The mega-corporations of Japan are not noted for scouring the common rooms of the Academy for Western Professors of Philosophy to install on their boards of directors. But a couple of months after I arrived in Japan I was invited to the headquarters of one of these great organizations. It seemed that they were planning a new investment fund for Europe, and were thinking of interviewing me for a gratifyingly lucrative position on the Fund’s international board. A combination of curiosity and aversion to looking a gift horse in the mouth made it hard not to go along for the ride, and so I agreed to attend a preliminary meeting where they could find out more about me.
I was escorted to the seventeenth floor of a gleaming new building and straight into a large boardroom, where several middle-ranking functionaries were dutifully waiting for me. Their demeanours were pristine; their bland stares gave nothing away that hadn’t been pre-cleared with a superior; and they evinced that perfect self-censorship that can make each Japanese his or her own oppressor, so that the whole country resembles a dictatorship without a dictator.
The boardroom was smart, but low-key and functional by Madison Avenue or Mayfair standards. I small-talked cautiously with my cohort of hosts, though the unspoken thought on all our minds was that the head honcho hadn’t shown up on time. Nor did he show up soon afterwards; and since only small talk was permissible before his arrival, we were forced to grope around for more banalities, steadily running out of things to say about the cherry blossom season, whether Westerners could stomach raw fish, and the splendid views of the Imperial Palace, which could be seen in the distance, half-hidden within its extensive gardens.
The lateness of the senior figure was starting to make his subordinates very uneasy. It was a bad omen, a signal that – for whatever random reason or emphatic decision or twist of fate – I wasn’t after all a serious candidate for a position on the board of the mega-corporation’s European Fund. As we floundered in the shallowest outer reaches of conversational desolation, I realized that through no fault or action of my own I was being transformed from a respected guest into a thundering embarrassment.The discomfort on their faces suggested that there were no rules on how to deal with thundering embarrassments who had somehow made their way into the executive suite on the seventeenth floor.
Eventually the Managing Director arrived. He was polite, professional and distant. To some extent his presence restored credibility to my position. Now I felt that I was in the sort of Japanese environment that is most familiar to Westerners: the tough, no-nonsense, well-organized world of big business. After we had worked our way through a shortlist of the usual pleasantries – he was senior enough to shortcut the more vacuous ones and to dispense briskly with the rest – the grilling began.At first his questions were about the precise content of every job I had ever held, how these jobs cohered with one another, and how my education had prepared me for them – a laundry list more or less identical to Tokyo University’s. But after a while he went deeper, asking about motives: why did I apply for a particular job? Why had I moved on? Why had I accepted the Tokyo University professorship? Once these matters had been dealt with to his satisfaction, and without a change in tone or a blink, without the slightest indication that his questions were about to take on a different aspect, he calmly and in all seriousness asked me if I was a spy.
“Sorry?”
“Are you a spy?”
“No!”
“You don’t belong to the European Union’s espionage service?”
“Of course not. As far as I know, they don’t have one anyway.”
I stared at him, baffled, trying to suppress a snigger or two – the idea that the EU could successfully run its own espionage service would bring tears of laughter to the most ardent Europhile. But the questions were insulting too – from where had he cobbled up such anxieties?
“So, Dr May, you’re not a player in the international arms industry?”
“What?”
“Let me be a little direct: are you really in Japan in order to deal in weapons?”
If I’d had the special key required to call the lift to the executive floor, I’d have walked out. Instead, I asked him to explain.
“Your CV, Dr May…”
“Sorry, I’m not sure I understand you.”
Running his finger over a line on the page – I strained to make out which one from the other side of the large boardroom table – he turned to one of his colleagues and started conferring inaudibly. I was beginning to feel rattled, mainly by his condescending tone – the sort that is quietly confident of the other’s mendacity, while pretending that the accused is innocent until proved guilty. And yet his insinuation held a hilarious fascination to it, and I was eager for him to get to the nitty-gritty. He got there at last: on my list of publications was an incriminating book I’d co-authored. With laboured precision, he read out the title to all present, as though it sufficed to indict me:
“The European Arms Market and Procurement Cooperation.”
Looking up at me gravely, as if all that remained were for me to confess my crime and hold up my wrists for handcuffing, he added:
“Why would anyone write that book if he isn’t working for weapons manufacturers or the secret service? We really don’t understand this, Dr May.”
I was oddly flattered. No one had invested this obscure first book of mine with such significance before; an out-of-print work that only a few academics had noticed was provoking controversy at the highest levels of corporate Japan. But while my eyebrows were still up and my mind searching for an explanation that wouldn’t inadvertently stoke his suspicions, he leant forwards, rather urgently, and unleashed his main objection:
“If you join the Board, won’t you try to influence the Fund to invest in the arms industry? Which it is forbidden to do!”
“I don’t know anybody in the arms industry. I’m not interested in it. The book was just…” But it was more or less useless trying to explain my position from the other side of the chasm of cultural assumptions that separated us: he saw my early scribblings as hastening Armageddon, perhaps even intentionally, whereas to me they had been a tentative step up the academic ladder. I did my best, however, to explain that I had been a commentator on such matters, not a participant. I talked about the highly political nature of arms procurement in Europe, the enormous waste of taxpayers’ money that props up the flagship arms companies of the Western nations, and the inherent corruption of cosy relationships between big companies and governments (something that mega-corporations in Japan happen to know a fair bit about). I sought to convince him that when it comes to international espionage and the sale of high-tech arms consignments, I had failed to clock up the achievements he was so eager to credit me with.
The longer our exchange went on, the more it became bogged down in misunderstanding. The head honcho was feeling frustrated by his inability to flush out the suspicious activities he was sure my book must be concealing, and I was once again feeling like an embarrassment to his organization.
At least the experience gained me some insights into the Japanese. First, over half a century after the end of World War Two, it is still hard to overstate their sensitivity to weapons and war.The defeat of militarism in 1945 effected a massive and, in great part, genuine about-turn of the national mentality. Overnight the welfare state replaced the warfare state. For many, even the word “military” is sordid, to be uttered only in hushed tones, and then with the caveat that Japanese forces (actually among the largest and best equipped in the world) are for “self-defence” only.Though some feel humiliated by this taboo, especially ambitious populist politicians who wax liberally about discarding it, the shackles of absolute defeat are going to be hard to throw off for a long time yet.
Second, the Japanese like a good conspiracy theory – a trait not unrelated to their deep predilection for superstition. They are a society in which rumour and gossip and intrigue are everywhere.This is obvious in any big institution, which will be rife with backstabbing and bitching, with cliques that can decide one’s destiny with arbitrary admittances and summary expulsions.
Third, they can flip from uncritical acceptance to intense mistrust in a moment. Like the proverbial butterfly whose flapping wings trigger a distant hurricane via a cascade of small events, some minor or unfounded suspicion can precipitate one’s downfall. Relationships will be exceptionally stable if both sides act with unshakeable predictability, but the slightest deviation from normal behaviour can arouse the most fantastic misgivings. Given the national pastime of denial and secrecy, any reputations tarnished by such misunderstanding can be nearly impossible to restore.
My unnerving dialogue with a senior figure of a mega-corporation was really only a function of these three national traits. I doubt that I ever managed to wriggle free of his assumption that I was an arms-toting secret agent, and so in the end I wasn’t surprised that this five-figure non-executive directorship – that would have paid for so much great Japanese food – was never mentioned again.