Political Order and Political Decay (56 page)

The force ultimately driving Japan to establish a constitution was not a domestic social group but the example of foreigners. No Western power was, at this point, overtly trying to coerce Japan to grant a constitution. Rather, the Japanese themselves saw adoption of a constitution as a necessary condition for their recognition as a great power with rights equal to those of the West. They were following a syllogism that said, “All modern states have constitutions; Japan aspires to be a modern state; therefore Japan must have a constitution.” The immediate political pretext for making these changes was the desire to abolish the unequal treaties, something that was in fact accomplished by 1899. But this objective was driven less by economic interest than by the desire for the recognition of Japan's status as a modern society in the eyes of Western powers.
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BUREAUCRATIC AUTONOMY GOES BERSERK

As in Germany, the modern Weberian bureaucracies created by Japan after the Meiji Restoration became so autonomous that they led the country to disaster. I would argue that the origin of Japan's turn to the right in the 1930s was rooted in this development rather than in any deeper social causes.

One of the most famous efforts to explain Japan's “fascist” turn in social terms is that of Barrington Moore. He argues that there were three distinct paths to modernity, and that peasants played a critical part in each. The first was the democratic one exemplified by England and the northern American states, in which peasant agriculture and feudal political arrangements were forcibly converted into commercial agriculture (England), or didn't exist in the first place because of the predominance of family farming (the American North). The second route was modernization via peasant revolution, which was the path taken by Communist Russia and China. And the third path was the fascist one, in which a repressive system of agriculture bred an authoritarian state that then escaped the control of its creators.
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Moore's arguments for why there was never a Chinese- or Russian-style peasant revolution in Japan are fairly convincing. The Tokugawa system of taxation encouraged increases in agricultural productivity in the century preceding the Meiji Restoration. Peasants were actually growing richer over time. Moreover, the collective manner in which taxes were assessed, and the relative impersonality of the government as tax collector, led to a high degree of communal solidarity or social capital at a village level. This stands in sharp contrast to China, where tax farming—that is, the outsourcing of tax collection to often predatory private agents—as well as family-centered individualism bred distrust on the part of the peasantry.
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There was a much higher degree of peasant discontent and anger in Qing China than in Meiji Japan, an anger that would be ultimately mobilized by the Chinese Communist Party. While there were peasant revolts accompanying the increasing commercialization of agriculture in Japan both before and after the Meiji Restoration, they did not reach a level that was sufficient to breed a nationwide uprising.
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Less convincing is Moore's effort to relate rural land tenure to the rise of the militarist governments of the 1930s. He wants to draw parallels between Japan and Prussia, a country whose military was indeed implicated in the increasingly repressive system of agrarian land tenure from the sixteenth century on. The Prussian officer corps was recruited directly from the class of Junker landlords who in civilian life were busy repressing their own peasants. But in Japan, feudal land tenure was already being replaced by freer forms of tenancy and commercial agriculture by the late nineteenth century. There were large landlords who survived until the American-imposed land reform of the late 1940s, forming part of the conservative parties' political base. But they were politically a much less important part of the conservative coalition in Japan than were the Junkers in Germany before World War I, or the large estancia owners of Argentina at the time of the 1930 coup, and they were actually opposed by bureaucratic activists within the emerging militarist state.
25

Indeed, absent an autonomous military, it would be perfectly possible to posit a counterfactual history where Japan evolved in a more English-style democratic direction. Having sat out World War I, the country experienced a vigorous period of economic expansion, which led to the rapid growth of an urban middle class and the spread of higher levels of education. The boom suddenly came to an end in 1920 with the return of the European powers to Asian markets. The prolonged recession that followed saw the growth of trade unions and labor unrest, the rise of various Marxist and left-wing groups, and the consolidation of industrial capitalism on the part of the country's huge industrial groups, or
zaibatsu
. None of these developments should have been necessarily fatal to democracy, since they were also occurring in Britain, France, and the United States at the time. Had participation by these new groups been accommodated by parties that were increasingly able to contest for power in the Japanese Diet, democracy would have been consolidated by the 1930s.
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What blocked this path were decisions taken by Japan's military, which was deployed not in Japan but in Japan's overseas empire. In a sense, Japanese authoritarianism was born in Manchuria, rather than in Tokyo or in the Japanese countryside. The navy was smarting from concessions made to Britain and the United States at the Washington Naval Conference of 1930. The army, for its part, hoped to establish a state-within-a-state in Manchuria. Lower-ranking officers of the Kwantung Army there assassinated the warlord Chang Tso-lin, and after the September 1931 Manchurian Incident seized most of southern Manchuria. The civilian government back in Tokyo was divided and failed to respond adequately. The Meiji Constitution gave the elected civilian government no direct authority over the military in any case. To an even greater extent than in pre–World War I Germany, the emperor became captive of the armed forces rather than being their commander. Thus began a period of mounting political violence in which military or right-wing political zealots, acting in the name of the emperor, began assassinating civilian politicians, including Prime Ministers Hamaguchi and Inukai in 1930 and 1932. Radical officers attempted a coup in 1936; although they were stopped, the civilian government was so intimidated that it was unable to prevent the Kwantung Army from provoking the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937 and plunging into a full-scale invasion of China.
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Unlike German and Italian fascism, Japanese militarism was not connected to a mass political party. While the military had civilian allies in various right-wing groups, it did not rest on a strong social base within Japan as the German military did. It was a creature of the younger officers in Japan's field armies, like Ishiwara Kanji, architect of the Manchurian Incident, who in his travels and studies developed a concept of the coming “total war” between the great powers. The Japanese military developed its own anticapitalist national ideology, deploring the materialism and selfishness of industrial society, and looked back nostalgically to an imagined agrarian past. But what it celebrated was less peasant life than the honor-bound ethos of the old military aristocracy. Bureaucratic autonomy within the military was especially strong due to “the time-honored right of local commanders to undertake operations in emergency situations without waiting for direct orders from central military headquarters.”
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In the course of the 1930s, the agents succeeded in turning themselves into principals.

