The Enigma of Japanese Power (26 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–
We have seen how rural Japanese are tied to the System, and how doctors, professors and small manufacturers are also a part of it. Relatively independent are the shop owner, the beauty-salon operator, the artist and some others. Even here, shopkeepers are often tied to dealer associations controlled by manufacturers, while in the other categories too associations proliferate and frequently make relatively heavy demands on their members to conform. Yet no category is as limited in its freedom as that of the salarymen.
It is through salaryman life and all its organisations that the System exerts its most effective economic sway over the Japanese population. The most glaring contrast in comparison with other industrialised countries is the absence of any counterbalancing power of labour, since there is almost no labour market for salarymen.
Most salarymen are urban consumers, and it is they who, through relatively high amounts of savings, subsequently channelled into the
keiretsu
for capital investments, have played a crucial role in sustaining the economic ‘miracle’. It is they who in the late 1980s were still subsidising Japan’s export industries by being systematically deprived of low-cost imports and by paying considerably higher prices than consumers in the Western industrialised countries for almost all daily necessities.
In most other countries the rise of the middle class upset and basically changed political relations. In Japan such a disturbing influence has been minimised. However important he may be to the survival of the System, the salaryman’s interests are woefully under-represented. One reason why housing policy is neglected is that the LDP sees no electoral advantages in it.
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We have seen in Chapter 3 how consumer movements initiated by salarymen’s wives have been systematically encapsulated and undermined. In Chapter 4 we saw how one type of racketeering, the
sarakin
, was reorganised under government auspices with an eye to the interests, not of the consumer, but of the larger
sarakin
firms, of the Ministry of Finance and of the politicians.
All efforts to organise the political potential of the salaryman, including a Salaryman Party, have failed. The claims made by the company on his total person leave him with insufficient time, energy and ideas to become a political force. The salarymen have been referred to as Japan’s new middle class, but this white-collar class has never grown into a bourgeoisie that could be a threat to the traditional Japanese body politic.
A mammoth industry sees to it that Japanese have their ‘circuses’ as well as their ‘bread’. Japanese mass culture is tailor-made to sustain the orderly world of the salaryman. It stands out for the dearth of anything that might tax the political imagination. The days of the serious Japanese cinema, exploring social and political issues, are long gone. Since the 1960s the Japanese movie studios, which are very much part of the System, have churned out totally predictable fare made according to a small variety of rigid formulas. Toei studios have long had intimate connections with the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate, and have made hundreds of films celebrating the traditional ‘morals’ of gangsters, as well as films on wartime and post-war history with a nationalistic slant. Twice or three times a year, perhaps, a more independent director will produce a quality product; but even when these satirise contemporary social practices, they lack implicit analysis of their origins. Japanese avant-garde theatre groups sometimes claim to make ‘political statements’, but their messages are abstract and imponderable.
A crucial factor in Japanese popular culture is its degree of commercial organisation. There is little room for the maverick. One example is film director Oshima Nagisa, one of the few Japanese artists to concern themselves seriously with socio-political questions such as the student movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the plight of Koreans living in Japan. He ended by being relegated to the margins of the Japanese movie industry, to the extent of having to finance his projects from foreign sources. Even the serious art world is highly organised, with rankings that determine income. Japanese painters, print-makers, musicians and stage performers are tied to systems that are much more hierarchical, forbidding and unbendable than in the West.
Control over Japanese mass culture is easily accomplished without open or direct governmental restraint. Japanese, talented or not, are unlikely to contribute to it unless either they are employed by a hierarchically ordered firm in the entertainment sector, or they are in some way tied in with the
jinmyaku
connections of executives in such firms. As is true of the education system, this industry abhors imagination that goes against the grain of socio-political expectations. The police are activated only by photographs and film scenes showing pubic hair. Everything else pertaining to mass culture can be controlled because the ‘private’ institutions that produce it are informally linked to a number of élite groups. They include film and television studios, as well as most of the gigantic newspaper and publishing firms. But the best example, probably, is afforded by the advertising world, and in particular Dentsu, the largest ‘advertising agency’ in the world.
Dentsu does more than any single corporation, anywhere in the world, to mould popular culture, both directly and through hordes of subcontractors. It also orchestrates major events such as expos and visits from the pope. It is highly active politically, about which more in a moment.
Dentsu is directly responsible for one-third of all advertising on Japanese TV, and virtually monopolises the scheduling of sponsors during prime-time hours, not to mention the control it exerts through its many subsidiaries and subcontracting firms. Some 120 film production companies and more than 400 subcontracting graphic arts studios are under its wing. Advertisers wishing to insert commercials in television programmes between 7 and 11 p.m. have almost no choice but to go via Dentsu, because it controls their selection and much of the programme material.
Programme makers jokingly refer to Dentsu as the ‘editing bureau of Tsukiji’ (the neighbourhood that houses its monumental head office).
