mentioned, there was a veritable boom in interest in Japanese food, design, and culture, from the martial arts to drama and modern Japanese dance. Japan became something of a cultural world leader, and interest in studying the Japanese language increased phenomenally. This was particularly true in Australia and the United States, where the Japanese language began to be regarded along with Spanish and French as a normal subject of study.

  In Japan itself, this was a peaceful, quiet time, in which Japanese tried their wings with considerable success in many avant-garde aspects of culture. Various older trends also continued, though with slowly fading force. The family continued strong, showing little of the decay that was evident in much of the West. Japan remained orderly, with virtually no drug culture or violent crime. Demonstrations occasionally occurred, but they were likely to be demands for the support of rice prices by aging farmers or sober marches against nuclear weapons and for peace, in which more middle-age persons than youths took part. The prolonged and violent opposition to Tokyo’s Narita Airport continued to stir up occasional student demonstrations, the worst perhaps in March 1982, but gradually disappeared almost completely. Similar student demonstrations occurred from time to time, usually over the visit of American aircraft carriers or nuclear-powered submarines to American bases in Japan, but they became much smaller. The firing of five small homemade rockets into the spacious imperial palace grounds in March 1986 and again in August 1987 seemed like futile last sputterings of a passing age.

  There was considerable concern, however, about Japanese education and trends among youth. Most Japanese were naturally proud of the excellent achievements of the educational system. Practically all young people completed the twelve rigorous years of education leading through high school and studied extremely hard during this whole period, usually driven by heavy homework and the desire to pass the examinations for entrance into the best schools at the next level. They showed the results of these efforts by ranking usually first or near the top among the advanced nations in such measurable fields as mathematics and science. In contrast, American students usually came near the bottom.

  The Japanese, however, recognized that their educational system also had its shortcomings. Students were better prepared for taking examinations than thinking for themselves. They excelled at memory work but not at creative intellectual activities and self-expression. Their minds were stuffed with the same facts, attitudes, and opinions, making them even more homogeneous than they already were and less fitted for the international role history was forcing on the country. The examination cram schools that most of them attended usually worsened the situation. In some fields, such as foreign languages, Japanese performed very poorly, handicapped by a rigid, outmoded system of instruction focused on learning how to pass examinations rather than on the speaking of English. School was an unhappy experience for many Japanese children, subjecting them to painful psychological pressures and tending to stifle their spontaneity and diversity.

  One thing that particularly bothered the Japanese about their educational system was the development of bullying behavior among some students aimed at weaker or nonconformist children. Those who suffered most were children who had received part of their education abroad and therefore were likely to have divergent attitudes and habits. The Japanese were particularly horrified that some of the bullying children even attacked their teachers. The number of such cases was infinitesimal by American standards, but the situation caused deep worries among the well-disciplined Japanese. It was feared that the whole race was degenerating under the corrupting influence of economic affluence and social change. The extreme styles of dress and sometimes of conduct of some young Japanese spawned a great deal of conjecture and no little anxiety about the shin-jinrui, the “new race.”

  To Westerners, however, the situation appeared very different. To them, Japanese young people still seemed too homogeneous and conformist to play the role in the world that Japan’s status as an economic superpower called for. Outlandish dress and even the bullying of other children and violence against teachers all seemed to be part of a desire on the part of young Japanese to express their self-identity and also join youth in the rest of the world. From this point of view, young Japanese were making some progress, even if slowly, toward becoming more spontaneous and less suppressed. They seemed more internationally open and ready to mix with the rest of the world.

  A more serious complaint about education in Japan was over textbooks. Since by law these had to be approved by the central government, they were extremely uniform. A textbook by Professor Ienaga Saburo, which was felt to lean too much to the left, gave rise to a famous legal case, which started in 1965 and continued through appeals and retrials until it was finally dismissed in March 1986. In the meantime, a different sort of textbook problem had become important. South Korea, China, and other neighboring countries objected to wording that toned down the characterizations of Japanese colonial rule or conquest. Many Japanese were irritated by such foreign intervention in domestic education, but these incidents usually ended with the Japanese returning to the original wording and expressing apologies. For example, an official Chinese protest in June 1982 against the use of the word “advance” in place of what had formerly been frankly called an “invasion” of China during World War II was meekly accepted by the Japanese a few months later.

  There was enough dissatisfaction with the various rigidities of Japanese education to induce Nakasone to appoint an Extraordinary Commission on Education, which issued several commendable reports. Regulations were relaxed for students who received part of their education abroad, and schools were encouraged to try out various schemes for the education of such students and the improvement of English language instruction. Several American universities set up branches in Japan, and some Japanese junior colleges and universities created campuses in the United States. Foreign students poured into Japan in greatly increased numbers, and literally thousands of native English speakers became official teachers or illegal English tutors. But despite all this peripheral tinkering with Japanese education, no basic reforms were attempted, and Japan did not come really to grips with the major educational problems forced on it by its new international status.

