The Enigma of Japanese Power (12 page)
Read The Enigma of Japanese Power Online
Authors: Karel van Wolferen
Tags: #Japan - Economic Policy - 1945-1989, #Japan - Politics and Government - 1945, #Japan, #Political Culture - Japan, #Political Culture, #Business & Economics, #International, #General, #Political Science, #International Relations, #Public Policy, #Economic Policy, #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Political culture—Japan, #Japan—Politics and government—1945–, #Japan—Economic policy—1945–
Why have the teachers alone persisted in their opposition to the System?
A possible explanation lies in the unusual background shared, at least until recently, by all Nikkyoso leaders. None of them attended either the University of Tokyo or any of the other élite universities that produce the administrators, and they were thus barred for ever from the world of decision-making. Yet at the same time they were intellectuals who felt special responsibilities towards the community. They had taught at elementary schools in villages and small towns during the Depression. They had been educated in teachers’ training schools that were notorious for their strict ideological discipline, and they were subsequently made to participate in the spreading of a nationalist mythology they did not believe. All these circumstances are conducive to serious reflection on the meaning of one’s job, and to rigid intellectual postures in later life.
But there is probably another, related reason. We have seen at the outset of this chapter how religion often provides a source of alternative power, countering and restricting the power of the rulers of the moment. The leadership of Nikkyoso, by faithfully adhering to the pseudo-religion of Marxism, drew upon such a source. Some of the earlier organisers of the movement spent years in prison because of their beliefs. Nor is it a coincidence that Nikkyoso came to provide ideological and intellectual guidance for Sohyo, for it had demonstrated an ability rare in Japan to manipulate universalist ideas as tools in gaining a measure of leverage over the established order.
Marxism has been, and to some extent still is, a powerful force in Japanese academia. Many of the very same professors who educated the ruling élite have adhered to a peculiar set of anti-capitalist theories, as unrealistic as they are rigid. The System has had no choice but to tolerate them, and we have already seen the safety-valve value of such token radicalism. It is when intellectual radicalism aspires to action that the System moves in to prevent the contagion from spreading. The experiences of Nikkyoso, on the receiving end of physical violence by rightist groups and the legislative and ideological onslaughts of LDP circles and the Ministry of Education, are no isolated manifestations of intolerance. Police, public prosecutors and judges systematically discriminate against people and groups whose activities are inspired by leftist ideology.
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The System abhors ideological heterodoxy as a threat to its own existence.
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All this suggests, in fact, that the time may have come to revise some post-1960 assumptions regarding the Japanese left and Japanese radicalism; for many who flocked to leftist causes were at heart liberals. The tragedy is that, as prisoners of the rigid Marxist ideology of their groups, they lost their natural allies, the Americans – the very allies who had given them what post-war freedom and opportunities they had. The name Nikkyoso has for long evoked images of ideological intransigence, yet in its context it can also be seen in a different way. Along with some other tiny groups of citizens with interests to protect but without the inclination to help further the fortunes of the System, it has no access to basic administrative decisions. Without their firm ideological commitment Japanese leftist groups could not for long have fought off the encroachments of the System. In that sense, they are both victims and beneficiaries of their own doctrines.
This was, at least to some extent, probably foreseen by the US occupation authorities. One occupation official who certainly cannot be accused of doubting the wisdom of General MacArthur remembers that ‘high [occupation] officials not only had considerable admiration for the leadership and organising skill of [communist leader] Nozaka [Sanzo], but an off-the-record conviction that his followers would fight hardest and most effectively to sustain the new democratic system’.
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Despite its intolerance towards those infected by leftist ideology, the System is not Big Brother. In fact, so much heed is paid to a whole variety of discontent and so much tolerance shown towards the obstruction of policy adjustments sponsored by officials and LDP circles, that some serious observers have concluded that the Japanese political system, however much it deviates from the Western parliamentary tradition, is a pluralist system after all.
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Yet while this view is understandable as a defence against the Marxist-inspired perspective – firmly entrenched among Japanese intellectuals – of a ruling élite in the service of ‘monopoly capitalism’, there are good reasons to disagree with it. To stretch the idea of pluralism to encompass the Japanese political reality is to deprive it of its original meaning.
Political pluralism does not simply mean, as is sometimes supposed, the existence of many groups and government institutions limiting each other’s elbow-room; if such were the case, Japan has been a veritable model of pluralism since before the turn of the century. Pluralism in national decision-making implies the ability of sizeable groups of the population to help choose, via their representatives, the nation’s long-term goals. The Japanese people have had no say whatsoever in the choice of unlimited industrial expansion, at the cost of other desirables in life, as the long-term goal. Most Japanese may have been enthusiastic about it at first (in the same way they were once enthusiastic about the growth of the Japanese empire), but ‘GNP-ism’ ceased being an inspiration some time in the 1970s. The absence of pluralism in the true sense can be seen in the absence of political parties with the political imagination to work out new and more rewarding priorities, as well as in the absence of the opportunity for imaginative Japanese to create them. To say that the vast majority of Japanese are not interested in such political competition, because they have never known it, does not make the System a pluralistic democracy.
The term ‘conservative coalition’ that has been used to characterise the Japanese political system
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is misleading, too, for similar reasons. A coalition presupposes a degree of political choice which the components of the System are not given.
In the late 1970s and 1980s some specialists concluded that Japan could profitably be labelled a ‘corporatist state’. Corporatist theories see key organisations at the top of professional and interest hierarchies as competing for influence on policy-making. This is indeed true for Japanese policy adjustments – in other words, administrative decisions. But that still leaves the more crucial initiatives that lead to policy changes, initiatives that compete with existing policies. The Netherlands, Sweden and Austria have been held up as good examples of states whose operations can be clarified by corporatist theory. And the political system of these countries is so very different from that of Japan – in such essentials as the choices that citizens are offered and the recourse they are given if they believe administrative decisions to be wrong – that to call Japan a corporatist state is to render corporatist theory almost meaningless.
The essential characteristic of the Japanese System that is thrown into relief by both the pluralist and corporatist theories (the two most popular perspectives in contemporary political science) is, in the end, the lack of political instruments to change overall Japanese policy. The Japanese political system should impress us for what it does not try to accomplish in areas where action appears sorely needed and where, in other states, governmental co-ordination would be taken for granted.
The System’s embrace is truly inescapable; it extends to institutions – typically, labour movements, parts of the educational world and the press – that in other non-dictatorial societies frequently exist in more or less permanent tension, if not open hostility, with the forces of the established socio-political order. We have already taken a look at Japan’s ‘house-trained’ labour unions. Its schools and its newspapers are no less crucial to the System’s survival. And the extraordinary scope of the embrace is emphasised still further by its inclusion of one entity that in other countries is generally considered beyond the pale: the criminal element. It may seem perverse to lump schoolchildren, journalists and gangsters together. But Japanese schools, newspapers and organised crime have in common that they are each highly politicised as servants of the System. The System abhors genuine opposition too much to leave any important social institution alone. Institutions strong enough occasionally to intimidate the main groups of administrators will be incorporated as minor components, participating at a lower level, of the power hierarchy. The press and, in a peculiar fashion, the criminal syndicates are examples of this. A relatively weak institution may be completely subjected to the System’s overall purposes, as has happened to Japanese schools.
It is ironic, but hardly surprising, that the teachers’ union – Nikkyoso, the most belligerent anti-System institution – should owe its existence to the very institution that in a most crucial way nurtures the System and promotes cohesion among its disparate and rival components.
Nikkyoso has blocked the introduction of forms of moral education that would serve the System in a more explicit manner. Though Japanese education is thus considered sorely deficient by an important segment of the administrative class, it still imparts an ideology, seldom recognised as such, favourable to the System.
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Much more significant, however, is the almost total subordination of education to the maintaining of a hierarchy of supposed merit. The schools operate as a sorting mechanism and recruiting agent for placement in the various overlapping hierarchies. This function, dominant in what are considered Japan’s best schools at every level, is stressed to the near exclusion of everything else, and much to the detriment of the intellectual development of the nation’s youth.
Japan’s education system has gained a reputation overseas as one of the best, if not the best, in the world. This reputation rests partly on the high (often highest) scores Japanese schoolchildren attain in international mathematics tests, and on the presumed connection with Japan’s economic successes. It is backed up by remarks of specialists impressed by the discipline in Japanese schools, the commitment of mothers and the ability of pupils to absorb masses of facts.
That Japanese pupils do well in international written tests is not surprising. To take just such tests is what Japanese pupils are trained for from elementary school to high school. However, if the tests were to evaluate, say, the ability to draw conclusions, to abstract from facts, to connect abstractions, to organise one’s thoughts in an essay, to express oneself in another language or just the ability to ask questions, they would reveal where the Japanese education system is deficient.