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It can play this role because in Japan volume of business tends to correspond directly to degree of political clout. Under such circumstances, it is a privilege to be treated with consideration by Dentsu, and advertisers tend to follow its instructions rather than the other way round. The same is even true for the commercial television channels, which have become highly dependent on Dentsu.
The result is that Dentsu’s sway over the substance of Japanese TV culture is quite unlike any kind of social control through the mass media anywhere in the world. And this is of great political significance. Nowhere has the drug of TV been applied as successfully as in Japan, and nowhere else has the addiction taken such a hold, with sets in restaurants, shops, tour buses and even taxis. Very few, if any, countries can be proud of the overall quality of their television programmes, but the global cultural desert has areas of greater and lesser misery. Sometimes NHK (comparable to the BBC) – ironically enough, the station most directly linked with officialdom – will broadcast a serious programme in which reporters are allowed to raise genuine questions about social issues. For the rest, however, Japanese television ranges from pseudo-scholarly, sanitised and carefully uncontroversial ‘serious’ fare on NHK, through soap operas that on all channels almost caricature cherished Japanese mores, to utterly vacuous show programmes.
Quizzes and amateur song-fests are copied from foreign examples, but in Japan they reach an apotheosis of mindlessness. Popular ‘stars’ are mass-produced; with ‘careers’ rarely lasting more than two years, they are a caricature of the Western phenomenon of entertainers famous merely for their fame.
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There are no accepted standards for measuring such things internationally. However, if television programmes in most West European countries and the USA are adjusted to viewers of an average mental age of eleven or twelve, those in Japan are attuned to an average age of eight or nine. Dentsu is the major instrument for determining the quality of Japan’s daily entertainment, and it has managed to reduce nearly everything to the lowest common denominator. Though institutions producing mind-deadening entertainment exist in other countries too, we are dealing here with an organisation possessing almost unfailing power to keep others out and to restrain or arrest the development of popular culture of a higher quality.
Dentsu handles about a quarter of all advertising budgets in Japan; it places over one-fifth of the ads in the major newspapers and close to a third of those in the more important magazines. The other three-quarters is taken care of by some 3,000 smaller firms, the largest eight of these reaching combined sales about equal to those of Dentsu. By comparison, the largest advertising agency in the United States, Young & Rubicam, has a US market share of only 3.46 per cent (in 1986). Dentsu gets higher commissions than the smaller agencies, and can set conditions of payment. New magazines may be asked to take advertisements free of charge for a trial period before they will be considered as an outlet; if they do not comply, Dentsu has enough influence to arrange a reduction in their existing advertising income.
23
Dentsu has become unbeatable thanks to its
jinmyaku
. Its hiring policies have always aimed to maintain and expand its pool of sons and other close relatives from the top level of administrators and executives in the television and publishing world, as well as of special clients and professional backstage fixers. Its employee ranking system reflects the extent to which these recruits are believed to be able to foster informal relations with clients, government agencies, broadcasting companies and publishers.
24
One Dentsu executive was quoted as characterising this as ‘taking hostages’ to maintain favourable relations with big sponsors.
25
Conversely, Dentsu provides presidents and top-level executives for major newspapers, national and regional TV stations
26
and other firms connected with the mass media, as well as its own subsidiaries. One landing spot for Dentsu personnel is Video Research Company, the rating agency that assesses the popularity of TV programmes. Set up by Dentsu in 1962, two years after the US firm Nielsen introduced the TV programme rating system in Japan (the second largest TV market in the world), it can be called upon to rid TV of programmes that are unpopular with the administrators. For example, a programme called
Judgment
that concerned itself with controversial issues (the
burakumin
, school textbook censorship by the Education Ministry and problems regarding the tax system) was taken off the air, allegedly because of low viewing rates.
27
Advertising agencies in other countries are intermediaries. In Japan, Dentsu itself often decides how companies must advertise and where. In the USA, the one other country where commercial television is a major industry, an independent rating agency determines how commercially successful the programmes are; in Japan this function remains in Dentsu’s hands.
Dentsu is in a position to intimidate large firms, since it can make corporate scandals known and hush them up again. Moreover, companies hardly dare switch agencies because of rumours that Dentsu will report irregularities in their business to the authorities.
28
Dentsu helps shelter big business from the scrutiny of consumers. A Dentsu executive once boasted in a speech that the
Yomiuri
newspaper, after having invited consumer activist Ralph Nader to Japan, heeded a warning from Dentsu by breaking up a planned two-page special report and toning down the fragments. Around the same time, the
Mainichi
newspaper, also under instructions from Dentsu, ran a ‘moderate’ story on the consumer movement.
29
Dentsu is able to apply enormous pressure on the media not to report, or to downplay, incidents that might harm the prestige of its clients. A famous case is Dentsu’s controlling of news about the arsenic contamination of Morinaga Milk Industry’s powdered milk in 1955. Another is the way Dentsu in 1964–5 censored news of deaths caused by cold medicine produced by Taisyo Pharmaceutical. As one reporter from the Kyodo news agency remembers: ‘Whenever news of a death through that medicine reached us, companies such as Dentsu applied pressure on us not to report it at all, or not to mention the name of the pharmaceutical company. Sometimes they telephoned us; at other times an executive would visit us.’
