Japan perplexes the world. It has become a major world power, yet it does not behave the way most of the world expects a world power to behave; sometimes it even gives the impression of not wanting to belong to the world at all. At the same time, Japan’s formidable economic presence has made it a source of apprehension both to the Western countries and to some of its Asian neighbours. The relationship between Japan on the one side and the United States and Europe on the other is in serious trouble. In the late 1980s the West is beginning to harbour doubts about Japan as a responsible partner in politics and trade. In Japan it has become common for officials and prominent commentators to suggest that their country has fallen victim to widespread international ill-will, and they are apt to dismiss unfavourable analyses as ‘Japan-bashing’.
For almost two decades Westerners have been advised to have patience with Japan. It was argued that the Japanese understood the necessity of adjustments and were speeding up their efforts at ‘internationalisation’. A sustained publicity campaign reiterating this goal, with the appropriate slogans popping up in innumerable speeches and countless newspaper and magazine articles, seemed to confirm this. But in the late 1980s an awareness is gradually taking hold in the West that the long-promised changes are not forthcoming, and that the explanations on which expectations of change have been based may have been wrong all along. In the meantime, increased criticism and demands, the first retaliatory measures and other forms of pressure from frustrated trading partners, particularly the United States, have changed the disposition of officials and commentators on the Japanese side. Their replies are becoming retorts. Their friendly counselling of patience has begun to change into a more belligerent message: the USA should put its own house in order, and Europe should stop being lazy and recognise its ‘advanced nation disease’ for what it is. Both sides have expressed a firm resolve to avoid an economic war, but around 1987 some people on both sides began to realise that they were in the middle of one.
The riddle that Japan poses for much of the world does not begin and end with its economic conflicts. But they are the most eye-catching, since they involve, it seems, practically all the countries with which Japan deals. For most observers the Japan Problem, as the conflicts have collectively become known, is summed up in Japan’s annual record-breaking trade surpluses: $44 billion in 1984, $56 billion in 1985, $93 billion in 1986; until the near doubling of the exchange rate of the Japanese yen against the dollar caused a lower surplus of some $76 billion in 1987.
But the essence of the Japan Problem lies beyond such figures. Not only does Japan export more than it imports, but its exports, in combination with its inhospitality to foreign products, undermine Western industries. The term ‘adversarial trade’ was coined by Peter Drucker to distinguish the Japanese method from competitive trade, in which a country imports manufactures of the same kind as it exports. West Germany’s trade surpluses are also very large, but West Germany practises competitive trade, as does the USA.1 With sectors such as consumer electronics and semiconductors – the bases for more specialised industries – being taken over almost completely by Japanese firms. Westerners have begun to fear they may suffer a gradual ‘de-industrialisation’. Once it has obtained the required technology, Japanese industry appears capable, with a concerted effort, of outcompeting and taking over from the original inventors and developers in any field.
Having hitherto focused almost exclusively on the trade surpluses, in 1988 the West was slowly coming to suspect that other astonishing developments might form part of an overall pattern of Japanese pursuits, a significant national endeavour, which is hardly understood at all. Months after the New York and London stock-market crash of October 1987 – which hardly seemed to affect Tokyo’s stock market at all – prices of Japanese stocks reached new, and by Western standards astonishing, heights when measured against corporate earnings. Land prices in many areas of Tokyo doubled, tripled or even quadrupled within the space of one year. And from around 1986 Japanese firms, often spending significantly more than warranted by market value, suddenly began to invest very heavily in foreign real estate and to buy foreign banks and corporations.2 Somewhat belatedly it began to dawn on a few anxious US and European observers that Japan, far from ‘beating the West at its own game’, might not be playing the Western ‘game’ at all; and that for the West, conversely, to emulate Japan would bring the world trading system to a screeching halt and lead eventually to the collapse of the non-communist international economic order.
Europe and the United States are, to say the least, disturbed by this entity in the Pacific Ocean that appears to be single-mindedly pursuing some obscure aim of its own. One can understand the Japanese wanting to make money, but their conquest of ever greater foreign market shares does not translate into noticeably more rewarding or more comfortable lives. Urban housing is cramped, confined and extraordinarily costly. The cost of living, measured against average income, is exorbitantly high. Only about one-third of Japanese homes are connected with sewers. Commuter trains are extremely overcrowded. The road system is ridiculously inadequate. These and other deficiencies in the infrastructure of daily living leave average Japanese city dwellers with a lower standard of comfort than that enjoyed by their counterparts in less wealthy European countries, and they proclaim the need for a shift in attention among Japanese policy-makers.
The flourishing of trade and industry has not been accompanied by any robust flourishing of the arts of the kind that history has often shown comes in times of great economic achievement. One can hardly say that much emanates from Japan today that enhances the less materialist aspects of life in the way of great music, great literature or even impressive architecture.
A number of thoughtful Japanese have concluded that something is amiss. A nationalistic Japanese anthropologist who finds dealing with foreigners ‘a demanding and troublesome task’ nevertheless laments the fact that his country is like a black hole in space, receiving culture but not transmitting any.3 A respected intellect and former vice-minister diagnoses his compatriots as suffering from a ‘Peter Pan Syndrome . . . retreating into an infantile dream world . . . Japanese businessmen and politicians continue to play Peter Pan, asking each other what the world can do for them’.4
The question of what drives the Japanese people has thus become something of an international conundrum. For what ultimate purpose do they deprive themselves of comfort and risk the enmity of the world?
It is usually explained that the Japanese are driven by collective concerns. And indeed, Japan appears to demonstrate the possibility of life organised in a genuinely communalist manner. As far as outsiders can tell, most Japanese accept with equanimity the daily demands that they subordinate their individual desires and interests to those of the community. This striking communalism is, however, the result of political arrangements consciously inserted into society by a ruling élite over three centuries ago, and the Japanese are today given little or no choice in accepting arrangements that are still essentially political. Under these arrangements, a Japanese individual must accept as inevitable that his intellectual and psychological growth is restrained by the will of the collectivity. To sugar the pill, this supposedly collective will is presented by most of his superiors as benevolent, devoid of power and wholly determined by a unique culture.
But this explanation does not answer the question of where this political force comes from. The power that systematically suppresses individualism in Japan does not emanate from a harsh central regime. Japan differs as much from the collectivist communist states in Eastern Europe and Asia as it does from the free-market states of the West.