The aims of Japanese schools could hardly be further removed from the original sense of the English word ‘education’: to bring forth and develop the powers of the mind, rather than merely imparting factual information. Far from sharpening the reasoning ability of its charges, the Japanese education system, on the whole, is hostile to such a purpose. Spontaneous reasoning, along with spontaneous behaviour, is systematically suppressed in practically all schools; there is no patience with originality. Pupils are not taught to think logically, or to ask the right questions – indeed to ask any questions at all. Instead, the emphasis is on rote memorisation. Japanese students who ‘have done well’ carry vast masses of facts around with them in their heads; if they have been able to connect these facts and work them into a coherent view of life, they have had to do so entirely on their own. The overriding purpose of the Japanese education system was summed up by an authority on the subject as ‘shaping generations of disciplined workers for a techno-meritocratic system that requires highly socialised individuals capable of performing reliably in a rigorous, hierarchical, and finely tuned organisational environment’.
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By deciding who will end up at what level and in which segment of which hierarchy within the System, Japanese education performs a function that can be found in most, if not all, other countries; but it fulfils this function in a more relentlessly rigid fashion than anywhere in the West and perhaps most of the communist world as well. It shapes elites who, dispersed throughout the System, will give it cohesion, in somewhat the same way as the old-boy networks of the English public schools and universities, but in a much magnified and multiplied form.
The selection begins at a very early stage, but to see why it should do so we must start at the other end, where the universities supply their annual batches of graduates to the larger corporations and the bureaucracy.
Japanese higher education forms a hierarchy, with Todai (the University of Tokyo) – more specifically, its law department – at its apex. Todai’s graduates have the best chance of gaining admission to the Ministry of Finance, the best jumping board for a try at the prime ministership or another career in the LDP. It also provides the business conglomerates with many of its future top managers. The University of Kyoto and other former imperial universities, on almost the same level as Todai, produce a smaller part of the élite. Yet it is not easy to convey just how much the Todai label is venerated. For a century past, its law department has ‘ordained’ almost all Japan’s top administrators; a diploma from this school is practically a ticket into the ruling class.
Students of French government may think they recognise this phenomenon, and point out the role of the
grandes ecolés
. But the variety among the latter is considerably greater, and it matters very much what subjects a student has studied there, and how hard.
One rung down the hierarchy, but still highly respectable and difficult to get into, come Waseda and Keio, two private universities in Tokyo. Waseda’s reputation rests on graduates who became politicians and journalists, while Keio has always given access to the higher reaches of the business world. Farther down again one finds the medium-ranking universities such as Chuo, Meiji, Sophia (run by Jesuits) and Rikkyo. And beneath these is a plethora of smaller provincial and private universities and colleges, women’s junior colleges and specialised training institutions for subjects like art and music, the last-named forming a small hierarchy of their own.
The quality of university education has never been the criterion for reaching the heights of Japan’s administrative apparatus. Once it became clear, in the final decades of the last century, that political decision-making would become the privilege of a class selected by examination rather than by heredity or some other non-meritocratic criterion, debate centred not on the quality or even the content of what was being taught but on which examinations, given by what authority, would provide the filter.
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What students today actually absorb from the law course at Todai, which gains them access to the peaks of the administrative hierarchies, is unimpressive when compared with what students must know to graduate from many European and the better American universities.
The quality of instruction in the lowest-ranking schools is not necessarily less than in the élite schools. The universities in the middle reaches and above would not lose their rank and reputation no matter how much they were to deteriorate. For though the bureaucracy and the large firms give entrance exams that are theoretically open to everyone, in fact they hire according to a quota system, taking in a more or less established portion of graduates from each of the various universities. The educational hierarchy corresponds with the economic-bureaucratic one. A middle-ranking firm would not dream of trying to take on a Todai graduate; and by the same token a graduate from, say, Chuo University rarely climbs to the highest levels of business and never of government.
Japanese are acutely aware of which schools the people they deal with have attended. A non-Japanese acquaintance of mine was once asked by his girlfriend not to meet her for a few months, because her sister was under investigation for an arranged marriage and the candidate to become her husband had graduated from Todai. Nothing, including a relationship of one member of the family with a foreigner, could be allowed to stand in the way of such a prize catch.
What students do during their four years as undergraduates is of little account, unless they do it in the faculties of medicine, engineering or the physical sciences – which mostly lead to careers outside the business-bureaucratic ‘élite course’. Law, economics and commerce – with a nearly exclusive emphasis on what writers on the administrative aspects of these fields have said – are the favoured subjects for gaining entry to the higher levels of the System. In four years of teaching at Waseda University, I found that students in the highest-ranking politics and economics department had little to do. They read a few, often obscure, books on their subject, of which they generally remembered precious little. I was instructed that students should normally be given passing grades so long as they had regularly attended classes.
Graduation is virtually automatic. Students who can demonstrate that they have worked harder than most have better chances of being admitted to the bureaucracy and top business firms. But graduates who have spent four years doing nothing at name schools can always find employment at a higher level than more capable graduates with lower-ranking diplomas. For most students the university means pure relaxation, a brief fling at life before entering the regimented world of business organisations.
