The Enigma of Japanese Power (50 page)

In his cell in Sugamo Prison, Hiranuma Kiichiro, the powerful public procurator and model social-control bureaucrat, ruminated in 1952 on the unfortunate fact that many people had come to consider the pre-war and wartime Special Higher Police (Tokko, popularly known as the ‘thought police’) to have been evil, a development that made him worry seriously about the country’s future.
⁵¹
His worries were a bit premature. A large number of Tokko officials escaped being purged through reshuffling manoeuvres that eluded SCAP.
⁵²
Half of the fourteen Naimusho bureaucrats appointed as supervisors of all police activity (including the Tokko) between 1935 and 1945 served in the post-war Diet.

To name only those Naimusho bureaucrats who fulfilled major functions with the ‘thought police’ before or during the war and who served in high posts after the war: Machimura Kingo (who suspended publication of magazines such as
Chuo Koron
and suppressed religious groups) became minister of home affairs and chairman of the National Public Safety Commission overseeing the post-war police; Niwa Kyoshiro (Tokko section chief in Kyoto) became transport minister; and Okazaki Eijo (Tokko section chief in Aichi and Tokyo) became political vice-minister at the Ministry of Labour, the Administrative Management Agency and MITI, and vice-chairman of the LDP’s public security committee. Hara Bumbei (Kagoshima Tokko section chief) became an Upper House member and head of the Tokyo metropolitan police. Another section chief of the Tokko in Kagoshima, Okuno Seisuke, was vice-minister of home affairs, education minister and justice minister, before becoming director-general of the National Land Agency in the Takeshita cabinet formed in 1987. The well-known Naimusho official Furui Yoshimi (Naimusho police bureau chief, Naimusho vice-minister, governor of Ibaragi and Aichi) became welfare minister and justice minister. The reform bureaucrat Odachi Shigeo (Naimusho minister in 1944) was education minister and, as we saw in Chapter 3, imported former Naimusho bureaucrats into the Education Ministry for his battle against the teachers’ union, Nikkyoso. Nadao Hirokichi (Naimusho vice-minister and Oita governor) became welfare minister and the greatest enemy of Nikkyoso as education minister in four cabinets. Masuhara Keikichi (Wakayama Tokko section chief) became director-general of the Self-Defence Agency. Otsubo Yasuo (in charge of the police section monitoring publications) became parliamentary vice-minister of education and of justice, and chairman of the judicial affairs committee of the Lower House. Goto Fumio, a leader of the reform bureaucrats and Naimusho minister, who played a major role organising the pre-war and wartime local youth organisations, served in the Upper House after the war.
⁵³

The list of former ‘thought police’ officials who re-emerged as politicians is much longer, but I have chosen only those who made a name for themselves with their post-war positions in the central government. A large number of them also ended up as prefectural governors, as officials in the .local public safety commissions (theoretically supervising the police) or in lower regional government positions. As my list shows, the former ‘thought police’ officials tended to drift to government departments concerned with social control: education, welfare, justice and labour. The labour bureaucrats in the Naimusho – also spared by SCAP – were holding the posts of vice-minister and chiefs of the most important bureaux in the Ministry of Labour as late as 1969.
⁵⁴
As their American chronicler writes: ‘Ironically, the labor bureaucrats achieved their greatest autonomy under the aegis of the American state. Like their colleagues in other ministries, these officials became more powerful during the Occupation than ever before or ever again.’
⁵⁵

The occupation period gave the social-control bureaucrats an opportunity to forge institutional weapons with which to fend off the labour union advance that they, under United States orders, had initially helped stimulate. The ‘Red Purge’ ousted officials with post-war ‘dangerous thoughts’, and set the stage for the dismissal of Education Ministry officials who had ‘co-operated too much’ with SCAP’s democratisation efforts.
⁵⁶
Steps to remedy the ‘excesses of the occupation’ in other areas such as the police and anti-trust legislation completed the consolidation of post-war bureaucratic power.