Much of the bafflement over Japan is due to a relative lack of interest on the part of Western intellectuals and people of affairs. Certainly, Japan is visited by many Westerners and receives mention in their sweeping global assessments. But to a large extent it is still treated as a curiosity and is not clearly visualised as a functioning element in those global assessments. One-sided ignorance is particularly striking in the case of the United States, considering that its relationship with Japan is beyond question among the strategically most important in the world. The continual frustration of the US expectations with regard to Japanese policies, or their absence, indicates that Washington’s understanding of its foremost Asian ally – despite all the talk of a ‘Pacific era’ – is woefully inadequate. In fact, the view of Japanese political processes and preoccupations apparent between the lines of public statements and articles written by US officials directly concerned with the relationship is often so faulty as to appal observers such as myself who believe that nobody in the non-communist world is served by a serious deterioration in the US–Japan relationship.
The uncommon manner in which power is exercised in Japan and the workings of the Japanese institutions responsible for the country’s non-dictatorial collectivism and national motivation have received scant attention from Westerners in general. Japan is often lumped together with Europe and the United States in discussions of the political shift towards a supposed ‘post-industrial’, ‘technetronic’ or ‘post-capitalist’ society, while the question of how Japan is actually ruled remains neglected.
It is curious that this should be so. Japan was the first non-Western country in modern times to play a major international role. It defeated Russia shortly after the turn of the century, became the only country ever to attack the United States, has since produced the second largest and, in terms of per capita income, most prosperous economy, has wiped out or is threatening with extinction a number of its trading partners’ industries and is on its way to gaining important financial leverage over the world economy. Moreover, two other non-Western countries, South Korea and Taiwan, have become significant industrial presences by following the Japanese, instead of the Western, example of industrialisation.
Inattention to the question of how power is exercised in Japan and how this determines trends in its international relationships is becoming dangerous. Japan has been much praised since the 1960s, but it has also been much vilified, and from the perspective of Tokyo in 1988 the antipathy appears to have overtaken the praise. Contacts between Japan and other countries are likely to increase, with (if experience is any guide) a further proliferation of problems and still more criticism.
This will probably be accompanied by Western measures that Japanese will interpret as hostile. Such measures may well reawaken irrational xenophobic sentiments in Japan and strengthen the old suspicion that, in essence, the world does not want to make room for it. The resulting strengthened nationalism, of which the first signs are already appearing, could mean the beginning of political instability in Japan and unpredictable, probably undesirable, developments for everyone. Under such circumstances, a better understanding of the nature and uses of power in Japan is no luxury.
The factor most corrosive, in the long run, of international trust is perhaps the confusion that exists on many levels of communication between Japan and its supposed allies and friends – the apparent impossibility, even, of reaching a point at which both sides can agree to disagree. The communication gap, dating from the early 1970s, that separates Japan from the West as well as from some of its neighbours appears to be widening all the time. Several commonly cherished fictions cloud the perception of outsiders and complicate communication, two of them being central to their seeming inability to come to grips with Japan.
First, there is the fiction that Japan is a sovereign state like any other, a state with central organs of government that can both recognise what is good for the country and bear ultimate responsibility for national decision-making. This is an illusion that is very difficult to dispel. Diplomacy takes a government’s ability to make responsible decisions for granted; it would be extremely difficult for foreign governments to proceed without the assumption of a Japanese government that can cope with the external world, as other governments do, simply by changing its policies.
Nevertheless, unless the relative lack of governmental responsibility in Japan, the fundamental cause of mutual frustration, is recognised, relations with Japan are bound to deteriorate further. Statecraft in Japan is quite different from in Europe, the Americas and most of contemporary Asia. For centuries it has entailed a balance between semi-autonomous groups that share in power. Today, the most powerful groups include certain ministry officials, some political cliques and clusters of bureaucrat-businessmen. There are many lesser ones, such as the agricultural cooperatives, the police, the press and the gangsters. All are components of what we may call the System in order to distinguish it, for reasons to be discussed later, from the state. No one is ultimately in charge. These semi-autonomous components, each endowed with discretionary powers that undermine the authority of the state, are not represented by any central body that rules the roost.
It is important to distinguish this situation from others where governments are besieged by special interest groups, or are unable to make up their minds because of inter-departmental disputes. We are dealing not with lobbies but with a structural phenomenon unaccounted for in the categories of accepted political theory. There is, to be sure, a hierarchy or, rather, a complex of overlapping hierarchies. But it has no peak; it is a truncated pyramid. There is no supreme institution with ultimate policy-making jurisdiction. Hence there is no place where, as Harry Truman would have said, the buck stops. In Japan, the buck keeps circulating.
If Japan seems to be in the world but not of it, this is because its prime minister and other power-holders are incapable of delivering on political promises they may make concerning commercial or other matters requiring important adjustments by one of the components of the System. The field of domestic power normally leaves no room for an accommodation to foreign wishes or demands. Such accommodation is made only with a great show of reluctance and very late in the day, when angry outsiders resort to coercion. Japan needs the world for its exports, to keep its economy running; but many Japanese in official positions appear to prefer their traditional isolation, wishing that the world with all its political complexities would leave their country alone.
The second of the central fictions that have determined Western attitudes since shortly after the Second World War is that Japan belongs in that loose category known as ‘capitalist, free-market’ economies.
In spite of all that is written about it, defining the Japanese economy still causes trouble to foreigners and to Japanese alike. Japanese officials are usually indignant at any hint that their country is something different from the label they have put on it. On the other hand, Japanese economists have told me privately that a common mistake among Westerners writing on Japan is to exaggerate the function of the market. It horrifies Western academic economists, especially those of the conventional neo-classical persuasion, to hear it suggested that Japan does not in fact belong in the club of ‘free-market’ nations. For many of them, the idea that there can be a successful economy not based on the free play of market forces is tantamount to heresy. While Japanese officials have interests to protect, many Western economists have stuck their heads into the sand against this Japanese threat to a set of theories that claim to be universal.
Japan is obviously not a centrally controlled, Soviet-type economy. Does it, then, as a number of commentators have implied, belong to a category of its own? The rise of South Korea and Taiwan as industrial states, apparently driven by an extraordinary force similar to that of Japan, suggests not. Their experience invites a new look at the Japanese ‘economic miracle’ and shows that, even minus its cultural and psychological specifics, it can provide a model for certain other countries.
The Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese experiences show that a third category of political economy can exist, beside the Western and communist types. US political scientist Chalmers Johnson has isolated this category of industrial nations and labelled it ‘capitalist developmental states’ (CDSs).5 The strength of the CDS lies in its partnership between bureaucrats and industrialists; it is a variant that traditional political and economic theory has overlooked.
