The Enigma of Japanese Power (24 page)
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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–
The post-war aims of the Japanese System have been entrusted mainly to the economic organisations. The System is preoccupied with industrial and commercial pursuits, the expansion of which is felt as essential to its survival. Although one cannot locate a political centre, there does exist a hard core, as it were, of institutions – numerous, closely packed, interconnected – that are tightly harnessed to these pursuits.
The administrators who stand at the apex of the interconnected hierarchies of manufacturing firms, banks and trading companies are concerned with something more than production or trade. Firms in the ‘private’ sector have in fact a double function. Politically, they are important for the hold they exert over the population by controlling the behaviour and thought of their employees to a degree far beyond anything that firms in the West aspire to or could get away with. It is the standard indoctrination that Japanese companies provide, and their success in forcing a life-style on their employees, that lends the System much of its solidity.
The human substance of the large hard core of the System is provided by the
sarariiman
(‘salaryman’). He was originally named for the salary he received, as distinct from the wages of factory hands and other workers lower in the occupational hierarchy. But the term ‘salaryman’ connotes much more than ‘office clerk’ or ‘white-collar worker’; it stands for a behavioural norm to aspire to. The salaryman has such predictable concerns and habits that it has become common in Japanese to speak of ‘salaryman culture’. The production of books and magazines devoted primarily to acknowledged salaryman tastes (including comics as thick as telephone books) comprises one of Japan’s biggest industries. The media carry the salaryman model of life to every corner of Japan.
The salaryman world is open to roughly one-third of the young Japanese males who have passed through the selection system described in Chapter 4. Yet even after all the hurdles of the school system have been cleared, acceptance by a firm is often dependent on introductions from professors, further exams given by the firm and the result of detective work. Former elementary-school and high-school teachers, as well as neighbours, may be asked about the conduct of the recruit as a teenager. Many companies will want to verify that the recruit is not descended from the ‘unclean’ caste
burakumin
, or to make sure that he is not a member of one of the so-called ‘new religions’, since this might cause loyalty problems.
1
Acceptance is usually followed by an extended
rite de passage
which confirms and symbolises in a dramatic way that the young man is becoming a ‘member’ of the institution he has joined, and allows no doubt in his mind about his position relative to everyone else in the scheme of things.
Life in the ‘adult world’ usually begins with a ceremony during which, sometimes in the company of hundreds of his fellows, the recruit, in a fresh ‘salaryman uniform’ (sober grey or blue suit, with the company badge on the lapel), will for the first time hear the ‘company philosophy’ from the mouth of the president or a high executive. He will soon be able to recite this ‘philosophy’, and the shorter slogans that come with it, in his sleep.
During subsequent training, considerable attention will be paid to an often complicated corporate etiquette. Even the angle of a bow is specified: 15 degrees for colleagues of equal rank met in the corridors; 30 degrees, with both hands held rigidly down the seams of the trousers, for superiors and important visitors; 45 degrees, accompanied by polite and apologetic phrases, when something has gone wrong or when special courtesy is called for. Offering and accepting the ubiquitous business cards requires practice. The position one is to occupy with respect to superiors in reception rooms, automobiles or trains must be studied. One must walk slightly behind superiors in the corridors of the company, but enter a lift before a guest. A recruit talking with contemporaries in the corridors indicates that he has not quite understood the seriousness of it all. The outward impression the new salaryman makes is considered extraordinarily important.
At the same time, a remodelling of the recruit’s mind is undertaken. Lengthy submersions in an ice-cold river clad in only a loincloth, a 24-hour march with soldiers and cleaning lavatories for an entire day with colleagues are some of the more extreme solutions which corporations have found for the problem of breaking in a new group of university graduates. Companies view their annual intake of new employees as a disciplinary problem, because it is only through discipline that the recruits will fully appreciate the special relationship they have entered into. They should not regard their company merely as a place to earn a living. If the salaryman cannot feel that he is merged with his firm, or cannot at least pretend to be totally bound up in it, he can hardly be considered a worthy and full-fledged member of society.
Some companies have arrangements with Zen temples for what comes down to endurance training. Roughly two thousand send their recruits to the barracks of the Self-Defence Forces. Most companies approach the problem of making new ‘members’ in a more relaxed fashion, but practically all have special training programmes which can last from two months to a year.
The recruit may be required to live in a company dormitory during this period, where he is made to rise before dawn, perform all manner of communal tasks, obey a curfew and be in bed with the lights out at ten. The larger firms that own recreation and meeting facilities in resort areas often isolate their recruits for a number of weeks for intensive practice in togetherness, mutual confessions and other exercises, some of which clearly constitute rites of purification and initiation. The ultimate purpose can be compared with that of the drill-sergeant in a military unit: to break down possible individual resistance to the aims of the whole organisation, and to inculcate a habit of obedience.
It is commonly assumed that university graduates today need this urgently. Thus Nikkeiren, the federation of employers’ associations, organises an annual training programme for smaller firms, held in the facilities built for the Olympic Games. At the end of this programme recruits march around the stadium behind the emblem of their company. Nikkeiren spokesmen explain that urbanisation, affluence and the shortcomings of the schools have made it more necessary than ever for young employees to undergo this kind of training.
Every year the newspapers print the results of an opinion poll in which new employees are asked whether they will attach more importance to their families or their firms. Each year there is a slight increase in the percentage favouring the family, which inspires another round of columns and articles on the changing ethics of the salarymen. In 1986 eight out of ten polices stated that they would rate their private life above the demands of their company. But the experts at Nikkeiren do not take such expressions of independence very seriously. So far, it has been clear in practice that whenever the interests of the company and the family come into conflict, it is the family that will adjust as a matter of course.
Maihomu-shugi
or ‘my-home-ism’ – the tendency of young salarymen to rate highly the claims of wife and children – has not proved the threat that officials and the business élite thought it might become in the 1960s and early 1970s. The prefix
mai
(‘my’) still has a relatively negative connotation, whatever noun it is made to precede, because in the eyes of the industrial administrators it is associated with a loss of preoccupation with the workplace. But at the same time the competition among salaryman families to stock their small homes with the latest-model refrigerators, air-conditioners and stereo-sound colour television and a vast array of electrical labour-saving devices, and their tiny parking places with cars, was exactly what was needed to keep many of their firms running at full capacity.
Most companies give special consideration to the recently married salaryman. But following the birth of the first child, typically after some two years of marriage, the husband is expected to settle down to the serious business of devoting most of his energy, time and attention to his company.
Some sociologists and other commentators have argued that Japanese men prefer the company of fellow workers, and that they are uncomfortable when they have to go out with their wives and children. But one can argue that the salarymen have little choice, and that their discomfort stems from a lack of practice. A visit to rural areas, or the urban neighbourhoods where family workshops and blue-collar workers predominate, will confirm that most Japanese have no inherent difficulty with a social life centred on the family. The phenomenon of a middle class deprived to a large extent of men functioning as husbands and fathers is of relatively recent origin. ‘If Japanese “naturally” – because of cultural preconditioning – were prepared to give up their egos to a large organisation, the organisation would not have to work so hard to instill loyalty and identification.’
2
The salaryman is expected actively to demonstrate loyalty to his firm. There are various ways of doing this; he walked to work during railway strikes in the 1960s and 1970s; and he refrains from taking some or all of the holidays he is entitled to in the 1980s. His most common way to demonstrate loyalty is by working late hours or by spending time after office hours with colleagues and business associates – which means limiting the time spent with his family to the hours between eleven at night and seven in the morning.
This bond between company and employee can only be maintained, of course, so long as the employee has nowhere else to hire out his services. In most cases he hasn’t. Although in the lower reaches of the business hierarchy – among the small subcontracting firms – a steady turnover of employees is fairly common, in the world of the salaryman to change one’s job is for all practical purposes possible only in the first couple of years, if at all.
The ‘psychological’ explanation of this lack of mobility has been overworked. While salarymen are undoubtedly conditioned to believe that it is proper to remain with the same employer, the more important factor is that changing companies nearly always entails a set-back in income, prestige and future prospects. It is the policy of large companies – unless the transfer is a company arrangement to begin with – either not to accept white-collar employees from other companies, or to place them in a considerably lower position than the one they have come from.
This policy is clearly a political provision to help the salaryman maintain a keen sense of loyalty. The hesitant beginnings, in the 1980s, of a free labour market for specialists, particularly engineers and software developers, for whom the demand far outweighed the supply, prompted Keidanren, the Federation of Economic Organisations, to issue a report clarifying that this development should be considered an undesirable trend to be kept within bounds. The administrators in the business world make no secret of their wish that salarymen should remain wholly dependent on their firms, as children are dependent on their parents.