Not all Japanese welcomed the retention of the wartime control bureaucrats. As one author wrote in one of the most respected of Japan’s intellectual monthlies, the Tokyo Trials judged acts perpetrated by war criminals against foreigners, but did not consider those committed against the Japanese people. Men who had sent others to the front, who had deprived them of their freedom and property, who had made cruel laws, continued, he pointed out, to hold high positions in post-war cabinets.
⁵⁷
Showing how the bureaucrats in question disposed of government assets to supply the politicians of their choice with the funds to gain power, the author reminded his readers that in Germany, unlike in Japan, a general sense of justice had prevailed. The Germans themselves tried war criminals who had been acquitted at the Nuremberg Trials.

The influential post-war careers of these wartime bureaucrats are only part of the story. No less important is the phenomenal institutional memory of the System’s components. Japanese bureaucrats, like their counterparts everywhere, constantly seek to minimise their personal responsibility for anything they do. But they differ from their counterparts in the West or Asia in the extraordinary sense of responsibility they are expected to feel towards their organisation. As we have seen in various contexts, Japanese socio-political circumstances leave members of an organisation little choice but to identify strongly with it, and this is especially true of élite groups. Members of MITI, the prosecutors’ office, Nikkeiren and all the institutions that guide and control Japan are continually aware of the experiences of their predecessors and the seriousness of their tasks. Institutional memory and institutional motivation go together, because collective experience gives a keen edge to a collective purpose, as well as to passionate partisanship. In Japanese government agencies they are strong, vivid and sharply etched into the minds of the officials. For comparable instances outside Japan, one could point to the Kremlin specialists who deal with the capitalist world; to, possibly, some intelligence organisations; and to churches and secret societies. These special institutions are like ordinary Japanese administrator institutions in the sense that membership can never be a casual or short-term affair (as it is in many US government agencies). Another similarity is that they operate largely under conditions in which the laws of mainstream society hardly affect them, or even bring their own set of ‘laws’ to their task.

No ministry of the interior of any Western country could, for example, be compared to the Naimusho in its dictatorial powers over the ordinary public. The occupation officials who disbanded it in December 1947 had no inkling of the breadth and depth of its institutional memory and of the force it would remain after its demise. Besides providing the above-mentioned Diet members and vice-ministers, as well as many of the prefectural vice-governors who were key figures at the regional level in post-war Japan, this Hydra-like institution lives on through its social bureau, which became the post-war Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Health and Welfare; its civil engineering bureau, which was turned into the Ministry of Construction and the National Land Agency; its police bureau, which became the National Police Agency; and its local bureau, which after an interim period as a special agency renewed itself as the Ministry of Home Affairs (Jichisho). The last-mentioned institution is generally considered to be the chief heir of its pre-1947 antecedent,
⁵⁸
but officials from all the offshoots share, in varying degrees, the ‘Naimusho spirit’.

In the 1980s several of the Naimusho’s descendants are thought to be increasing their relative power. This is certainly true of the Ministry of Home Affairs, whose former bureaucrats already occupy about one-third of the prefectural governorships,
⁵⁹
as well as prominent positions in municipal governments, so that it has gradually become the most formidable rival to the Ministry of Finance.
⁶⁰
Most relevant in the context of social control are special committees set up by the Ministry of Home Affairs in local governments to collect information on inhabitants and their
jinmyaku
. The ministry has the advantage of not being attractive to politicians who use cabinet portfolios to expand their ‘political fund’ resources, so it is not much bothered by the LDP.
⁶¹

There are also traces of the Naimusho tradition in less obvious places. For example, Shoriki Matsutaro, the powerful post-war boss of the
Yomiuri Shinbun
, Japan’s largest newspaper, was in the Naimusho before becoming the newspaper’s president in 1924. He exerted himself on behalf of the bureaucrats in the 1936 merger of the news agencies into one government propaganda organ, Domei Tsushinsha.
⁶²
After a stint in prison as a war criminal suspect, he established Nippon Television and became a Diet member and director-general of the Science and Technology Agency.

After the Second World War the military ceased to be a factor, and the police lost their more drastic means of compelling compliance. The education and justice ministries were obliged to give themselves a ‘democratic’ appearance, which inevitably had an inhibiting effect on the overbearing attitudes of pre-occupation days. But an essential element in the attitude of administrators in the civil service, the notion that they must always control the people, has remained.