An eloquent theoretical objection made by Friedrich von Hayek to government interference in the economy is that planners at the centre can never know enough about the many ramifications of social and economic life to make the right decisions.6 According to this theory, centrally planned economies must always fail to prosper. Yet if this is true, how have Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, whose governments consider manufacturing and trade very much their business, managed to improve their national wealth and economic power?
The manner in which Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have found a way around the Hayekian obstacle is crucial to an understanding of their political economies. To begin with, their governments have never considered private enterprise antagonistic to their goals. Unlike the communist approach, which equates entrepreneurism with original sin, or the socialist approach of the European welfare state, where regulations obstruct the entrepreneur, the CDS encourages the private sector and treats it with great deference. The bureaucrats never attempt to gain full power over non-governmental corporations. They guide the economy, using businessmen as their antennae in doing so. They get to know what is happening far away from the centre by constant monitoring of the experiences of capitalists trying to find new ways of expanding their businesses.
The many mistakes these officials undoubtedly make are more than compensated for by the unifying force they bring to bear on industrial development. The economy prospers because areas of industry that show promise are stimulated by fiscal policies favouring investment. Industries considered of strategic importance are carefully nursed and protected against genuine foreign competition. Those that are in trouble are temporarily protected to give the firms concerned an opportunity to diversify, while those that appear to have reached a dead end are more easily abandoned by policies forcing reorganisation. In other words, this is a partnership sealed by a shared industrial policy and trade strategy. Market freedom is considered to be not a goal desirable in itself but one of several instruments for achieving the paramount aim of industrial expansion.
Japan pioneered the CDS model a century or so ago, during the Meiji period, when it transferred state industries into private hands (after state entrepreneurism had brought many governmental corporations to the verge of collapse).7 It further experimented with it during the forced industrial development of Manchuria, from the early 1930s until 1945. In its post-war form this economic model, which has made Marxist-Leninist theory distinctly less appealing as an economic guide for politicians and intellectuals in the less developed nations of non-communist Asia, is structurally protectionist. It has to stay so if it wants to continue enjoying its proven benefits. The question remains as to whether the bureaucrat-businessman partnership will continue to pay off once industry has saturated the market at home and once overseas markets become inhospitable. Another question, raised with particular urgency by the case of Japan, is whether international free trade as a system can survive so long as the countries without a trade strategy are locked in a struggle to accommodate these formidable capitalist developmental states.
The question of whether or not Japan represents a largely uncharted economic and social-political category generates much controversy. Since 1945 Japan has been considered a Western ally and has been treated as a full member of the club of capitalist free-market nations – this despite recent doubts raised by trade conflicts. Clarifications from the Japanese side do not help settle the controversy. Very few scholars or commentators are given to serious theorising about the nature of their political economy. Officials, for understandable reasons, are the least interested in setting the record straight. Journalists and academics, moreover, wrongly apply Western social, political and economic concepts in discussing their society, with the result that the unsuspecting observer is nearly always misled as to how things actually work.
It is not at all difficult for Japanese commentators and official spokesmen to maintain such fictions, because it is socially acceptable in Japan for ‘reality’ to consist not so much of the results of objective observation as of an emotionally constructed picture in which things are portrayed the way they are supposed to be. How things are supposed to be tends to coincide, of course, with the immediate interests of one’s group. For the past four centuries the Japanese people have been told to consider socio-political loyalty as the supreme virtue. The result, as one anthropologist has put it, is that truth is socially constituted.8 Here we arrive at the first conceptual problem Japan has in store for the outside observer.
In the West ‘reality’ is not often thought of as something that can be managed, moulded or negotiated. It is not seen as depending on arbitrary ideas of how things should be. Indeed, Western philosophy – as well as Western horse sense – decrees that the general human capacity for self-deceit be countered by a constant watchfulness against illusions and delusions. If there is one single command that has reverberated throughout Western intellectual development ever since the Greeks, it is: ‘Thou shalt not cherish contradictions’. This command is fundamental to logic, mathematics and the sciences.
Heirs to various Asian traditions of thought may be less uncomfortable with the idea of multiple and contradictory truth. Yet it is clear, if one observes the other Asian countries, that nowhere does one find as much ‘management of reality’ as in Japan. This has important political consequences. Japanese in positions of control show great agility in moving from one reality to another as they seek to explain ‘facts’ and motives to other Japanese or to foreigners. A rationally argued claim made by the other side may be countered by arguments belonging to an altogether different frame of reference – at which point the exchange reaches a dead end. Such manoeuvring is one of the ways in Japan by which the higher-ranking and the stronger claim their privileges.
In international exchanges these tactics sometimes exasperate logically reasoning Westerners, who conclude that arguing with Japanese is impossible. One must be prepared for the extremely skilful use of red herrings. Occasionally these are too crude to be diplomatically effective, as when new regulations threatening the export of European skis to Japan were defended with the argument that Japanese snow tends to be constituted differently from snow in the West. But a small library could be compiled of books and reports in which Western trading partners themselves repeat the sophistry with which Japanese officials wriggle themselves out of tight spots in international dealings.
In Japan the ‘flexible’ approach to reality goes far beyond the bounds within which other societies tolerate lame excuses and self-serving untruths. For instance, when a Western businessman or government representative appeals to a contract, a law or an international agreement, he may be told by his Japanese counterpart that Japanese society is guided not so much by cold rules as by warm human feelings responding to each situation as it occurs. Yet should the foreigner, at the next opportunity, appeal to this extra-legal tradition by, for example, urging bureaucratic intervention in a trade problem, he may well hear that such a thing is impossible in democratic Japan which, he should understand, is governed by laws. Both these arguments – that Japanese society is humanly flexible by not sticking to cold rules, and that it sticks to what the law says – are uttered with great conviction, and Japanese third parties are hardly ever inclined to point out the contradiction.
The tolerance of contradiction is closely connected with a characteristic that, in the final analysis, is the most crucial factor determining Japan’s socio-political reality, a factor bred into Japanese intellectual life over centuries of political suppression. It is the near absence of any idea that there can be truths, rules, principles or morals that always apply, no matter what the circumstances. Most Westerners as well as most Asians who have stayed for any length of time in Japan will be struck by this absence; and some Japanese thinkers also have seen it as the ultimate determinant of Japanese public behaviour.
Concepts of independent, universal truths or immutable religious beliefs, transcending the worldly reality of social dictates and the decrees of power-holders, have of course found their way into Japan, but they have never taken root in any surviving world-view. Political arrangements and social practices were originally sanctioned by Shinto, a religion of nature and ancestor-worship that tolerated contradiction and ambiguity. This indigenous Japanese religion (not to be confused with the ‘state Shinto’ that provided the ideological underpinnings of the Japanese empire from the late nineteenth century until 1945) never developed philosophical or moral doctrines. Even when such philosophical and moral teachings were imported from China, they did not displace domestic socio-political sanctions and assumptions. On the contrary, the Chinese ideas merely strengthened the existing this-worldly belief system that supported the power-holders of the day.