  Japan’s tremendous economic growth brought a great increase in the employment of women in industry and business, as it did in all the industrialized countries, but no great change in the position of women ensued. Although slightly more than half of women were employed outside the home, they held firmly onto their primary roles as mothers, family makers, and the dominators of the home. They paid a price for this by receiving grossly inferior wages, being paid only slightly more than half as much as men in comparable positions. This held true even after an Equal Employment Opportunities Law went into effect on April 1, 1986.

  Women achieved no great gains in politics either. They were often effective through “residents’ movements,” as in a notable fight, largely between 1984 and 1986, in the suburban town of Zushi on the coast west of Tokyo to preserve a forest area as a bird sanctuary despite American navy requests for its use for new housing. The women won a series of local elections on the issue but in the long run got only a compromise settlement. The appointment of a woman to the cabinet in November 1984 was only the first such choice in twenty-two years, though the election of Doi Takako as secretary general of the Socialist party in September 1986 was a significant step forward for women. Perhaps the greatest advance, however, was in subtle, less visible ways. Study and employment abroad influenced many young Japanese men to treat their wives more as equals, and women increased their self-confidence in their relations with their husbands. The wife commonly drove the family car more than her husband, since h
e could not use it for commuting and she required it for shopping and driving their small children around. The role of women, however, still seemed very unsatisfactory to non-Japanese observers, though Japanese women appeared on the whole more satisfied with the compromise they had made among jobs, marriage, and children than were their more activist Western sisters.

  Throughout the eighties there was a slow but clear drift toward more liberal ways. A good symbol of the type of change that was going on was to be seen in the persons portrayed on the bank notes adopted on November 1, 1984. Hitherto they had been great political leaders from the past, such as Prince Shotoku of the seventh century and Prince Ito, the framer of the 1889 constitution. Now they became Fukuzawa Yukichi, the first important popularizer of knowledge about the West in the nineteenth century, Nitobe Inazo, the prominent Christian educator and introducer of Japan to the West, and Natsume Soseki, Japan’s outstanding modern novelist.

  Japan had achieved its status as an economic giant by outstripping in industrial productivity and international trade all the countries of the world except for the United States. It would have seemed natural, therefore, if it had become self-confident in its international relations. But this was not the case. The Japanese knew full well that they depended unequivocally on the outside world for their livelihood. Long historical experience made them still feel a need to catch up with others, even though they were demonstrably ahead in most ways. They felt that they still had to concentrate on their own economic welfare. They were fearful that the other industrialized nations might conspire to undermine them and that the poor nations would expect too much from them. For many generations they had followed a reactive policy, leaving it up to others to take the lead and reacting to what they did in ways that would best serve Japan’s own narrow interests. But now others looked to them for leadership and a vision that went beyond the restricted national interests of Japan itself. The country had made amazing progress in technology, economics, social organization, and political stability, but it seemed to falter in self-doubt when it faced its role in the world. What did it mean to be an economic giant and how should Japan try to play this role? The question of the Nihonjin-ron—what did it mean to be a Japanese?—had gripped the nation ever since the seventies. At the end of the eighties they were still groping to find an answer.

  In the early postwar years, disputes over Japan’s political and military position in the world had shaken the nation, and these still lingered on, though with much less fervor. Almost no one now believed in the desirability of an alliance with the communist nations; neutrality remained an appealing concept but was not seen as very practical; American bases and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces were still opposed by some but without much ardor; and almost all Japanese realized that Japan had become a part of the Western industrialized world in defense as well as economically. In 1973 the American carrier Midway was permitted to make Yokosuka its home port; in 1976 the government openly called for a coordinated defense policy with the United States; and in 1979 it started holding regular working-level defense meetings between the two countries. Meanwhile joint military exercises with the Americans had started, and these grew steadily in size and complexity throughout the eighties.

  One flareup did occur in May 1981 when former American ambassador Edwin Reischauer mentioned to Japanese newsmen that Americans took for granted that their vessels entering bases in Japan or transitting Japanese waters did not off-load their nuclear weapons beforehand. The point had been clearly stated already in 1974 by a former American admiral, but the Japanese public did not pay any attention to it until the so-called Reischauer statement, or hatsugen. The excitement, however, did not last long, since the situation as described by Reischauer was soon seen to be merely common sense. But it illustrated an old difference of interpretation that was allowed to continue. Sato, as we have seen, had himself defined Japan’s three nuclear principles as being not to produce, possess, or introduce nuclear weapons. “Introduction” to Americans meant the emplacement or storage of such weapons, but to the Japanese public the corresponding Japanese term (mochikomi) included casual transit on nuclear-armed vessels. As late as 1983 Nakasone repeated this interpretation, but the whole subject gradually dropped out of Japanese attention.

