A Japan of regions

Nikkei's leading editorial today, found here (in Japanese), is an urgent call for action on the "regional" problem in Japanese society. The problem is that Japan, like France and other countries, is extraordinarily top-heavy: Tokyo, like Paris, plays a disproportionately large role in all facets of Japanese life. And, as Tokyo grows, Japan's regions wither away, gradually depopulating as younger generations flee.

Nikkei suggests that the solution to reversing the decline of the regions is two-fold. First, Japan's prefectural governments need to do a better job attracting foreign direct investment. The editorial notes that Japan has been uniquely resistant to FDI, and, in light of China's active courting of foreign companies, further resistance will handicap Japan's economic prospects in an Asia dominated by China. Second, prefectural governments need to attract more tourism.

In other words, Japan needs to become genuinely globalized.

This editorial is interesting in light of this story from CNN, which notes that Toyota has become one of America's "Big Three" automakers. Toyota has been extremely successful in investing in regions of the US that might otherwise have been left behind by globalization, parlaying its investment in the US into substantial sales.

Now Japan needs the reverse to happen, but, as the editorial notes, Japan's high costs and the weak yen make Japan a perpetually unattractive place to invest.

Nikkei suggests that the regions could become IT platforms, and why not -- why can't Japan have its own clusters? For the moment, however, Japan remains too centralized politically and economically for this to be a short-term solution.

Ozawa Ichiro called for a more decentralized Japan in his 1993 book Blueprint for a New Japan, but after thirteen years Japan has, if anything, become more centralized. Not surprisingly, then, Ozawa's DPJ has made stronger regions and communities a fundamental principle in their newly released policy index. But I have my doubts as to whether any Japanese government would have the wherewithal to initiative a regional development policy that actually devolves power to prefectures and cities and enables them to pursue their own path to development.

Perhaps as Japan considers revising its constitution, it should consider changing from a French-style system, in which power is concentrated in the capital, to a German-style federal system, in which prefectures would be accorded considerable autonomy. The Japanese Upper House, were it to become more like Germany's Bundesrat, could actually become a capable, muscular organ with responsibility for regional development.

Just a thought...I mean, as long as Japan is going to undertake the effort to consider constitutional revision, the government might as well do the job right and seriously consider how all of Japan's postwar institutions should change to better enable the country to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century.

Future-shocked Japan

I first want to wish a happy and healthy New Year to all of my readers.

After a bit of break, I'm back to posting, although my posts will most likely be on a more abstract level, like, say, this post, because Japan is on holiday for the week.

The title of this post refers to the 1970 book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (with uncredited work by Heidi Toffler). I read Toffler's book not too long ago, and it's high on my list of books that have remained relevant long after their initial publication. I guess that's why it's still published as a mass market paperback.

In any case, I was prompted to think about Future Shock today after reading this op-ed in The Japan Times by Kimihiro Masamura, professor emeritus at Senshu University.

Masamura's thesis is that Japan's political leadership has to date failed to respond effectively to the panoply of problems plaguing Japanese society. He writes:

In order to build up again the basic strength of society, the quality of life must be improved. It is necessary to change the people's orientation toward work, restore the function of the family and change the landscape of cities and agricultural villages. It is also necessary to restore the family's power to raise and educate children, and the power of schools to educate children and reconstruct the whole environment surrounding children -- or the totality of nature, society and culture in which children are born and grow.

Masamura's diagnosis of Japan's problems sounds familiar -- namely, like Toffler's idea of future shock.

Toffler considered the impact upon individuals and societies of the rapidly accelerating pace of social change in developed countries. He wrote:

Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one's own society. But its impact is far worse...Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to -- different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else -- then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and if -- worse yet -- its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will be still further intensified...Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation -- including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members -- suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale.

Arguably future shock is the disease that not only Japan, but every developed society (and increasingly, developing societies) has suffered from, to greater or lesser extents, since Toffler first coined the term in the 1960s. Japan has already suffered from future shock in a substantial way -- the breakdown of its political and economic institutions during the 1990s -- but until recently it was relatively immune to social stresses. No longer. The bullying problem, the general failure of schools to prepare students for the future, the new relationships between grown-up children and their parents, the aging problem: these are the symptoms of a society undergoing a much more substantial social shift.

While better leadership is essential to help Japan through the convulsions of future shock, it is a necessary but insufficient condition; there will be no top-down solutions to Japan's social problems. In his op-ed Masamura points out what has to change:

We must think what the government has to do to ensure the people's safety and stabilize their lives, and to protect the environment. Japan is suffering from a vicious cycle: The government's policies are poor and cause anxiety to the people. As a result, the people do not have intellectual and spiritual latitude to think about the future of the nation and society, and become indifferent to politics. This leads to the government's policies becoming even poorer. We need to create a positive cycle: The government's activities concerning the people's safety and lives would be strengthened, enabling the people to have intellectual and spiritual latitude, and to start thinking about the future of the nation and society, and becoming interested in politics. As a result, the government's activities will be improved.

For Japan to change Japanese society will have to become more dynamic. The Japanese people must break the habit of looking to Tokyo for guidance when something goes wrong.

I will leave you to mull the implications of Japan's future shock. And if you haven't read Toffler's book, now would be a good time to do so, because when looking the problems plaguing Japanese, American, and European societies today, his diagnosis is remarkably accurate.

Japan's comparative advantage?

Reuters has a story today on Japan's booming "elderly services" industry. As I've written before in this space -- and noted in a number of conversations -- Japan may be poised to reap an enormous economic windfall not only from its own "greying," but from the greying of the world, include its soon-to-be-considerably-older neighbor, China.

As this article suggests, companies are only scratching the surface in catering to Japan's elderly. How long, for example, before household robots become as common as cars, serving as helpers and caretakers for the elderly? Will personal robots soon crowd Japan's grocery store aisles? This might be one possibly far-fetched example, but the Reuters article points to the need for companies to change as consumers age and their tastes and demands change.

As such, the question is whether Japan -- with the world's first geronto-capitalist economy -- will be able to use this unusual head-start on a global trend to remain a top-tier power.

Two looks at modern China

Two recent articles provide an excellent look at the bundle of contradictions that is modern China.

First, the Atlantic's James Fallows, currently residing in China, presents his "Four Cautions and Two Mysteries" about rapidly changing China. His look is largely limited to urban China, but it is still worthwhile, because Fallows also was on hand when Japan emerged in the 1980s as a contender, and has a number of useful comparisons with Japan's period of explosive growth. The picture that Fallows paints is of a China that has more in common with the United States than any other country -- a point I made in my contribution to this book. China, like the US, is a continental country, and like the US in the heady days of its industrialization in the late nineteenth century, its rise is profoundly impacting its own society, the surrounding region, and the world. A continental power has unleashed its boundless energy, and the world is being remade. That is why I defy anyone to predict what China will look like in the near-future.

Accordingly, in time the US and China may look across the Pacific and see a close friend in the other. At present, beyond the Taiwan Straits, there is no issue in US-China relations that could result in war between the two. There are points of friction, certainly, but nothing that would unleash the "guns of August," so to speak. In fact, as Fallows implies, culturally speaking the US and China may be far more natural allies than the US and Japan:

One reason why Americans typically find China less “foreign” than Japan is that in Japan the social controls are internalized, through years of training in one’s proper role in a group, whereas China seems like a bunch of individuals who behave themselves only when they think they might get caught. As I took an airport bus from downtown Tokyo to the distant Narita International Airport for the trip to Shanghai, the squadron of luggage handlers who had loaded the bus lined up, bowed in unison, and chanted safe-travel wishes to the bus as it departed. When I arrived in Shanghai, I saw teenaged airport baggage handlers playfully slapping each other and then being told by the foreman to get back to work. In Japan, the controls are built in; in China, they appear to be bolted on.

There's a lot to unpack in this quote, but, to be brief, Fallows points to a fundamental cultural divide between Japan on the one hand, and China and the US on the other. Japanese institutions have been shaped by limits -- of land, of resources, of people. While this argument is perhaps overexaggerated, not least by the Japanese (an example of Nihonjinron), it is significant when comparing the Japanese experience to that of China and the US, both of whom have been shaped by bigness and plenty (Maoism aside, which for China was a masochistic ideology that essentially entailed renouncing China's continental advantages). The Chinese people, in general, strike me as more entrepreneurial than the Japanese, which is hardly surprising because to me entrepreneurialism is a natural reaction to seemingly limitless possibilities.

As such, the more the Communist Party steps out of the way, the easier China and the US will be able to cooperate, a scenario that has kept many in Kasumigaseki up at night ever since Nixon and Kissinger sprang the opening to China on Tokyo without prior warning.

The second essay worth reading is from the London Review of Books, by Indian writer Pankaj Mishra (hat tip to a correspondent in Beijing). Mishra's view is more nuanced than Fallows', and in many ways more grim. For example:

The old heart of the city has been razed to meet the needs and desires of this new elite. Luxury villas have sprung up to accommodate expatriate businessmen, senior Party officials and the nouveaux riches. With their bewilderingly mixed facades – American colonial-style decking, neoclassical columns, baroque plasterwork, Tudor beams –they symbolise a city under fresh occupation by the transnational elite of the rich and powerful.

Others make do with what they have. One afternoon, soon after arriving in Shanghai, I travelled on one of the elevated expressways that lead from downtown to the clusters of high-rise housing estates built for those expelled from their neighbourhoods of longtang alleys and lanes. Rust and grime have already tainted these buildings, the lifts don’t work, there is no water pressure, the residents walk up and down the gloomy stairs carrying plastic buckets, but the inhabitants of this premature decay still seemed privileged, compared to the residents of the remoter suburbs, crammed in subdivided houses with enclosed balconies and a view of oil-blackened dust lanes and exposed drains.

Much of the essay comes from a conversation Mishra had with liberal Chinese intellectual Zhu Xueqin, and the picture that emerges is of a China that, loosed from the moorings of Maoism, is now adrift on a (polluted) sea of ideological rootlessness, with a number of pretenders to intellectual "hegemony" (to use a favorite word of one of my Cambridge chums) but no clear winner, meaning that soulless consumerism has filled the void. Arguably, this is not all that different from Japan, which turned to world-beating economic growth and consumerism after emerging from its own romance with a murderous ideology (although, to split hairs, Maoism was much more coherent as an ideology than that of Japan's militarist government). But it is not pretty, and its consequences for the world are far greater than those of Japan's postwar modernization ever were.

Bell on the Chinese way of sport

The always enjoyable Daniel Bell has an essay in Dissent called "The Politics of Sports: Watching the World Cup in Beijing." Before elaborating further, I just want to note as an aside how much I look forward to Bell's essays from Beijing. Bell is one of my intellectual heroes, and he has an extremely sharp eye for observing societies, which in recent years he has cast upon China and East Asia in general.

In any case, in this essay Bell dissects how the Chinese view international athletics. I have previously looked at how at Japanese attitudes towards international competitions, so I found this essay particularly useful for the sake of comparison. The Japanese too are greatly interested in how their national teams perform in international competitions (and how Japanese nationals perform in foreign professional leagues: witness the nightly recaps on how Japanese baseball players in the US and footballers in Europe perform). But at the same time, I haven't noticed a prevailing pattern in Japanese attitudes to competitions in which Japanese teams or players are not involved (although there is apparently some interest in American football, based on there being university football teams and broadcasts of NFL games).

But Bell finds something interesting about the teams Chinese fans support internationally:

Chinese fans support traditional soccer powers such as Germany, England, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy. It is difficult to overestimate the passion for such teams. In the 2002 World Cup, the CCTV hostess Sheng Bin wept openly at Argentina’s early exit. When England went down in defeat against Portugal in 2006, my son’s piano teacher’s husband was so depressed he could barely get out of bed. Partly, the preference for traditional soccer powers can be explained by the love of the game: Chinese fans support teams that have performed well in the past and are likely to generate exciting games in the future. But there may also be a special form of internationalist nationalism at work. The support for established teams may be an expression of a more general appreciation for nations with long and rich histories and cultures.

Bell suggests that the flip side of this attitude is an aversion to supporting underdogs in sports and in politics, which is hardly surprising given that the CCP has tried to cultivate the impression that it is the natural heir to five thousand years of Chinese civilization, and the rightful counterpart to other nations that are heirs to great civilizations. A good example of Beijing's about-face since Cultural Revolution is the creation of Confucius Institutes beginning in 2004. It seems that the more the CCP appears as the guardian of Chinese civilization, the more legitimacy it expects to enjoy at home and abroad.

Accordingly, expect the Beijing Olympics to be steeped in Chinese history, presenting China as a worthy world leader.

Recent reading on China

As long as this blog is already banned by China, there's no reason for me not to post on a recent book I read by exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian. