> >This is from "THE USE AND ABUSE OF JAPAN AS A PROGRESSIVE MODEL"
> >by Paul Burkett and Martin Hart-Landsberg
> >http://www.yorku.ca/socreg/burkett-landsberg96.txt
> >
> >The Japanese Investment Regime
> >
> >By contrast, it seems more likely to us that the
> >relative patience of Japanese capital was based firmly on the relative
> >weakness of the Japanese working-class, i.e., on the strictly
> >subordinate status of workers' priorities in the Japanese political
> >economy. Indeed, Steven (1990: pp.12-3) suggests that the nationalist-
> >industrialist form and ideology of the post-World War II Japanese state
> >were based on Japanese capital's complete domination of the Japanese
> >working class, which allowed the state to focus on external
> >competitiveness and the management of inter-imperialist rivalry more so
> >than in any other developed capitalist country.5"
>
> I have one question concerning the last sentence here. It seems to
> me that had "the nationalist-industrialist form and ideology of the
> post-World War II Japanese state" been "based on Japanese capital's
> complete domination of the Japanese working class," _by now_ the
> state & capital would have embarked upon a far more drastic
> restructuring of social relations along the neoliberal line than has
> been the case. Japan's economic problems for the last decade point
> to the weakness & absence of coherence on the part of the ruling
> class (well matched by the weakness & absence of coherence on the
> part of the working class). In countries where civil services are
> well developed, bureaucrats have interests & ideologies of their own,
> which are not identical to the ruling class's, much less neoliberal
> ideologues'.
Although I found the article generally agreeable, the last passage referred to did catch my eye as basically wrong. It ignores the facts of AMPO and the "Income Doubling" regime that immediately followed it as a concession to the Japanese working class from Washington after 1960. It is this regime that has been coming undone since the Bubble. Here is Patrick Smiths' account:
"Yet the single serious threat to it" - the postwar American 'Crysanthemum Club' "paradign" for or stereotype of Japan - "came from...ordinary Japanese. It occurred in the summer of 1960, when the treaty binding Japan to the American security was to be renewed. The treaty is abbreviated in Japanese as AMPO. The events surrounding the renewel of AMPO are worth recalling , for it was the anti-AMPO movement, which was immense, that implicitly challenged the paradigm in the simplest of ways: It showed how little the new imagery had to do with the Japanese as they really were."
"The man at the center of the AMPO crisis was named Nobusuke Kishi. Elected premier in 1957, Kishi seems to have been a prime recipient of the C.I.A.'s political funds. Who, precisely, was Kishi?...If Washington had purposely sought out an emblem of all that was repulsive in imperial Japan, it could not have made a better choice"
"To put the matter simply, Kishi was a war criminal and a thug. During the 1930's, when Japan occupied Manchuria, Kishi was the second-ranked civilian in the colonial administration. In Hideki Tojo's wartime cabinet he held the industry portfolio and served, in addition, as vice-minister for munitions. He was, nonetheless, described by Joseph Grew, Washington's prewar ambassador and a prominent figure in the Tokyo lobby at the war's end, as 'one of my highly valued friends in Japan.' Kishi, it seems, let Grew out of prison to play golf in 1942, before Washington and Tokyo exchanged diplomats."
"As an 'A' class war criminal according to the international postwar classification, Kishi was held in Sugamo prison after the defeat, but the occupation released him (along with a number of others) at the end of 1948. No public explanation for this move was ever offered, though its place in the reverse course" - the U.S. occupation's sharp Cold War anticommunist turn in Japan in 1948 - "can hardly be disputed. Kishi then began a steady march to the premiership, backed by postwar Japan's least-savory collection of unreconstructed fascists, Sugamo alumni, and yakuza crime bosses. Kishi brought many of his cronies into national politics with him. His administration, indeed, marked the consolidation of the prewar nationalists' future in Japanese politics. Kishi himself remained an influentiol figure in Nagatacho"- the government district of Tokyo - "until his death in 1987."
"In June of 1957, the just-elected Kishi visited the United States. He had golfed with President Eisenhower and addressed both houses of Congress. He traveled to New York, met with influential Wall Street financiers, and tossed out a ball at a Yankees game. It was shortly after this visit, the scholar Michael Schaller wrote recently, that the C.I.A. appears to have begun sending Kishi covert funds. Three years later it was Kishi, more than any other Japanese, who made sure the AMPO treaty was renewed."
Sound familiar so far? Pre-AMPO Japan was fated to be yet another beaten-down Washington satrapy ruled by a C.I.A-backed lumpen bourgeois gangster clique. It wasn't Europe, after all. But then the story got interesting:
"All of Japan knew the AMPO question was a crossroads. The country could either go on as it had since the war, under strict American tutelage, or it could declare the postwar era over and find its own way. In the Diet and among voters there was widespread opposition to the AMPO treaty. The pacifism of the postwar constitution had sunk deep roots. People did not want Japan to continue as America's Cold War partner; neither did they care to sacrifice sovereignty any longer to a victor who had brought back the prewar regime while pretending to purge it. Nontheless, Kishi signed a new version of the treaty at the White House in January 1960, Eisenhower looking happily on. By the following May, when the Diet was due to ratify the pact, the entire nation was absorbed by the AMPO issue - much of it mobilized against the treaty's extension."
"Kishi brought the Diet to the brink of rioting, for he had a self-imposed deadline. He wanted the treaty signed into law before Eisenhower visited Japan in June. Impatient with lengthy debates, Kishi eventually ordered police to carry opposing politicians out of the legislative chamber. Then he railroaded through a renewel vote in his adversaries' absence...."
"Kishi's vote prompted protests all over the country. Several hundred thousand people ringed the Diet building in Tokyo. Eleven days before Eisenhower was to arrive a military helicopter had to rescue his press secretary from demonstrators who surrounded his car as it made its way in from the airport. Soon after, amid violent clashes between demonstrators and rightists recruited by the government, Tokyo cancelled Eisenhowers' trip. It would have been an embarassement for America, anyway: By then Kishi had organized security that would have made the president's visit look like a military maneuver. There were command posts, first aid squads, aircraft units, eighteen thousand policemen, and twice that number of ultranationalists and yakuza goons."
First the uprising was repressed - then came the historic turn:
"Nineteen sixty was not only a watershed for Japan, but for our idea of Japan. We can consider it today as the year America's "Japan" was formally launched. A few days after the AMPO treaty became law Premier Kishi was replaced by Hayato Ikeda, another leftover from the wartime bureaucracy, whose mission it was to take peoples' minds off the troublesome matters of democracy, sovereignty and world politics. Ikeda promptly instituted another program every Japanese, alive at the time or not, recognizes as a postwar turning point. It was called the Income-Doubling Plan. It was designed to give as many Japanese as possible a material interest in arrangements as they were. It may look today like a bribe, and it was - partly. But it was more in the way of an offer the Japanese could not refuse."
"...The Ikeda plan produced a kind of madness - the madness of material growth at any human or environmental cost, of a ruling party whose sole task was good relations with America; the madness of a mutant democracy in which elections function to deprive voters of their democratic rights. Thereafter, production and consumption were everything. Ikeda also invented the notion of consensus politics. His slogan was "Tolerance and Patience". Everything was to be done by common agreement after 1960. Of course, tolerance and patience changed nothing in Nagatacho; it meant that the opposition took its place at the table on the understanding that power would never change hands. The Liberal Democrats could still pass any law they wanted, as the treaty vote had proven. Consensus was advanced as a traditional Japanese value, but it was really just another word for the disguised power of the political brokers who controlled Nagatacho."
"Ikeda's plan succedded admirably, at least on its own terms. The average salary doubled in seven years, three short of the goal. So began the era of Japan, Inc., the name we gave to the obsessed nation we created. It was almost as if America had chosen Ikeda for office, for he did much to produce the country America wanted Japan to be. "High exports through hard work," Kennan's prescient phrase in NSC 13/2, was fixed as the national ethos. All at once Japan became a mass society, a corporate society, and a management society (that is, one planned and controlled by a technocratic elite, like a business). But it was no longer a society capable of managing the democratic process, or even of sensible decisions, for Hayata Ikeda put Japan to sleep as a civic society. So it was that the Diet assumed the lifeless gait and the taste for immense corruption that have been its hallmarks ever since." ("Reinterpreting Japan", pgs. 25-29)
In other words, the AMPO explosion forced Washington to change policy, extend a bribe to the Japanese working class and admit its bourgeoisie into the first rank of Empire, at least formally, while manufacturing a "new tradition" to rationalize the new regime. However, since the Bubble the balance of power has shifted against the Tokyo regime, which has now entered a prolonged death agony, exposing beneath the shiny technocratic veneer the ultranationalist/yakuza feet of clay it first rose and now totters back upon.
Not a "progressive model", indeed. It is rather a model of class struggle, as with any other country.
-Brad Mayer
Oakland, CA
> Yoshie
>