Japan’s social-control bureaucrats have always believed that their mission goes far beyond the enforcement of regulations that is the normal task of civil servants in most Western nations. With or without support from their military allies, they have always been interested in social engineering, and have viewed such active and inventive interference in civil society as necessary to prevent instability. The Japanese ruling élite had before the war and still has today an overpowering ‘daddy knows best’ attitude, while, as we have seen throughout this book, the people have been kept under permanent political tutelage. It is this continuity through the pre-war, wartime and post-war periods, rather than the undoubted modification of elitist demeanour and the gains in personal freedom, that most significantly determines the character of the Japanese political system today.

Heterodox political ideas and unconventional behaviour are feared because of a strong sense of the fragility of the prevailing order of power relations. This should come as no surprise; outside these power relations there is nothing to sustain socio-political order – no legal framework consistently adhered to and providing a sense of security, no certainties transcending the here and now of political expediency. Japan’s ruling élite has more reason to fear disorder than Western elites do, for anything that cannot be anticipated and forestalled directly threatens its security. Westerners take it so much for granted that society is regulated automatically by laws and universal principles that they almost never fully appreciate the acute Japanese sense of the need for constant vigilance. In so far as the order as represented by the System has ultimate meaning, unchallenged by any religious or secular belief-system, maintenance of order must be an ultimate aim.

Just as the problem has remained, so have formidable vestiges of the neo-Confucianist notions that – by presenting existing socio-political relations as the embodiment of ultimate truth – served the Tokugawa shogunate so well as a supporting ideology. The administrators have also inherited from their Tokugawa predecessors a dominating sense of obligation to control the masses. The Japanist ideology, justifying extra-legal power by referring to homogeneity and harmony, cannot completely subdue the bureaucrats’ uneasy awareness that the ‘culturalist’ excuse that keeps them in place does not convince everyone. They know that, just as in the time of Shotoku Taishi and in the Meiji period, harmony needs to be enforced. Success in keeping the lid on the unacknowledged legitimacy problem depends on success in keeping social order.

The administrators of today may not be especially concerned on an individual level, but as members of administrative institutions it is their duty to worry, just as it is the duty of, say. United States anti-trust enforcers to be troubled by the slightest business collusion as a possible sign of the beginning of the end of the free-market system. They demonstrate their ingrained collective concern with order by, for instance, their common vocabulary. Numerous reports and speeches speak of an ‘increasingly complex society’;
⁶³
it is one of the most frequently used clichés in the press. Ever since the Meiji Restoration and the reopening of Japan to foreign influence, complexity has horrified Japanese power-holders: the political situation could no longer be sized up at a glance. ‘Complexity’ is often cited today as a justification for interference, and a reference to something as ‘becoming too complex’ often indicates that it is about to receive more supervision.

The fear of unruliness and unexpected behaviour and, by implication, the need for better bureaucratic control are also conveyed by such terms as ‘excessive competition’. The latter means competition carrying risks – in other words, the kind that is common in free-market countries. Administrators also frequently refer to a ‘confused situation’, by which they mean an unwanted development eluding the bureaucratic grasp.

Histories of Japan commonly remark with regard to cultural borrowing that the country ‘took only what it needed’ and generally ‘imported the form and not the content’. This supports what was said in Chapter 1 about the unusual extent to which Japan’s power-holders have for centuries restricted the introduction and development of politically significant ideas and institutions. The social changes that the administrators have guided and monitored have most often been viewed as inevitable adjustments to newly appreciated realities rather than purposeful, radical breaks with old habits.

