ASIAN AFFAIRS ON JAPAN Takashi Inogushi - Professor of Political Science Tokyo University JAPAN'S MEDIEVAL MOULD Two films that I have seen recently have given me an eye-opening opportunity to see one of the origins of Japan’s late medieval legacy. They are Elizabeth directed by Shekhar Kapur and Shadow Shogun by Akira Kurosawa. Both deal with the late 16th century, respectively in England and Japan. What they reveal is how remarkably similar both countries were up to late 16th century and how starkly different they became in terms of the success or failure of absolutist rule. In England, Elizabeth was able to establish an absolute power by severing ties with the Vatican and building the Anglican Church headed by herself, by weakening the Parliament, and by appealing to the broader population. England then was torn between Catholics and Protestants. Mary I, Elizabeth’s predecessor and half-sister, was Catholic while Elizabeth was Protestant. On her death-bed, Mary I asked Elizabeth, who she had feared all her life, not to punish her followers, the Catholics. Elizabeth said to the dying Queen that her conscience dictated such course of action and she would respect such a wish. Later on, Elizabeth, who was courted both by the Spanish Royal heir and by the French court, decided to turn down any such proposal, both countries being Catholic and hostile to any other practice. She declared that she would reign as the Virgin Queen. Such decision was in fact a political gesture. She had to enhance her power base which was split between Catholics and Anglicans, to resist the Church and the Parliament which were in fact trying to reduce the role of monarchy. As for the foreign powers, the Vatican and the foreign countries especially France, Spain and Scotland, kept entangling England in an intermittently negative fashion. Ultimately, by repressing all the oppositions to her, Elizabeth cunningly laid the foundation of English absolutism and, that was an historical turning-point, to the notion of universalism in the governance of the kingdom. Shadow Shogun, by Akira Kurosawa, could not make a bigger contrast. The film is the story of Nobunaga, and its failed attempt at absolutism. The film portrays the famous battle of Nagashino in 1575, hailed as the first military battle with a systematic use of firearms on a massive scale. It is only in 1641 that a similar battle with a systematic use of firearms would take place in Europe. At Nagashino, Oda Nobunaga, using 3,000 guns, smashed the cavalry division of Takeda Katsuyori, on his way to the unification of late medieval Japan emerging of a century of war (the period known fittingly as the Warring States period). From his tiny fiefdom in central Japan, Nobunaga set out first to defeat his neighbouring warlords. He then destroyed two rebellious Buddhist sects, on north of Kyoto, known as “Pure Land", the other in the mountainous South, known as the “Heavenly Base”. Nobunaga did not stop there. He also took over Sakai,a merchant republic. As a ruler, although a medieval warring lord, Nobunaga was open to Western technology, religion and many other modern ideas, Not surprisingly, very much like Elizabeth, his enemies were numerous. They conspired to assassinate him. Besieged and in an hopeless position, Nobunaga finally set fire to a temple before killing himself rather than being captured and killed by his enemies)\. Thus the most vigorous attempt to establish absolutism and possibly universalism in the governance in Japan foundered midway. Although thereafter came a hodgepodge unification of Japan in two steps, firstly by Toyotomi Hedeyoshi, followed by Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japan, in my view, is still living with the legacy of the failed Nobunaga. Notwithstanding, Tokugawa Ieyasu is widely said to have set the most enduring foundation of Japanese society and politics mainly because the Togugawa shoguns ruled from 1600 to 1868. His legacy is however one of a late medieval system blending with early modern features. Japan under the Tokugawa period was a mixture of central authority, with some federal pretension, three hundred odd fiefdoms having some kind of basic autonomy, barring defense, diplomacy and external commerce. Over time, each fiefdom known as a domain was bound to develop its own set of features, much of which have survived until now, their main common characteristics being to be impervious to change. What happened was this: in those three hundred odd domains, the people residing in fortified towns, being disarmed and dispossessed of land ownership by the Tokugawa, became the bureaucrats of the central authority. However, the central authority being weak, the bureaucrats had to run the local politics based on a consensus decision process among themselves, the lords (daimyo) being generally left as de facto figurehead with little or no power. Such method of governance lead incrementally to an ad hoc and pragmatic problem solving attitude, which lacked any content of universalism throughout the country. In contrast to Elizabeth where the elements of a modern society are put together, Shadow Shogun underlines the resilience of the late medieval legacy in the Japanese society, its politics and its economics. That legacy is still very much central to our current social fabric, to women’s place in our society, and our attitude to the perceived role of the Constitution. First, let's look at the social fabric of the Japanese society. Business firms are, in theory, only and exclusively