30
Weekly magazines exercise a certain amount of self-censorship over stories that might adversely affect large Dentsu clients. They may also expect pressure prior to publication, since the contents of an upcoming issue are usually known to Dentsu.
31
Dentsu is given additional leverage by a system whereby it buys a regular chunk of a magazine’s advertisement space, guaranteeing the magazine a regular income and freeing it from the need to find advertisers on its own.
32
Its success in the censorship business derives not only from its financial leverage, but also from having once been merged with the monopolistic Domei Tsushinsha news agency that purveyed government propaganda between 1936 and 1945, and from its very close connections with Japan’s two major news agencies, Kyodo Tsushin and Jiji Press, both of them likewise descendants of the wartime Domei Tsushinsha.
33
These links are reinforced by cross-shareholding.
34
Dentsu is kept informed of the news that Kyodo handles, and especially with local newspapers can instantaneously intercede on behalf of its clients.
35
Another major function of this media institution is the bolstering of ‘traditional values’ with the aid of ‘opinion polls’, together with public-relations work for the bureaucrats and the LDP. It collects intelligence for the Prime Minister’s Office and the LDP, and helps manufacture ‘public opinion’ through slanted polls. It is in charge of the more sophisticated aspects of LDP election campaigns. It handles propaganda concerning controversial issues such as the safety of nuclear power generation, and concerning projects of the various ministries. It co-ordinated political manoeuvres to unseat a string of oppositionist mayors and prefectural governors in the late 1970s, and has waged campaigns against politically significant local consumer and environmental movements.
Such work for the bureaucrats and the LDP is mainly done by Dentsu’s ‘ninth bureau’, which has sections corresponding to the ministries of Construction, Transport, Agriculture, Post and Telecommunications, Education and Finance and the Prime Minister’s Office. Officially privatised but in fact nearly unchanged public corporations such as NTT and Japan Railways are handled by this bureau as well. The ninth bureau absorbs over one-third of the PR budget of the prime minister’s office and some 40 per cent of that of the other ministries.
36
Dentsu also has a near monopoly on disposal of the LDP’s PR budget.
One reason why the LDP and Dentsu maintain such cordial relations is that Dentsu’s oligopolistic power allows it to charge such high commissions from business clients that the LDP- always short of ‘political funds’ – need not pay much, nor be prompt in paying it. The ninth bureau was established shortly after the formation of the Tanaka Kakuei cabinet in 1972. A year later Dentsu published a memorable report. Reflections on the PR of the LDP, containing the often quoted assertion that, whereas the LDP already maintained fairly advantageous connections, via the reporter club system, with reporters of the daily press, TV and radio, its relations with important weekly magazines other than those published by the newspaper companies were not yet based sufficiently on ‘fixed rules’.
Japan’s second largest ‘advertising agency’, Hakuhodo (with roughly 40 per cent of Dentsu’s volume of sales), is also well ensconced among the administrators, especially those of the financial community. This is understandable, for two successive presidents of the company and several other executives have been
amakudari
bureaucrats from the Ministry of Finance.
37
But the most interesting of the smaller outfits making propaganda for the administrators is the very active Tokyu Agency. Whereas Dentsu normally receives orders through the bureaucrats, when Nakasone Yasuhiro was prime minister he would telephone Tokyu Agency directly to pass on instructions. The link is close because Goto Noboru, the great boss of the Tokyu Group and president until 1987 of the Japan Chamber of Commerce, has Nakasone, a former classmate at Todai, at the apex of his
jinmyaku
.
38
One of Tokyu Agency’s greatest assignments was the celebrations in connection with the controversial National Foundation Day that Nakasone promoted as part of his programme to clear away post-war taboos. Even larger in scope was its co-ordination of a nation-wide propaganda effort in connection with Nakasone’s administrative reform programme.
39
It formed a pressure group, enlisting housewives’ associations for the purpose, and organised marches and demonstrations in front of the Diet building. On one occasion in March 1983 it managed to mobilise 15,000 ‘demonstrators’. Tokyu Agency lost money on these large assignments, but the connections it solidified through them have made it the fastest-growing ‘advertising agency’.
The role of the major ‘advertising agencies’ as servants of the System illustrates admirably the impossibility of drawing a line between the private and public sectors in Japan. If the ‘policy platforms’ that successive LDP governments are expected to come up with usually sound like advertising copy, it is because the slogans that they substitute for political ideas are manufactured in one or the other of the above-mentioned agencies.
The questions usually asked to determine whether there is collusion between business and government become irrelevant when applied to the cases of Dentsu, Hakuhodo and Tokyu Agency. It is inconceivable that they would stand idly by if politically engaged groups should ever try to undermine the System on which they depend.