For the administrator élite the salaryman’s allegiance to his firm epitomises the ideal relationship between all Japanese and the System. It is most commonly expressed in the image of the corporation as a kind of family – an image that has made its way into numerous foreign assessments of Japanese economic life. It is widely believed that such familial relationships have evolved naturally out of a centuries-old tradition of psychosocial preferences. But in fact the company-as-family idea is a fairly modern innovation, even though the socio-political functions of the Japanese household and fictive kinship relationships inherited from the Tokugawa period helped prepare the way for it.
From a socio-economic as distinct from a political point of view, it was by no means inevitable that Japanese companies should become pseudo-families. Business firms in the Meiji period tended to be run by fairly individualistic entrepreneurs. The flagrant exploitation of workers and the resulting industrial unrest, not to mention the very conspicuous status differences, would hardly have made the family metaphor acceptable in those days, even to the most credulous observer.
Familistic organisation in industry did not, even so, spring out of nowhere. Fictive kinship relations have been common for centuries. Moreover, the Tokugawa shogunate gave the household, as we will see in a moment, a socio-political function that in some way prefigures that of the corporation. And there was an even more immediate model, a model that emerged in the context of the vigorous labour market created by rapidly expanding entrepreneurism in Meiji Japan. This market was originally formed by bands of workers controlled by bosses, who referred to each other as
oyakata
and
kokata
(literally, people who fill the role of ‘parent’ and ‘child’ respectively), and were bound together by quasi-familial ties in which loyalty and obedience were exchanged for supposed benevolence. Early labour unions were often, in fact, little other than these
oyakata
–
kokata
groups. They were to some extent comparable to the gangster organisations of today – indeed, around the turn of the century the two were sometimes related. The stevedores and coal-miners are good examples.
As the large corporations came to require more refined skills, and their fear of labour activism increased, entrepreneurs were prodded by their own requirements and the urgings of the government bureaucrats into recruiting and training workers with the purpose of forming regular bodies of permanent employees. Even so, it was decades before familistic ideas began to catch on among the managers. When they did, many companies were no longer led by independent-minded entrepreneurs. ‘It was the first generation of bureaucratic managers recruited straight from universities who actually adopted the ideal of familism.’
3
Without these early administrators of the business world, the familistic rhetoric might never have gained general acceptance. They had their counterparts in the bureaucracy in the shape of fellow graduates of Todai’s law department, who were at that same time extolling an ideology of a ‘family state’ held together by a benevolent emperor. Still, it was only in the second half of the 1930s, when the war in China led the government to focus on industrial programmes for increasing productivity, that the company-as-family notion spread all over the country, with corresponding organisational adjustments. Some of the characteristics of Japan’s famous ‘lifetime employment’ system were first introduced in 1942 with the Ordinance on Labour Management in Essential Industries.
4
Wars always make it easier for bureaucrats to dictate to business managers. In this case, Japanese bureaucrats were also helped by the lack of a traditional distinction between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ realm. Two or three centuries ago, Japanese on all levels were kept under control exclusively through personal ties, which were part of a complex of paternalistic structures. The lowliest tiller of the land and his family knew of no authority other than that of the land manager whose servants they were. For the land manager and his family, authority was solely embodied in a single figure above them: the vassal of the daimyo (baron). And the latter, in turn, owed allegiance only to his daimyo.
5
As Tokugawa economic life became more complex, self-regulating occupational classes and functional groups developed. But even though the urban worker, merchant or artisan was occasionally made aware that power also emanated from sources other than his own superior or guild, he would still have had no sense of any impersonal political organisation, any possible precursor of the state, that might judge his conduct objectively. ‘Public’ affairs meant simply the sum of those things that occupied the attention of his superior.
While over the centuries political integration increased and a national culture evolved, there was no parallel development of the idea of belonging to a state. Had such a notion established itself in Japanese thinking, political attitudes would probably be quite different today. Equipped with the concept of ‘the state’, one can imagine a boundary drawn around authority. It enables the mind to create a map of separate public and private realms – a prerequisite if one is to detect where and how the first is unnecessarily encroaching upon the second. Without this intellectual construct to help sort out one’s thinking, the political order and ‘society’ are congruent. And indeed, the Japanese intellectual tradition has consistently failed to distinguish between a political realm and ‘society’.