The notions transcending the here and now of socio-political expediency that are inherent in the original teachings of Confucianism and Buddhism have always been unwelcome to Japan’s ruling élite. Christianity and, later, Marxism threatened to introduce transcendental concepts into the universe of Japanese thought, but both were either proscribed or forced to compromise their essential tenets. The accepted view that Japan has always displayed great religious tolerance applies only where new religions or belief-systems have not been deemed a threat to existing political arrangements.
To grasp the essence of a political culture that does not recognise the possibility of transcendental truths demands an unusual intellectual effort for Westerners, an effort that is rarely made even in serious assessments of Japan. The occidental intellectual and moral traditions are so deeply rooted in assumptions of the universal validity of certain beliefs that the possibility of a culture without such assumptions is hardly ever contemplated. Western child-rearing practice inculcates suppositions that implicitly confirm the existence of an ultimate logic controlling the universe independently of the desires and caprices of human beings. This outlook, constantly reaffirmed in later life, inclines Westerners to take it for granted that all advanced civilisations develop concepts of universal validity, and they are therefore not prompted to examine the effects of their absence.
True, the fact that Japanese have situational instead of general moral rules, and hold particularistic values rather than universalistic ones, is routinely noticed in writing on Japan. But this is often confused with the more superficial distinctions of current social science, and is not used consistently to provide clues to Japanese behaviour. Most authors, having dutifully mentioned that the Japanese continually adjust their beliefs to the situation they find themselves in, move on to other topics as though totally unaware of the momentousness of this observation.9
Where ‘beliefs’ are dependent on socio-political circumstances, and ‘reality’ is something that can be manipulated, it is fairly easy to maintain fictions. The international confusion of tongues brought about by such fictions is further complicated by the special meaning acquired by the word ‘understanding’ in the mouths of Japanese commentators and officials. The dire need for better ‘mutual understanding’ is frequently and enthusiastically endorsed. But wakatte kudasai means ‘please understand’ in the sense of ‘please accept my explanation, regardless of whether it has any basis in fact’. It connotes acceptance or tolerance. ‘Understanding’ in this Japanese context is another word for agreeing. True ‘understanding’ of people or things implies accepting them the way they are, as long as you are not strong enough to change them. If you have strength, the other party will show ‘understanding’ by a certain degree of adaptation to your wishes. Thus in practice ‘mutual understanding’ implies that foreigners should accept the picture of Japan presented by its spokesmen. Foreigners who insist on protesting about Japanese trade methods despite the many Japanese explanations are seen as demonstrating a perennial lack of understanding. Japanese are often well aware of the political connotation of ‘understanding’ in their usage; as a newspaper editor warned, the time is gone ‘when we were able to enjoy the often beautiful misunderstandings – and ignorance – of the foreigners’.10
Two important phenomena complicate the communication-gap aspect of the Japan Problem. One is Japan’s use of ‘buffers’. The second is its monumental propaganda effort.
By ‘buffer’ I refer to someone entrusted with the task of making contacts with foreigners as smooth as possible. He is a peculiarly Japanese institution and is readily recognisable in government offices as well as business corporations. Resident foreign diplomats and businessmen deal with Japan through an intermediary community of English-speaking and supposedly internationalised buffers who are expected to absorb the shocks that an unpredictable outside world might deliver to their institutions.
These buffers can be amazingly frank, can convey a genuine understanding of the foreigner’s difficulties and often create an impression, if not of willingness to cater to his wishes, then at least of reasonableness with which the institutions they represent consider the foreigner’s problems. Japan has a handful of super-buffers who spend much of their time travelling the globe, trouble-shooting and explaining the Japanese case at international conferences. Some of these, such as Okita Saburo and the late Ushiba Nobuhiko, were made ministers for external economic affairs, in which roles they only increased the confusion, because in spite of their title they had no mandate to decide anything and could therefore not really negotiate.
Sometimes still more influential ministers or leaders of economic federations, or the prime minister himself, play the buffer role when speaking with foreign trade envoys. Foreign negotiators who arrive home with the news that this time they have really talked with the proper authorities, who have impressed them with their readiness to take effective action, are deceiving themselves. People with such broad authority do not exist in Japan.
Overlapping with the buffer category is a class of informants, hierarchically ordered according to the positions they occupy in the business, political or bureaucratic worlds, who are constantly being interviewed by visiting dignitaries and journalists. The rest of the world learns about Japan via the accounts of a much smaller group than is generally appreciated. Visitors who have met a ‘good source’ in the shape of one of these informants are often under the impression that they have heard an interesting personal opinion. Most are unaware that these informants tend to regurgitate currently circulating platitudes, whether on some pressing issue of the day or on more general themes concerning the character and role of Japan, that convey an ‘official reality’ to which they routinely defer.
It often seems as if all Japanese spokesmen are hooked up to the same prompter with the same message recorded on a loop of tape. Although they may introduce some personal variation, the essence of the message is almost always the same and is predictable down to the finer details, if one is abreast of the current preoccupations of the press, or of the voluminous explanatory literature distributed by the ministries, economic federations and subsidised ‘private’ institutions.
To believe that these predictable assertions reflect personal opinions would be doing injustice to the intellectual capacities of Japan’s more highly placed communicators. Their genuinely personal opinions are often very interesting, and can be at great variance with the public assertions. But to get to hear these opinions requires either a long period of acquaintanceship and large amounts of sake or, more rarely, a sudden realisation on their part that you are not going to believe the official line anyway.
The predictable assertions of the established informants may include criticism of certain points of government policy or of bureaucratic and business attitudes. But they practically always support the larger contentions of the System’s major institutions, that Japan is a pluralist democracy with a free-market economy, that progress is being made in opening the market, that the growth of individualism must be stimulated, that most Japanese are beginning to see the need to become more cosmopolitan, that foreigners do not try hard enough to compete and that conflict with Japan arises mainly from foreign misunderstanding.
Taken together, the activities of Japan’s buffers and informants constitute a propaganda effort that is not recognised for what it is, because it comes almost entirely in the guise of sincere efforts to ‘explain’ Japan to the world. The propaganda is all the more convincing because many informants believe these explanations.