Many Japanese think that the ‘rest’ students get at the ‘better’ universities is well deserved, because getting into them is an extremely nerve-racking process. Though money and parental connections sometimes play a role, especially in entering medical and dental schools, in the vast majority of cases the ambitious youth must try to outscore ten, twenty or more rivals in entrance examinations. The least complicated way of accomplishing this is to get into a high school with a reputation for producing a large crop of successful candidates. Japanese high schools are, in fact, ranked by this criterion. Three out of the 5,453 high schools in the country supply about 10 per cent of the successful candidates for Tokyo University.
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This means that at high schools considered better than average – and the evaluation of schools in such terms is almost a national pastime – pupils spend most of their time training to pass exams. The name schools have the best idea of what will be asked in the (exclusively written) exams. And since the professors who compose these exams are often quite arbitrary in their view of the correct answers, the object of these schools is not so much to teach a subject as to turn out experts who can read the minds of those professors.
Where English teaching is concerned, for example, high-school pupils learn to pass exams consisting only of multiple-choice questions, put together by professors who themselves are uncomfortable with the real language. The tests often contain ambiguities or downright grammatical errors. After ten years studying English, which along with mathematics and Japanese is one of the three major examination subjects for all the universities, students are, with rare exceptions, unable to communicate in this language.
Mathematics and physics are better suited to written exams, and consequently much attention at school is devoted to passing maths tests. Where history or social studies are concerned, the examinations seem, as one expert puts it, ‘like nothing more than a giant trivia contest compiled by scholars instead of popular culture freaks’.
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The critical importance of entrance examinations has brought a lucrative subsidiary industry into being in the form of special schools offering private tuition after normal school hours. Called
juku
, they too are ranked on the basis of how many of their students have passed which examinations. Many students who fail the tests for the highly reputed universities will try again, sometimes three or four years in a row. In the meantime, they attend
juku
where they review the examinations of past years, or crammer schools (
yobiko
), which have sprung up just to accommodate them. The learning at these schools has become highly esoteric: published question papers from earlier examinations are reviewed, dissected and commented upon, much as a classical scholar would treat a newly discovered ancient Chinese text. Some professional crammers even develop probability theories for their clients, not unlike the ‘theorists’ who peddle a systemic approach to gambling at Las Vegas.
To be admitted to a highly reputed high school it is almost mandatory to have attended a highly reputed middle school. Most pupils whose parents have decided to go for high stakes in the System sit for the entrance examinations of two, three or even four different schools. To get into one of the most promising middle schools, it helps to have passed through the right primary school. Thus the latter’s reputation in turn depends on the proportion of its pupils delivered to high-ranking middle and high schools. There are books on the market with the special drills for children preparing for elementary school entrance exams. But often the selection begins even earlier.
A relatively smooth ride upward from elementary school to university is provided by certain expensive private institutions that consist of universities with their own ‘attached’ high, middle and elementary schools and sometimes even kindergartens. Once one is on such a track, the exams at each level are largely perfunctory. This has come to be known as the ‘escalator’ system, and the best way to get on an escalator is to attend a kindergarten leading to higher-level schools. As a consequence there are famous and extraordinarily expensive kindergartens that actually give entrance examinations of their own. Keio, Gakushuin, Seijo Gakuen and Aoyama Gakuin are among well-known private universities at the top of escalators that start at kindergarten level. According to eyewitnesses, kindergarten exams typically test ability to recognise letters in the Japanese syllabaries, skills with building blocks and the like. At a crucial point in one routine test attended by one of my informants, the toddler was given a wrapped sweet; all eyes were on him to see whether he neatly folded the wrapper or threw it on the floor.
But still we are not at the beginning. Some mothers arrange private tuition for their three-year-olds so that they may stand a better chance of passing the kindergarten exam. Entry into one of the famous kindergartens of Tokyo usually requires training at a
juku
for infants. Parents have been known to move to Tokyo for the sole purpose of getting their child into the right kindergarten. One maternity hospital has even advertised that delivery could be arranged as part of a package deal, guaranteeing that the baby would qualify for the right kindergarten.
Girls aiming for a position in the bureaucracy may compete with boys in this system. But for most girls with ambitious parents there is a parallel hierarchy of private women’s colleges in which placing is important, not only for mothers who wish to make ‘good marriages’ for their daughters, but also for company recruiters who seek high-class brides for their employees. A blue-collar ladder of high schools supplying high-quality factory workers to manufacturing industries also exists.