In the ideal Japanese perspective – which survives in the negative connotation of ‘my-home-ism’ – the workplace, the multi-generational family as distinct from the nuclear family, the schools or the clubs are not considered part of a private realm. This means, of course, that the public realm can encroach all the way up to the threshold of the individual psyche. For many Japanese, family, friends and colleagues do not constitute a buffer giving protection or moral support in the face of government or company authorities; the political world lies immediately outside one’s skin. Or, conversely, one might say that the whole world is a ‘private’ world, with ulcer-producing ‘family’ tensions and other problems soluble only through ‘personal relations’.
It will be illuminating here to examine more closely a subject already touched on in Chapter 3: the Japanese
ie
or ‘household’, and how the Tokugawa version of it differed from its Chinese counterpart.
6
The Chinese comparison is profitable, for while the two countries share certain Confucianist notions regarding the family, the
ie
denotes a social unit that unlike its Chinese counterpart is determined less by blood-ties than by a shared economic role. The ‘kinship’ family may well, of course, overlap with the economic unit that the
ie
represents, but the distinction becomes abundantly clear if one considers Japanese and Chinese practices concerning succession through adoption. Where there was no male heir to become the new head of a family, the Chinese would adopt someone as close to the family blood-line as possible. In Japan the crucial question often was suitability for the succession; even a natural son might be bypassed if considered lacking in the necessary qualities.
7
A fairly common solution for households with unsuitable sons, or no sons at all, was to adopt a son-in-law, or even to adopt a young girl and then choose for her a suitable husband who could subsequently be adopted into the household. This tradition is not dead. A close friend of mine, a childless Buddhist priest,
8
spent ten years searching – in vain – for a young lady so that he could adopt her and arrange her marriage with a young priest, who would then inherit his small temple. In Japan, again, maids, farmhands and the like were considered participants in the
ie
, whereas family members no longer under the common roof were not. By contrast, Chinese generally continued to feel a deep sense of membership in the family even after generations of separation by, say, the Pacific Ocean.
The corporate character of the Japanese
ie
did not come about in the natural course of events, but developed as a result of regulations enforced by the Tokugawa shogunate as part of its elaborate system of social control. The household was, quite consciously, transformed into a political unit some three and a half centuries ago – first of all the samurai household, but later also the well-to-do village households and city households engaged in business. Individuals did not own property, the
ie
did. Individuals were registered as members of the
ie
, whose head was responsible for them. The head also had nearly unlimited legal power over the members of his household.
The significance of the
ie
as a political unit derived from its metaphysical attributes. It was not just a social convenience; it had been given – according to the ideology that evolved around it – existence and various other blessings by a continuous line of ancestors (real or fictitious), and would, given a proper succession, continue indefinitely into the future. The
ie
was like a ship launched by gods and never sold as scrap: home to an ever-changing crew whose sacred duty was to keep it afloat and on course.
For power-holders this was a marvellous basic unit to work with, and the Meiji oligarchy extended the legal
ie
organisation to all layers of the population. In the twentieth century the
ie
was legally obliged until 1945 to produced moral citizens.
9
The post-war civil code stripped the household and its head of their legal rights and duties, and dropped the formal concept of
ie
altogether. But it survives in organisational ideals.
In the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, households engaged in business were
ie
by legal definition. When the managers began replacing the entrepreneurs in the early part of this century, they simply re-adopted the
ie
imagery, superimposing this originally political construct on their companies. Today many of the large firms have their ‘ancestors’ in the form of legendary founding presidents and their immediate successors, ancestors who frequently bequeathed a ‘philosophy’ or ‘moral’ code for the benefit of generations of employees. These are sometimes expounded in the glossy literature put out by Japanese companies, which often ask one to believe that commercial gain is the last thing on the mind of Japanese managers. Companies are portrayed as benefiting the people, if not the whole of humanity, and a fair number have, in fact, inserted in their promotional literature a line or two about their ideal of contributing to world peace. But above all, according to accepted theory, the company benefits and exists for its employees, whose ‘sincere efforts’ are expected in return for all that previous managers have done to bring it where it is.