Foreigners play an important role in the dissemination of opinion favourable to the System. A great deal of foreign criticism has been defused by the use of Japanese money. No country has ever spent as much on officially recorded lobbying expenses as the Japanese were spending in Washington in the mid- and late 1980s. The Japanese government and corporations hire the best lawyers and former US administration officials to defend their position. A large proportion of academic research by Western scholars who concentrate on Japan is funded by Japanese institutions. The idea that scholars and commentators can remain objective because no formal conditions are attached to what they receive is mostly an illusion when the money comes from Japan. Access to the necessary personal contacts and institutions is a great problem for businessmen and scholars working in Japan, who are therefore acutely aware that a genuinely critical stance may close many doors. A combination of money and the need for access, as well as political innocence, has bred large numbers of Japan specialists who are in varying degrees – however unwittingly – apologists for Japan.11 Their public pronouncements and comments in the media regularly attest to this.
Defending Japan is the bread and butter of many real and supposed specialists, who hold forth at highly publicised seminars, panel discussions and conferences organised to improve ‘mutual understanding’. Most representatives of the big foreign corporations in Japan, and also the foreign consultants, have had to become part of the Japanese System in order to function in it. They cannot risk alienating themselves from it by publicly coming out with critical analyses, and are therefore unreliable informants.
Japanese propaganda is also spread, consciously as well as inadvertently, by numerous newspaper and magazine articles mindful of the editorial convention of telling the imagined ‘two sides’ of a story. And it has had an impressive effect, as can be gathered from the fact that at the time of writing the US government and many US commentators continue to think that market forces can ultimately solve the bilateral problem with Japan, notwithstanding the systematic Japanese protectionism that has been staring them in the face for more than two decades.
‘Understanding’ Japan has become a heavy export industry funded by several components of the System. Yet many Japanese, specifically those who must represent domestic interests internationally, are uncomfortable with the idea that they actually might be understood. The idea that there is a spiritual dimension to being Japanese, which by definition cannot be grasped by foreigners, is an important ingredient for Japanese self-esteem and therefore widely believed.
A top editor on one of Japan’s five national dailies once told me that his paper, as well as its competitors, felt that they could print practically anything foreigners said, no matter how devastating their criticism might be, because editors and readers could always console themselves with their belief in the ultimate inability of foreigners to understand the more subtle aspects of what they were describing. Readers of critical foreign assessments may thus enjoy a superficial masochistic thrill without having to draw genuinely disturbing conclusions.
It is almost an article of faith among Japanese that their culture is unique, not in the way that all cultures are unique, but somehow uniquely unique, ultimately different from all others, the source of unique Japanese sensibilities and therefore safe from (if not off-limits to) intellectual probes by outsiders. Japanese are constantly persuaded of the specialness of their nation in their schools and corporations and through the media and speeches by functionaries, whenever an opportunity arises for comparisons with the outside world.
Western intellectual support for the idea of the utter strangeness of Japan, which is easily converted into the idea of uniqueness, goes back many centuries. When it was still ‘on the other side of the world’ Marco Polo turned Zippangu (as he called Japan) into something mysterious and paradisiacal, imagining roofs of solid gold on its emperor’s palace. Jonathan Swift had Gulliver drop in on Japan after Luggnagg, as his final destination before returning home. The first Westerner to interpret Japan in modern times, Lafcadio Hearn, wrote just before the turn of the century of ‘the immense difficulty of perceiving and comprehending what underlies the surface of Japanese life’.12 Hearn thought that ‘no work picturing Japan within and without, historically and socially, psychologically and ethically, can be written for at least another fifty years’. In 1946 Ruth Benedict published the admirable first attempt at an inclusive appraisal of ‘the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle. In no war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of thinking and acting.’13
The same things that led Lafcadio Hearn and Ruth Benedict to make such strong statements still lend vehemence to discussion of Japan today. Westerners still repeat Hearn’s excited discovery of the topsy-turviness of it all. And Ruth Benedict’s interpretation of Japan as a cohesive entity that can stand on its own, culturally cut off from the rest of the world and essentially different from it, has remained seductive to many serious observers. Physical isolation can no longer be blamed for this. In 1962 I was one of 202,181 foreigners entering the country, and in that year only 145,749 Japanese travelled abroad. Twenty-five years later some six and a half million Japanese went overseas, and over two million foreigners visited Japan. But despite this greatly increased international traffic, much of the earlier aura of remoteness has remained. Japan is still the object of romantic musings. For some Westerners who decry the decline of polite manners, industriousness and other such things in their own countries, it is something of a Utopia.
We are often warned, especially in academic literature, that we must resist treating Japan as too special a case. And it is a good thing, of course, to emphasise that the Japanese are human and to show that they share the essential human traits; the intellectual desire to incorporate Japan more fully into the world is in itself laudable. Yet in their zeal to carry out this mission, some Westerners go to unwarranted extremes in pointing to the similarities and ignore those habits and institutions which cannot be forced, no matter how hard and consistent the attempt, to fit Western patterns of experience.
When studying a people by comparing them to other peoples one faces the age-old choice of whether to emphasise ‘sameness’ or ‘otherness’. In the case of Japan this has led to great discrepancies in the views held by informed commentators. No important human practices and attitudes found elsewhere in the world are entirely unknown to the Japanese. Conversely, in other countries one can recognise habits and institutions corresponding with those in Japan. But to describe the Japanese experience more often than not requires the addition of phrases such as ‘much more so’ or ‘much less so’. There is a point at which differences in degree and in the combination of elements add up to a difference in kind, particularly in the context of socio-political organisation – dependent as that can be on the ambitions and caprices of small groups of power-holders.
Countless newspaper articles, magazine features and scholarly assessments have asserted over the past quarter-century that Japan had reached a crossroads. Perhaps no other country is so regularly examined by journalists and scholars for signs of impending change: not just the routine kind of change that may be expected in any society, but something basic, a change in the way people see themselves and consequently a change in the attitude of the entire nation towards the world.
Implicit in most reports on the Japan-at-the-crossroads theme is the idea that Japan must change; the things setting Japan apart from the rest of the world are often seen as anomalous and temporary. In the 1960s it was widely believed that Japanese youth was going to change things once it had reached positions of influence. At the same time, demands by labour were going to bring about drastic changes in the socio-economic structure. In the 1970s it was thought that the many employees who went abroad for their corporations were going to ‘internationalise’ Japan upon their return, and that widespread hankering after better living conditions would redirect Japanese efforts through a change in priorities. Later it became fashionable to think that the ‘internationalisation’ of the Japanese financial market and other unstoppable economic developments would force Japan to come to terms with the outside world’s expectations of greater Japanese concern and initiative on behalf of collective international interests. In 1987 there existed a pervasive notion that the pressure of a supposed public demand for change, combined with loss of bureaucratic control over businessmen, was beginning to transform the Japanese political economy into one more clearly driven by market forces.