profit seeking organizations. Yet, in Japan, a key feature of many firms often is that they give the impression that they are not committed to a 100 percent profit seeking. In other word, their ultimate goal is not to maximize the profit. Of course, today, because of the current economic difficulties, life time employment has been publicly de-emphasized a great deal. Yet, one can only be struck by the fact that, except for a very small number of business leaders, business firms are trying to avoid laying off people at all costs. Why, if the business firms are having trouble, would the managers resist layoffs? The reasoning could be as follows: layoffs undermine the morale of even those not laid off; a low morale brings about diminished labor productivity. Yet, pure efficiency is not what is at stake. Layoffs in fact destroy the harmony. So, what is happening is that the business firms are playing a dual role, ultimately ending up being in charge of social policy as well. As a result, the striking characteristic of the country is that not only the government but also the business community conduct social policy. Thus, the central government, with a reduced role, ends up being as it was during the Tokugawa days, a small government. And if we look at figures, it is indeed true that the Japanese government is small in comparison to its northwestern European counterparts and to the American federal government in terms of the number of civil servants per population. It is as smallish as the Tokugawa government was and as much as the 300 odd domains bureaucrats were taking care of everything at the local level, nowadays we have 3,000 odd business firms who must take care of the local residents who are mostly their employees or retirees, in good times or bad. There is however one major problem in such a set-up. The business firms, unlike the 300 domains, are stock-companies whose stocks are open to the market. Here lies the first of a series of major fault-lines, for if the business firms are exposed to the vagary of the market, at the same time, one has to admit that labor productivity per hour in Japanese firms is not terribly high at all, since, in any case, it is not their highest priority. Their priority is to produce and sell good goods and services, but those tasks should be in harmony with the social fabric of organization, and in a medieval society, it meant being in harmony with the domain you belong to. And you still are what you belong to sub nationally, be it Satsuma domain (one of the 300 odd ones), Mitsubishi Heavy Industry, University of Tokyo, or Finance Ministry. Because, and that is the legitimacy of the system, these sub national units are units enabling you to eat. You are what you eat. One might think that the administrative and financial reform package which was legislated by the Obuchi-led government earlier in 1999, and the recent one, should produce some tangible results in terms of staff reduction. But, on careful analysis, in the first phase of implementation, the cuts proposed by each bureaucratic agency are shocking in the sense that they are basically the same figures minus the number of those who retire every year anyway. So what does one conclude? That there is no reduction at all. Yes, the late medieval legacy is strong. Inevitably, one may ask, and that question is raised daily in the foreign media, can Japan remain as it is? Or will the tide of globalization force it to subside? And if so, what will happen? Actually and maybe, one would think it is paradoxical, we do not see a problem. After all, the late medieval features of Japan are very much in harmony with the feature of globalization. Indeed one of the largest multinationals' catchword is: "the expansion of globalization, the fragmentation of the consumers". So fragmentation is one of the elements of the globalization. So, even though one might see Japan as an unrepentant remnant of the late medieval spirit and instincts, nevertheless globalization and fragmentation are what Japan most deftly can adapt to for it had been living with them for a long time. But others might simply see Japan as a no less unrepentant remnant of the modern ideology of the nation state, the national economy and national culture. For those, inevitably, Japan is then a failing state and fading economy in its dogged resistance to the tide of globalization and its associated need to trim and become fit. Since Japan's reality is the mixture of both, Japan watchers would have an interesting time for some time to come. Another interesting aspect of the Togugawa legacy, is the role role of women in the society. In the 16th century, the Japanese society was governed strongly by the individualist logic of the warring lords. Each one was competing with his might in pursuit of honor. The novelist Eiko Ikegami in her book, Taming of Samurai, called it "the honorific individualism". In medieval Japan, collectivism was not very much stressed and social organization was based on individualism as collectivistic norms were not found as a primordial principle. One can see this paradoxical attitude in the story of Ikkyu, a Buddhist monk, who fell in love with nuns one after another, breaking the norms of the Buddhist monk community. To him, the pursuit of individual desires was much more important than the communal norms. What all this amounts to, is that a number of feminist studies of the late medieval period seem to indicate that in such an individualistic society, women of that period were far more