It is instructive to look at the equation of family with workplace from yet another angle, in comparison with Western experience. Before the Industrial Revolution, the European family was the elementary unit of economic production, just as in China and Japan. But as industrialisation progressed, Westerners began to find employment outside the family, in impersonal workplaces: the work function became separated from the family unit. Japan, on the other hand, after a transition period followed by the consolidation of today’s System, has ended up with a situation in which, one might say, the family function has become separated from the work unit. The
ie
of today are the work groups in the large corporations. China has had a long history of tension between the clan system and representatives of the central government. Unsurprisingly, after 1949 there have been many reports of conflicts between devotion to the family and the demands of an artificially collectivist state. The Chinese communists, notably during the Great Leap Forward, tried to establish among their subjects the very attitude that the Japanese have for some time demonstrated without special prodding from a central government: the willingness to sacrifice personal and family interests for the sake of communal economic pursuits. The way things are fixed in the System gives the salaryman no other choice. And Japan’s ruling élite is quite happy with the unwittingly ideological conclusion of sociologists that work units, and not families, are the basic building blocks of Japanese society.
10
The salaryman’s intensive involvement in his company makes necessary a reassuring symbolism, confirming that his time, energy and personal interests are being sacrificed for a worthy cause; the company must appear to be something more than an organisation established for the purpose of making a profit or providing its employees with a livelihood. It is generally presented as having intrinsic value. Sometimes a company Shinto shrine on the roof provides a vague but ever-present reminder of spiritual significance attached to the communal effort to continue the voyage of the company from past generations through the present into the future. One important symbol for the large modern company is its emblem, reminiscent of the family crests (comparable to the Western coat of arms) of the prominent
ie
of the past. Some firms – again like the old merchant
ie
– also have a ‘constitution’ consisting of pieties and prescribed duties. And each large company is expected to have its own
shafu
, a ‘company spirit’ derived from ideals set forth in catechism-like tracts. Whoever makes a tour of contemporary Japanese factories is likely to end up with stacks of booklets and pamphlets setting out the special wisdom and traditions of the firms, interspersed with platitudes concerning the general welfare.
The shared company culture is regularly reaffirmed by the communal singing of company songs. The employees of Hitachi Shipbuilding and Engineering sing:
Fresh light at dawn, Peace country Japan is born. . . . Let’s build good ships, Our duty is important, We pray for Hitachi zosen which develops the nation’s wealth. . . . We are full of vitality, Hitachi zosen . . . brings about people’s happiness. . . . We are proud of harmony, Our ambition is to connect the countries of the world with ships, May (God) bless Hitachi zosen. May it develop day by day.
The personnel of Victor Company of Japan Ltd see it thus:
Geniuses in the world assemble here where music is played, Essence of culture, Pride of human technics, Victor, Victor, Our Victor, the Nation’s welfare. Family harmony. We realise them both, We enjoy accomplishing our mission, Highest technology of the age, Pride of the world. . . . The flame which makes our products is in our sincerity, Essence of culture, Pride of human technics.
Workers at Obayashi-gumi, a construction company, sing:
Let’s make a rainbow bridge in the sky, If we build full of hope, songs of construction will echo. They will echo to tomorrow’s sky, Obayashi-gumi is constructing the world, Let’s sculpt dreams on the earth. New things will be created. The road starts from here and leads to a sparkling dawn, Obayashi-gumi is developing for the world.
Employees of the Toyota Motor Corporation confirm that they are full of
Wishes for overflowing sunshine and green. We open the new age with guts and an eternally expanding human network . . . We keep growing tomorrow, with a unified mind and continuous effort. Our, Our, Our Toyota. . . . We form our history with a worldly dream, wisdom and rich technology. Bright future, with a unified mind and new strides. Our, Our, Our Toyota.
Songs from any other four companies would cover roughly the same ground. Expressions like ‘brighter future’ and ‘harmony’ are rarely absent. The songs often mention belonging to a large family, helping to build the nation and a great determination to achieve goals oftener than not only vaguely defined. Many songs refer to what others in the past have done to create the present, thus implying a duty to carry on the good work.
Although Japanese salarymen do not exactly begin the day with joint prayer, this is the impression given by the
choreikai
, the morning meetings held in an estimated 80 per cent of Japanese firms.
11
Employees are intensively and constantly involved in meetings, work discussion groups, ‘quality control circles’ and the like. All of this helps to shape a personality susceptible to manipulation. The passionate clinging to the symbols of the firm, the founder and the corporate ideology; the singing of the company song; the joint calisthenics: all are symbolic acts designed to reassure the employee of his membership in the company and of its nurturing powers. The symbols, though abstract, are immediate and familiar. The trite phrases, repeated like incantations, dull the critical faculties. All this consumes much of the salaryman’s emotional energy, leaving little psychological reserve for personal attachments outside the company.