  Opposition to the veritable Japanese-American defense alliance had become largely pro forma by the latter part of the seventies, when Peking made it clear that it strongly opposed the possibility of Japan falling under Soviet influence and that it much preferred Japan having a close relationship with the United States. This old issue now raised problems only when Japanese prime ministers on visits to Washington waxed too enthusiastic or specific over their nation’s alliance with the United States. There was loud criticism when Suzuki referred to an “alliance relationship” between the two countries in May 1981 and suggested the possibility in June 1982 that Japan might take part in UN peacekeeping missions, and when Nakasone in January 1983 described Japan and the United States as “allies” and referred to Japan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” Usually the Japanese prime minister felt compelled to “clarify” his unfortunate choice of words for the public. But none of this verbal sensitivity changed the fact that the Japanese-American alliance was growing stronger all the time and becoming accepted as a simple reality. An American suggestion that the Self-Defense Forces should take charge of the defense of the approaches to Japan up to a distance of 1,000 nautical miles shocked the public when made in May 1982, but by the end of the decade the concept had come to be accepted as only natural.

  Public toleration of the Self-Defense Forces followed somewhat the same pattern. Most Japanese came to accept them at their existing strength, which, as has been noted, was generally defined as having a budget of no more than 1 percent of the nation’s GNP. There was little protest when Ohira dignified the Forces by speaking at the graduation ceremonies of the Defense Academy in March 1979. More important, the Komeito withdrew its formal opposition to the Forces in December 1981, and even the Socialists did the same “under existing conditions” in February 1984.

  There was much more opposition, however, whenever plans were drawn up to exceed the traditional 1 percent limit on the military budget even by such a tiny fraction as 0.004 percent. One percent was felt to be a virtually sacrosanct figure, but it was, after all, a flexible one, capable of being calculated in many radically different ways and growing rapidly in step with the whole economy. The Japanese government figured it in a way to minimize it in the eyes of the public, but one way of counting it would have placed it as high as third in the democratic world in 1988. Since most other parts of the national budget were being held down while the military portion was allowed to keep growing with the GNP, it was also becoming a larger part of the overall budget. Because of the nation’s tremendous economic growth even during the seventies and eighties, Japan came to have very sizable military expenditures, able to support a well-equipped and trained force, while also assuming a growing share of the costs of American bases in Japan. Many Japanese incorrectly came to assume that the military budget was exceeding the 1 percent limitation, but they were no longer much exercised over the point, since the “peace constitution” seemed to be holding firm.

  Japanese economic ties, cultural relations, and military cooperation with the United States increased greatly in the eighties, and the “equal partnership” talked about during the early sixties, which at that time had seemed grossly overstated, had indeed become a reality. Americans now quite freely called the two countries “allies,” and even some Japanese cautiously used the term. The other industrialized democracies bordering on the Pacific Ocean followed suit. The Australians had at first concentrated with bitterness on the atrocities and hatred that World War II had bred, but when they suddenly realized that Japan had become their primary market as well as source of imports, there was a great change in attitudes. The Japanese language became widely studied in schools, and contacts of all sorts proliferated. Japan an
d Canada also began to build close ties, and both Australia and Canada started to hold regularly scheduled meetings between their cabinet ministers and high officials and their Japanese counterparts, along the lines pioneered by the United States.

  The countries of Europe were slower to change the way in which they viewed Japan. They maintained more restrictions on trade, and when the Japanese emperor and empress visited Europe in 1971, there were unpleasant incidents, in contrast to the unreserved welcome the elderly imperial couple received when they visited the United States in October 1975. As has been mentioned, the United States insisted in 1964 that Japan be allowed to join the OECD, despite European opposition. The Japanese, however, remained in European eyes only semimembers of the community of advanced democracies, but in the seventies a great change began to take place. A nongovernmental group of political, economic, and intellectual leaders from North America, Japan, and Europe, realizing the desirability of strengthening the contacts on the third side of the triangle of great industrialized democracies, founded in April 1973 a private organization called the Trilateral Commission to help pave the way for a stronger and better balanced relationship between these three areas. An even more significant step was taken in November 1975 when Miki was included with the prime ministers or presidents of the five other largest industrialized democracies—the United States, West Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy—to discuss their mutual economic problems at a “summit” conference at Rambouillet near Paris. The “summit” meetings, which soon came to include Canada, met annually thereafter in rotation in the member countries.

 

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