individualistic than one might think of modern Japanese women in what is today a much more collectivist society. After the 17th century, a so-called early modern society was forged in each of the 300 odd domains. In other words, the honorific individualism gave way to an honorific collectivism within each domain which were transformed into collectivist organizations. At that time, collectivism started to suppress individualism. The change gave birth to a new literature. The pet motif of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, a major playwright of kabuki play, was the dilemma between public obligations and private sentiments, the public and the private, and collectivism and individualism, the two lovers’ inability to pursue their private sentiments and their consequent double suicide. Collectivism was gradually consolidated over time to the point at which, in the mid-19 century, the collectivist logic prevailing in the society, went as far as organizing the 300 odd domains into one centralized sovereign state with, nevertheless, all their idiosyncrasies intact. Accordingly, "messhi hoko",, which means diminishing the private and serving the public, became the absolute norm. Many novels of the so-called modern period are called the I-novels because in them authors of modern persuasion grumbled about the suppressed individualism and talked about their own private life in a depressed mood. Natsume Soseki, himself a depressed individualist, ended up with the quasi-Confucian and quasi-Kantian notion of sokuten kyoshi, that is following the voice of the heaven and leaving the private. Of course, while men’s individualism was much suppressed women’s individualism met an even worse fate. It is only in the later part of the 20th century, I would say, the mid-seventies, that the honorific collectivism was openly challenged in what might be called the post-modern novels. Yoshimoto Banana’s novels, like Kitchen, focused on the inner world of individuals enjoying their psychological dimensions of dense interactions. Since then, individualism has come back in a society while collectivist legacies of the early modern and modern periods are still strong. When individualism is making an atavistic comeback, women are also coming back as a more self-assertive and self-expressive entity and it is a most opportune evolution for the Japanese demographic decline is tangible. The age groups between 25 and 55 are rapidly becoming smaller than those before 25 and after 55. Not only the demographic decline is tangible, but men are no longer enough. Women are therefore a welcome addition to the dwindling productive population group. The government has sized up the problem, speeding up the process of integration. The labor law prohibiting women from working into night has recently been revised in the opposite direction. The pre-revised labor law wanted to protect women’s rights to defend maternity. Employers did not have then much incentive to hire women as a permanent force from among which future executives were picked. Hence employed women with career ambitions were largely unhappy until recently. Under the revised law college graduate women can choose from among (1) pursuit of career at the costs of intermittently working late and usually very hard; (2) pursuit of “office ladies” with light routine work and with the expectation of leaving a firm in conjunction with marriage or birth of a child; (3) pursuit of sengyo shufu, pure housewife role from the start. In addition, public facilities to take care of children while their mothers are working have started to proliferate very steadily after the legislation of the revised law. Private facilities are slower to come but they are also coming along in the same direction. Achievements are however much slower to come. Women are on the steady rise primarily in the public sector. In the private sector a large bulk of them are still only part time workers. In the public sector, public primary school principals and school heads have now a fairly large percentage of women, starting from nil twenty years ago. In the central bureaucracy, approximately one percent of the kachos' head, are women ( a kacho is the lowest department. There are many kachos under one division and many divisions under one bureaus, thus goes the hierarchy). Still able and ambitious women go to the public sector or to multinational banks and firms as there is less discrimination. More salient are international organizations like the United Nations Organization where of all the Japanese UN employees about 80 percent are women. The emerging picture is that of more women labor force’s entry in full time market. Yet one must caution that a fairly large number of women, able and ambitious, in their early 20s suddenly switch from course one to courses three and two in Japan, partly because they are induced to do so by the society. But the point here is that the tide is changing steadily. And ironically, what some would perceived as a progress can in way be perceived as a come-back of the late medieval legacy and its honorific individualism. Of the same order seems to be the emergence of revisionists of the Japanese Constitution among the Japanese parliamentarians. A few months before the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s presidential election of early October 1999, Taku Yamasaki, one of the three candidates, said that Constitutional revision was his dream. Koichi Kato, another candidate of pacifist persuasion with respect to clause nine, said