The bureaucrats serving the Meiji oligarchy, alert to the potential dangers of imported ideas and institutions, engaged in
shiho zendo
(‘thought guidance’) as a means of forestalling social problems of the kind that existed in Europe.
⁶⁴
At the same time, the Japanese power-holders have borrowed much that they could use to strengthen their own position, and have discovered various foreign methods of social control. The earliest bureaucrats to do so were concentrated in the Naimusho with, at their centre, Kawaji’s police force, whose diverse and extensive social duties were inspired by the example of the highly efficient French police. Six decades later, Nazi Germany was a crucial model. The patriotic industrial associations, the precursors of the post-war enterprise unions, grew out of plans based on Hitler’s solution for coping with labour. The labour bill of 1936 was an ‘obvious imitation of Nazi Germany’s 1934 Law for the Organisation of National Labor’.
⁶⁵
After the Second World War the business administrators turned to largely discarded American ideas for streamlining capitalism, and produced institutions such as quality control circles aimed at enhancing discipline in factories. More recently, the bureaucrats have been studying the causes of the ‘advanced country disease’ that allegedly enfeebles the European and United States economies today.

When the Meiji oligarchs introduced military conscription in 1873, they knew that, aside from its ostensible function, it also constituted their best hope of enforcing order. This had been anticipated by Aizawa Seishisai, the pre-Meiji author who said that people should obey the rules but not know about them.
⁶⁶
For Aizawa, the only alternative to keeping people weak and ignorant was to enlist them in an army. Western governments, according to him, had had no choice but to introduce the military draft, since they had failed to check the emancipation of the masses.
⁶⁷

Even though the different cliques among the ‘emperor’s servants’ were engaged in unceasing rivalry, their opinions were mostly unanimous with regard to social control. Between early Meiji and 1945 a military-bureaucratic alliance constituted the chief institutional provision for ensuring such control. The figure largely responsible for the original nature of this alliance was Yamagata Aritomo, who has appeared in Chapter 12 as the political genius who permanently insulated the bureaucracy from the caprices of politicians. With greater influence than any of the other oligarchs over the training of the bureaucracy as well as the military, he established a pattern for military influence over civilian society, and educated a group of protégés who continued to carry out his programmes during the first half of the twentieth century. The retired military men who between 1885 and 1906 headed the Naimusho ‘virtually comprise the Who’s Who of the Army and Navy’.
⁶⁸
The Ministry of Education also saw to it that the elementary schools exemplified military ideals. Many school presidents were retired officers. The Army, moreover, gave teachers half a year of intensive military training and indoctrination, with the idea not of sending them to front lines in a future war, but of turning village youth into admirers of soldiers and martial values.
⁶⁹

The mass of potentially disloyal rural Japanese were regimented through a campaign taking advantage of the rural hierarchy. The local ruling élite, which initially disdained soldiering, was co-opted (following the instructions of a German adviser) by a system in which the educated sons of landlords and other village bosses served as draftees for only one-third or half the time usual for ordinary villagers, and returned to their homes as lieutenants. After the turn of the century, the Naimusho contributed to this regimentation campaign by launching a ‘local improvement movement’ aimed at replacing the villagers’ loyalty to the old hamlets with loyalty to new administrative villages, which were more controllable from Tokyo.
⁷⁰

Yamagata’s dream was that the schools and military training should complement each other, forming a gigantic institute for inculcating ‘national essence’ (
kokutai
) beliefs and thus ensuring an orderly and unified nation.
⁷¹
It was to this end that his most important protégé. General Tanaka Giichi, established the Imperial Military Reserve Association, trail-blazer for the other nationally organised, military-led institutions for indoctrination referred to in Chapter 10.

Tanaka Giichi was to continue the mission he had inherited from Yamagata for many years. In 1928, under his prime ministership, the Peace Preservation Law was toughened to include lifetime imprisonment and the death penalty for those who harboured ‘dangerous thoughts’. Under his auspices. Justice Ministry bureaucrats who supported the fanatical
kokutai
advocate Hiranuma Kiichiro moved into the Naimusho and from this new base arrested over 3,400 people.
⁷²

The bureaucrats did not intervene in society with unmitigated harshness. They saw their task as one of finding Japanist solutions to social problems, presented with a strong emphasis on ‘harmony’, ‘beautiful ancient customs’, and so on. Many of the most important democratising reforms of the 1920s were in fact initiated by activist cliques of labour bureaucrats in the Naimusho.
⁷³
Moved by considerations of national security, these bureaucrats had from before the turn of the century been arguing the necessity of taking care of workers, since crippled children and weakly mothers made for weak and unhealthy soldiers.
⁷⁴
Even so, the initiatives on behalf of workers that came from the Naimusho were supported by a surviving ideal of benevolence.