LAW AND DEMOCRACY

A genuine rule of law finally arrived in Japan with its defeat in the Pacific War and adoption of an American-drafted constitution in 1947 that has remained in force without amendment until the present day. There were a number of important legal steps leading up to this result, including the August 16, 1945, announcement by the emperor that Japan had accepted the Potsdam Declaration and unconditional surrender, and the Imperial Rescript of January 1, 1946, in which the emperor renounced the doctrine of imperial divinity.
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The government of the defeated and occupied Japan had drafted a set of minor revisions to the Meiji Constitution which, when leaked to the press, induced General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, to order the drafting of a very different document, which was delivered to a shocked Japanese government in February 1946.

The American draft contained a number of key changes. Sovereignty was no longer vested in the emperor, but in the Japanese people; the peerage system was abolished; a list of basic rights was enumerated and not qualified in the manner of the Meiji Constitution; and the famous Article 9 renounced Japan's right of warmaking and maintenance of a military. The constitution was debated before a newly elected Diet and came into effect on May 3, 1947.
30

Contemporary Japanese nationalists like Ishihara Shintaro, former governor of Tokyo, have criticized Article 9 and the postwar constitution as a whole as having been imposed on Japan, and argue for amending it to restore the right to military power and self-defense. Before we accept this narrative, however, we should note that the Americans tried to impose a lot of different policies on Japan after 1945, some of which became very durable and some of which failed. Besides the democratic system embodied in the constitution itself, the durable policies included land reform that ended the system of tenancy and distributed agricultural land to individual farmers, and the strengthening of women's legal and political rights. The vast majority of Japanese were subsequently quite grateful that these changes had been forced on them, particularly women, whose rights were secured due to the tenacity of a young woman named Beate Sirota who served on the constitutional drafting committee.
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The Japanese system had been stuck, in effect, in an equilibrium where the existing actors would never have agreed to certain changes—popular rather than imperial sovereignty, land reform, and women's rights—on their own. The Americans did not force Japan to accept a distasteful outcome as much as help the Japanese to reach a more positive equilibrium.

On the other hand, the Americans failed to bring about certain other changes they desired. One was a dismantling of the
zaibatsu
, the huge industrial conglomerates that were held to be responsible for funding and pushing for war. The
zaibatsu
formally disbanded but quickly reconstituted themselves on an informal basis as
keiretsu
(built around famous brands like Sumitomo, Mitsui, and Mitsubishi), where they went on to be the basis for the country's subsequent economic miracle.
32

Moreover, both the borrowed and imposed legal codes that make up contemporary Japanese law are implemented quite differently in Japan than they are in Europe and North America. Japan as well as other Asian countries has always been less litigious than the United States, and the number of lawyers and lawsuits per capita actually declined during the three decades following the end of the Pacific War. The Japanese make much heavier use of arbitration and informal dispute resolution processes than do Westerners.
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A final area of the failure of imposed institutions was the effort to bring Japan's bureaucratic apparatus under greater democratic control, or in other words, to reduce its autonomy. As in Germany, the Allied occupation authorities sought to purge the bureaucracy of what they regarded as war criminals and ultranationalists. But the need to keep Japan stable and well governed, especially under the pressures of an emerging cold war, cut short this effort. In many cases, only the wartime ministers and vice ministers were removed from their positions; younger bureaucrats simply moved up the promotion ladder while keeping their bureaucratic traditions alive. So even under its new democratic constitution, the bureaucracy remained the center of Japanese political decision making. While the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) controlled spending decisions and doled out pork-barrel subsidies to favored interests, it never succeeded in penetrating the bureaucracy and placing its own people there. Rather the reverse: the bureaucracy produced countless officials who, after retirement (called
amakudari
, or “descent from heaven”), went on to important political leadership positions and facilitated the hand-in-glove cooperation between the LDP and the government. This bureaucracy became one leg of the “iron triangle” that included the business sector and Liberal Democratic Party that dominated Japanese politics for two generations.

Indeed, it has become clear in retrospect that much of the bureaucratic system centering around the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI, now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) that guided Japan's postwar economic miracle was the descendant of the wartime planning bureaucracy. This agency had its distant origins in a group of officers connected with the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, which instituted a centrally planned economic system for that territory. This system was brought back in 1941 to Japan itself and became the core of the wartime resource allocation system.
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Thus the American trade negotiators of the 1970s and '80s were contending over economic issues with descendants of the bureaucrats their fathers had fought during the Pacific War.

While the Japanese bureaucracy was powerful relative to other parts of the political system, in its postwar incarnation it was never as centralized and decisive as its Chinese counterpart. Power tended to be diffused among a variety of agencies, each of which was pervaded by cliques and factions that had to seek consensus before being able to make a decision. In recent years, this has reinforced a tendency to put off making difficult choices, whether concerning nuclear power or agricultural subsidies. Moreover, there is strong evidence that the bureaucratic system itself has decayed, with the end of the
amakudari
system in 2007, which reduced incentives for elite recruitment, and the efforts of political parties to place their supporters in key bureaucratic roles.