Today, Japan is stuck at the same crossroads as twenty-five years ago: one where the Japanese people are expected to choose a new approach to the world, helped along by supposed changes in their own society but always in a direction mapped out by Westerners. No country should be condemned to waiting at the same uncomfortable spot for so long. What the crossroads stories appear to reflect more than anything else is myopic Western preconceptions about the possible forms that institutions and the organisation of affairs in non-Western nations can take. The march in the direction that many Western observers thought inevitable is just not going to take place.
For a while in the late 1970s Japanese officials began to fight back by contending that, if there was going to be evolution anywhere, it would be in the West. A government-sponsored publication spelled this out, saying that Japanese forms of social and economic management would ‘become universal in all advanced industrial societies’ if those societies wished to follow a rational course of further industrial development.14
Around this time the idea caught on in Europe and the United States that a number of Japanese practices might profitably be adopted. This is understandable. The question of whether the West should not be moving towards a society similar to that of Japan today inevitably arises in the minds of visitors who learn that Japan has next to no violent crime, no industrially damaging labour conflicts and an economic system that seems to weather oil crises and the like better than anyone else’s. But the ‘learn from Japan’ approach has glossed over some crucial differences between Japan and the West. The adoption of parts of the System is not likely to work without most of the rest of the Japanese package, and the costs of that package cannot be paid by the West. An evolution of Western practices in Japanese directions would entail the reproduction of conditions inconceivable as long as social and intellectual freedom are valued.
There is reason to emphasise Japanese differences precisely because the crossroads view persists. Many sober Western analysts continue to expect large-scale change. ‘Japan Inc., to the extent it ever existed, is being further dismantled,’ asserts a highly respected economic daily.15 Japanese slogans about ‘internationalisation’ are taken at face value. The official Japanese line in the 1980s is that the various forms of governmental guidance carry much less weight with the private sector than in the past. But even though this contention is regularly accompanied with figures intended to show that current tariff regulations make Japan about the freest market in the world, Japan has not in fact transferred into the category of Western free-market economies. What is true on paper in Japan is often – and always more frequently than in the West – not true in practice. Tokyo’s officials are extremely inventive in devising subtle controls and euphemistic labels to render them more palatable. Foreign governments and columnists, automatically assuming that Japan sees itself faced with new choices and a new sense of responsibility, continue to expect major developments. But barring some great upheaval unforeseeable at present, it is unlikely that Japanese institutions will come to mesh more smoothly with the outside world, because this would entail the break-up of the bureaucracy-business partnership that forms the heart of the System.
The crossroads view should be discarded for yet another reason. It creates frustrations when expected changes fail to materialise, and ultimately leads to further vilification of Japan.
Having abandoned the crossroads view, we are left with the Lafcadio Hearn-Ruth Benedict thesis of cultural singularity. But this approach fails, in itself, to relate Japan to any wider, universally understandable realm of human experience. It is also, on a more practical level, powerless to help foreign governments and businesses formulate a modus vivendi with Japan.
There is, however, a way out of the conceptual maze. The Japan problem appears less mysterious, and many of the puzzles are soluble, when instead of the common approach of looking for cultural explanations we ask questions concerning the way power is exercised in Japan.
There are four general approaches to the study of human affairs, emphasising, respectively, their social, cultural, economic or political aspects. Problems cannot of course be told what to do, and therefore will not stay on one side of the boundaries some scholars have drawn between one approach and another. Human affairs, moreover, can be subsumed under any one of these headings; each incorporates the other three to at least some extent, because social, cultural, economic and political life are, of course, interrelated; when we choose one of these labels, we choose an emphasis.
The favourite perspectives of both Japanese commentators and foreign scholars studying Japan have been, by and large, the cultural and social ones, often amalgamated into one.
Japanese politics is still largely portrayed (very enthusiastically so by Japan’s official spokesmen) as obeying cultural dictates. Japanese authors who choose a non-Marxist vantage-point practically always take it for granted that their native world is a product of the predilections of past generations of the people as a whole. Most writing on Japanese politics and its history does not give the impression that there have been power-holders at every stage with the means to organise the lives of those they controlled. A major recent effort by three prominent scholars to arrive at a new, all-encompassing perspective of Japanese socio-political life is an elaborate attempt to reduce everything to cultural factors, as if power has never been exercised in Japan.16 Such reductionism is all the more remarkable because, if there is one nation whose predominant social and cultural idiosyncrasies can be traced back to political decisions that can clearly be seen in isolation from other influences, it is Japan.
If I had to explain the essential characteristics of Holland, where I was brought up, I could trace political determinants in the development of its economic, religious and general social life, but I would not necessarily adopt a political emphasis. Holland shares the European heritage of Greek and Hebrew thought, Roman law and the powerful force of Christianity, as Japan shares in the continental Asian heritage of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. But the Dutch patricians were not in a position to choose what suited them from among Christian tenets and Roman ideas of jurisprudence, to be incorporated into Dutch culture as they saw fit. Nor did the absolute monarchs of Europe often have the power to control their borders effectively against ideas they did not like.
Any European country offers a whole jumble of possible leads to original causes of whatever one wants to explain. The same is true of India, to take one other example. And where must one look for the beginnings of what is most essential in Chinese culture? To the state, or to the philosophy that justified it?
Such ‘chicken and egg’ questions are less applicable to Japan. Looking back over its history, it is clear that political arrangements have been a major factor in determining the development of Japanese culture. Japan’s relative isolation meant that the élite, in its efforts to hang on to power, could readily control the inflow and the impact of foreign culture. Power-holders could also pick and choose, from among what the rest of the world had to offer, those techniques and attitudes best calculated to consolidate their own positions. Such relatively wide control over culture meant a near absolute control over potentially subversive thinking.
It is generally acknowledged that Chinese ideas and methods have helped shape official Japanese culture to a greater extent than any other influence. Apart from the great legacy of the writing system and the techniques and styles of artistic production, these cultural imports primarily served political purposes. In the sixth century Japan’s rulers adopted Buddhism, explaining that they did so for political reasons. The introduction of the Chinese model of state administration, shortly afterwards, was obviously also a political move.
Diplomatic channels to China were subsequently closed, and kept closed at the discretion of generations of Japanese rulers until 1401, when shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu established trade relations with the Ming court. In spite of the huge profits and many luxuries this brought Yoshimitsu, his successors again put a stop to the Chinese traffic. During the periods when court and shogun did not maintain official relations with China, Japan’s southern provinces continued to trade, and some Chinese cultural influence must have continued to filter through, but it does not seem to have had a lasting effect on Japanese élite culture.