In the midst of the bureaucratic-military crusade to rescue and safeguard Japan’s hallowed order there was an odd political period, from the second decade of this century until 1932, concerning which historians have rather widely diverging opinions. It is referred to as ‘Taisho democracy’ because it coincided roughly with the Taisho period, the reign of Hirohito’s father that lasted from 1912 to 1926. This period saw developments that suggested a potential for structural change in the governing of Japan. There was a measure of political relaxation in the cities, and the political parties became more significant.

Evolutionistic theories have interpreted this as a ‘natural’ development towards a Western type of parliamentary democracy. As it happened, the promise was not fulfilled. The right to vote was extended to all adult males in 1925, but in the same year the legal basis for ‘thought control’ was established with the promulgation of the Peace Preservation Law. And after roughly a decade of relative openness and freedom, the military-bureaucratic reaction that came in the late 1920s was all the more intense.
⁷⁵

The administrators of post-war Japan have been able to create a world in which socio-political disorder threatening their security and peace of mind is kept to a minimum. Japan’s political culture, shaped by a succession of political arrangements in which the cult of submission has been a major common denominator, helps them to do this. This tradition discourages individual growth and fosters dependency. The Japanese accept a high degree of organisation and restrictions; they tolerate the ways that officials meddle in their lives, and do not question their permanent political tutelage. Very few can conceive of civil disobedience as legitimate political action.

Nevertheless, the administrators must remain vigilant, because the tradition established by their predecessors cannot be trusted to continue on its own. We have seen the results of their vigilance throughout this book. University students, salaryman recruits and young factory workers are often treated as if they were still in elementary school. Even older adults are often admonished or advised as if they were children. Military service no longer helps ensure discipline among Japanese adolescent and young adult males, and the post-war family has lost most of its pre-war legal control of its members – but the enforced conformism of salaryman life is a very effective substitute.

Unconventional behaviour and unexpected changes in the routines of life within the System are frightening and must be contained. The administrators tend to react swiftly when they sense that society is becoming cluttered with groups whose behaviour might become unpredictable. A classic pre-war example of this was their clamping down on new religious sects. The bureaucrats were not worried about their teachings, which did not strike at any vulnerable spots in the body politic. The trouble was that these sects proliferated outside the hierarchy of established religions; they were undesirable simply because they were too different from conventional groups.
⁷⁶

The energy with which in the late 1980s the authorities have pursued fingerprint refusers is a post-war example of the government bringing its might to bear on a matter that has not even the remotest potential for state-undermining confusion. Some members of the Korean and Chinese minorities who have resided in Japan for several generations object to the rule that they must be fingerprinted for alien registration purposes; they see this practice, which among Japanese nationals is followed only with criminals, as symbolic of the discrimination they suffer. Some other resident foreigners also refuse to be fingerprinted. There is no convincing reason why this antiquated method of identification should still be in use, and a number of sympathetic local municipal offices help the refusers by not reporting them. Although the fingerprinting issue has become a diplomatic burden for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the officials of both the Ministry of Justice and the National Police Agency are adamant about enforcing ‘order’ (sometimes with devices that help police to take a person’s fingerprints forcibly), and set examples by refusing to issue reentry permits or visa renewals, or by issuing deportation orders.

Such control for its own sake also sets an example for the Japanese people. The System would collapse if they did not take social control for granted. The administrators in the editorial offices of the media, no less than those in police and judiciary circles, take arbitrary control in their stride by appealing to its purportedly lofty purpose of guarding public ‘morality’.

Whenever possible, the administrators like to combine their setting of examples with a show of ‘benevolence’. Take the case of the three 21-year-old Japanese Olympic swimmers who were caught smoking marijuana in Los Angeles in 1984. Even though they have no jurisdiction beyond Japanese borders, the Japanese prosecutors made much of their ‘lenient’ decision not to prosecute tor the reason that the young men had tried the forbidden weed only once out of curiosity. The swimmers’ university was also ‘lenient’, suspending them and then readmitting them after a semester during which they professed their contrition in diaries sent to the university authorities in instalments.