that he would start to massage public opinion when Prime Minister so that Yamasaki, some 10 years from 1999, would become Prime Minister and accomplish Constitutional revision. As for the largest opposition party of center, the Democratic Party (Minshuto), ha has elected Yukio Hatoyama as party boss, man who is in favour of Constitutional revision of clause nine while the Liberal Party headed by Ichiro Ozawa has been pushing for some time already the agenda of Constitutional revision. That such a revision might take place in the future seems therefore likely since so many parliamentarians are talking about it, and so, one might think that Japan may have one day again a Constitution that allows the country to use military force. Whether such a revision would constitute a fundamental change of course for the Japanese state and its society in a direction of internationalism and a more facile use of force is a moot question at best. The arguments for revision have been largely driven by the immediate frustration felt at recent times at North Korea’s missile launching and the illegal penetration of Japanese waters by alleged North Korean boats, Pakistani and Indian nuclear testings, and Chinese sabre-rattling in the Taiwan straits as well as by the vague angst about the way in which the United States exercises its power, especially after (2) President Clinton’s three No’s about Taiwan, considered among some quarters in Japan as close to voluntary kowtowing to Beijing unnecessarily, (3) United States’ handling of North Korea, considered among some quarters in Japan as perhaps correct in a longer term yet somewhat slightly carrot-focused without credible sticks when Japan-related matters like kidnapping of Japanese nationals are considered, (4) United States’ handling of Indonesia, considered again among some quarters in Pacific Asia as somewhat close to U. S.-engineered coup d’état, (5) United States’ handling of Kosovo, considered to be a slightly facile use of force and slightly crude violation of state sovereignty despite the admirable aim of human rights protection, (6) United States’ handling of East Timor, considered as all right initially but somewhat loose in ensuring the matters after referendum, allowing massacre of a fairly large scale to take place in East Timor. The uproar of revisionists seems to be directed at getting Constitutional legitimacy to enable Japan to meet challenges of sorts in a way which would work as a deterrent to potential aggressors or violators. In other words, they seem to be arguing that Japan should build armed forces not to be humiliated by aggressors or violators and to protect human rights and security of Japanese citizens. If this interpretation is largely the case, a Constitutional revision would not affect the Japanese society and politics very much. In other words, a Constitutional revision proposal might not contain things to worry too much. Such a revision would look more like a largely minor Constitutional amendment made a number of times in Germany for the last half a century. But if the discontent of revisionists derives from anti-Americanism, then a Constitutional revision proposal might signal something that would alert the United States about Japan. My sense is that anti-Americanism cannot grow very far in the near future given the way in which many Japanese eggs have been placed in one basket called the United States and given the way in which Japanese have developed their norms and thinking about peace and security, i. e., inward looking pacifism. It would take one generation at least, not ten years, as Yamasaki dreams, to achieve a Constitutional revision. It seems to me that the nature of such a revision will be determined more by international environments where Japan’s two neighbors, China and the United States, are likely to go through a fairly dramatic transition -quasi-democratization in China’s case and quasi-isolationism in the case of the United States- in two to three decades’ time than by the Japanese societal psyche, which is in the basic long transition from collectivism to individualism and in which national war mobilization has become a thing of the past. It seems to be plainly wrong to assume that any Japanese coming to terms with armed forces immediately means the revival of Japanese militarism because the Japanese societal psyche and institutions are moving away very slowly but fairly steadily from collectivism, centralization, and national mobilization to individualism, decentralization, and global minglings. Many foreign observers are puzzled when they looked at the position of women in our society, the Japanese social fabric and the arguments we have about the Constitution. In my view, the Japanese society should be looked at as a society shaped deeply by an history that goes far beyond the one and half century long Meiji-Showa periods of national centralization and mobilization they generally refer to. Our late medieval legacy and its early modern reformulation in the Japanese society may have much more profound influence in reshaping the society in the new millennium than it is generally thought. Such atavistic and opportune comeback of the honorific individualism may give an interesting twist to the society at a time where the fragmentation of national polity, national economy and national culture and the tremendous expansion in the number of choices to individuals are two other irrepressible features. Autumn 1999 | |||
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