From the middle of the sixteenth century the Portuguese were allowed to bring their firearms, medicine, astronomy, clocks and, most significantly, their religion. But this hospitality was reversed not long after the turn of the century, when the shogun began to fear them as a political fifth column, realising the potential threat posed by a Lord beyond the clouds towards whom his underlings could redirect their sense of loyalty. The result of this political insight was a policy of almost hermetic seclusion, kept in force until the middle of the nineteenth century.
The new set of rulers that came in with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 promoted the import of practically anything their official missions to the United States and Europe considered useful for a new Japan. When this, inevitably, resulted in the spread of subversive ideas, they clamped down on them and began propagating an ‘ancient’ tradition, which they had themselves manufactured from bits and pieces of earlier political ideology, glorifying the emperor as head of the Japanese family state.
Until 1945 Japanese power-holders had a special police force with the task of eliminating ‘dangerous thoughts’. Half a dozen officers of that police force became ministers of education, justice, labour, home affairs and welfare after the war.17 And the essential character of Japanese nationalism in the 1980s is still determined by notions incorporated in the mythology fabricated by the Meiji oligarchy.
Fourteen centuries ago Japanese power-holders could rummage among what China had to offer and limit such outside cultural influences almost totally to institutions and beliefs that suited them. They again succeeded remarkably well with Western influences in the second half of the nineteenth century. In between, after centuries of civil strife, the power-holders suppressed those indigenous Buddhist sects that threatened to inject religious competition into the political realm, and selectively stimulated or arrested various social, economic and cultural trends depending on their importance to their own staying in power. The power-holders could even reverse the development of technology, as when they banned and forgot the firearms introduced by the Portuguese. They preferred not to run the risk of commoners acquiring the skills to rise up against them; firing a musket or rifle is a great deal simpler than swordsmanship, and sword-wielding opponents are more easily kept at bay before castle walls than gun-toting ones.
As we have seen, no intellectual leverage over the power of the political élite was possible, since the notion of a universal or transcendental truth was never permitted to embed itself in Japanese thought. The power-holders could control even this; indeed, no law ever restrained their power. It is thus no exaggeration to say that political arrangements have been crucial in determining the limits on Japanese religious life and thought.
A scholar of comparative political history has pointed out that, whereas in nineteenth-century Europe an ‘intellectual mobilisation’ – with lawyers, philosophes, freemasons, writers and journalists participating – could be distinguished from social and political action, in Japan no such a distinction could be made. The daimyo and samurai who took up ‘Dutch studies’ were equally engaged in intellectual activity, but ‘they are distinguished from “intellectuals” in nineteenth-century Europe by the extraordinary singleness of political purpose with which they pursued these studies’.18
Power patterns have both directed and inhibited Japanese intellectual pursuits. Japanese ideas of justice and the place of law in society have been fashioned by rulers in terms of expediency, and have not influenced the attitudes and methods of those rulers in any critical way. Supposedly typical aspects of Japanese society and culture, such as group life, company loyalty and the love of harmony, the lack of individualism, the near absence of litigation, ultimately originate in political arrangements and are sustained for political purposes.
So long as Japan is considered primarily in social and cultural terms, one always runs up against a basic question: what is the origin of the great differences between the habits and institutions of the Japanese and those of other peoples? Part of the answer lies in Japan’s historical isolation. But it is the political approach that can answer the question most satisfyingly, since it makes it possible to recognise the strong forces behind the shaping of Japanese society.
We have no difficulty in accepting that Soviet society, sixty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, has acquired characteristics it would not have had if it had known liberty, if it had been spared oppression by a ruling nomenklatura class and if it had no built-in impetus for people to lie for personal advantage. By comparison, Japan constitutes an altogether different, freer and more pleasant society. But the Japanese System has so far been as inescapable as the political system of the Soviet Union, and it has much deeper foundations.
Why, even so, does the cultural explanation of Japanese political life appear so much more attractive than the political perspective on Japanese culture? Perhaps because a superficial first look at the country would not urge one to look at it through political spectacles. There is no tyrant in sight; not even is there a clear centre of political power. The situation would not, on the face of it, suggest any particularly strong coercion over the individual. Even after a long stay in Japan one does not notice much coercion traceable to, say, a police force or some other government agency. Literature on Japan abounds, rather, in descriptions of a striving for harmony. Japanese power, in short, is highly diffuse; and, while this makes it particularly pervasive, it is not so immediately noticeable.
Yet I suspect that there is another, more important, reason for the success of the culturalist perspective among Westerners. Many people in democratically organised societies feel uncomfortable with the notion of power. Even the less threatening word ‘politics’ evokes distaste, associated as it often is with greed, lying and other things beneath our dignity. ‘Power’ is a dirtier word still, eliciting pleasurable emotions perhaps only in those who are themselves power-hungry.
The concept of ‘power’ has been eliminated from the vocabularies of a fair number of contemporary scholars studying human affairs. So unpleasant are its connotations for intellectuals, especially Americans, that they tend to deny or renounce it,19 sometimes to the point of seriously suggesting that the concept be banished altogether.20 One explanation for this might be that the idea of power clashes emotionally with the ideal of equal opportunity, which has gained the force of an ideology. Power in the sense of control by a small group of people over the majority, and power of the kind wielded by a master over a servant, are unpleasant possibilities. Thus intellectual constructs are created that sanitise power relations and view them as the perfectly rational result of collective decisions.
This is no place to linger over the foibles of contemporary political science, but a few observations may help to place this approach in perspective. Since the Second World War academics have offered us, by and large, a cellophane-wrapped, hygienic version of our socio-political world. In this version, the concept of power is sometimes replaced by that of an allegedly more neutral ‘influence’ in which the element of (potential) force is absent. Master-servant relationships are, if noticed at all, considered in exclusively economic terms, as something moreover that works for the good of everyone; while the idea of power ‘red in tooth and claw’ emerges only in reference to revolutionary situations.
This view, especially as purveyed by the adherents of ‘pluralist theory’, leads to the acceptance of any political arrangement as basically what it ought to be, though with room for improvement of certain details. Even where power is not eliminated from scholarly discourse, its sharp edges are removed. It is often treated as if it were a scarce commodity that can be allocated through forces akin to those of the market-place. This economic explanation of the political world denatures the idea of power. It cannot explain the very real bloody noses of, say, Japan’s teachers fighting against the attempts of national educational administrators to regain control over ‘moral thinking’ in the schools. It cannot envision a country rushing headlong into disaster because of the disastrous way in which power is exercised.
The parcelling out of responsibilities and duties in the manner of the democratically organised Western communities – the basis for ‘pluralist theory’ – is possible only with some prior agreement on how to limit power, and on the guises in which it is allowed to affect ordinary citizens. This approach to power presupposes the existence of laws that are taken seriously. It also assumes that the ideal of pluralist representation is a reality, and uses this reality as a point of departure.
Japanese citizens do not in practice have recourse to the law; in fact, the idea of ‘citizen’ as distinct from ‘subject’ is hardly understood. Pluralist representation exists on paper, of course, but to believe that this informs Japanese practice is taking very much on faith.
If, between the lines of the following chapters, I give the impression that power in Japan is something to be wary of, this is intentional. Unlike power-holders in the countries that have provided the models for ‘pluralist theory’, Japanese power-holders systematically use power in ways and for ends over which the voter has ultimately no control whatsoever.
By recognising Japanese power where we should, we see things we would otherwise not be aware of. One is that the System as such is in better shape than at any other time in this century. We can see that the defeat in the Second World War and the occupation represent less of a watershed in Japanese political life than has generally been thought. The pre-war and wartime bureaucratic power system, minus its military components, has consolidated its power after the war, and is in the process of consolidating it even further.
The political perspective I propose also affords a fresh view of Japanese international business dealings. It has long been agreed that the priority of the large Japanese corporations is the expansion of market shares rather than medium-term profits. And it has often been noticed that, in order to achieve their strategic aims, they will forgo healthy profits for much longer periods than Western firms could possibly afford. Enlarging one’s market share, like enlarging the territory one controls, depends on the desire for greater power, a political motive. Making maximum profits depends on a desire for money, an economic motive. The two approaches are of course related and mixed in both Western and Japanese corporations; but the results of the difference in emphasis are momentous. The bureaucratisation of Japanese business in the post-war period via increased bureaucratic controls and protection, as well as the replacement of entrepreneurs by ministry-friendly administrators, is directly related to the politically motivated drive for ever greater international market shares.
The history of Japan’s drive in the 1970s to carve out niches of power in foreign markets without reciprocity is repeating itself in the late 1980s in the financial world. Japanese firms are buying many Western financial institutions. They are investing their massive profits (made by consolidating the conquest of international market shares for finished goods) not at home, where it would solve quite a few domestic and international problems, but abroad, where there are still opportunities to carve up market shares. The effect of the much publicised ‘liberalisation’ of financial and capital markets by the Ministry of Finance has been to foster the international emancipation of the Japanese banks, security houses and insurance firms, enabling them to compete better in the money markets of the world, and to give the trading companies a large new field for foreign investment.
These developments could be of considerable political significance, since the possibility of counteracting Japan’s unilateral economic conquests will be greatly limited if Tokyo gains the kind of leverage over the world’s financial markets that its current drive to expand market share appears to be heading for. There has been a consistent failure on the part of the West to foresee effects of this kind – a result of its apparent inability to envision the possibilities as the Japanese do.
As a nation, Japan is a problem for itself because the way Japanese power is exercised results in conflicts with, and isolation from, other countries. But Japan is also a problem for Japanese individuals. Discussions with many of them over the past quarter-century have convinced me that they are adversely affected by the way that power is exercised in their country. They are less free than they should be. Japanese are treated by their school system and their superiors in the way a landscape gardener treats a hedge; protruding bits of the personality are regularly snipped off. It is simply not possible for a political system to be unkind to the individual without this having grave consequences for the psychological development of its citizenry.
I believe that the Japanese are individuals, all 120 million of them. Not all may want to assert their individuality; most, having been so conditioned, do not. But I have met quite a few who want to be taken for distinct persons, rather than as indistinct members of a group. These independent thinkers are disturbed. In many cases they have withdrawn into the private world of their own mind. Japanese culture harbours a vast, unconnected and uncharted archipelago of such private worlds. Individualistic Japanese are generally non-political because they would constantly burn their fingers if they were to challenge the existing power arrangements. But they are Japanese despite their refusal to be conformist.
In recent decades it has become common, in referring to Japan, to dismiss the ideal of personal growth as a manifestation of Western ethnocentrism, and to surmise that Japanese have their own specifically Japanese way of individual differentiation. Yet there are criteria for personal growth that are not culture-bound. Just as it is in the bud to become a rose, and in the cub to become a tiger, the growing human being has the built-in purpose of becoming a mature, well-integrated individual.21 My experience in other Asian countries and my acquaintance with well-integrated Japanese individuals have strengthened this belief.
Many serious commentators on Japan have studiously avoided statements that could be labelled as value judgements. However, my position is that it is an illusion to think that meaningful discourse on political matters can be kept free of judgements that are not ultimately connected with beliefs of some kind. Striving for objectivity goes hand in glove with a constant alertness to possible prejudices, but the very selection of subject-matter already betrays personal concerns, and these are not necessarily prejudices. Many things may be relative, but standards for a desirable way of organising life do exist, and choices should be made. The place of human beings in their society should not be left to chance.
Plato, who made the great discovery that self-knowledge depends on an understanding of the character and scope of political life, was fully aware of the corrupting potential of power. His magnificently rational and poetic mind first saw the need for liberation from myths, from tradition and from brute power as the fundamental justification for political action. I see no reason why this should apply only to Western societies.
The philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, born in Poland and forced to come to intellectual terms with communist society, has thought about this more than most of his colleagues born in the West, and is most to the point:
the freedom of individuals has – we may presume – an anthropological foundation. This is admittedly a doctrine which cannot be proved or disproved in the normal sense of the word ‘prove’. And yet our hope that freedom is not going to be ultimately destroyed by the joint pressure of totalitarianism and of general bureaucratisation of the world and indeed our very readiness to defend it depend crucially on our belief that the desire for freedom, for sovereign individual self-assertion in free choice, is not an accidental fancy of history, not a result of peculiar social conditions or a temporary by-product of specific economic life forms, of market mechanisms, but that it is rooted in the very quality of being human.22
Kolakowski knows that this is a philosophical issue which can never be conclusively settled by empirical investigation. But he is right in considering it an issue which ‘we simply may not disregard or reject on the ground that [it is] insoluble according to the rules that govern scientific inquiry’. Once one has taken the philosophical position that freedom is desirable for the individual, one is entitled to employ the critical approach when scrutinising any political arrangements that severely hamper this freedom beyond the reasonable requirements for maintaining social order.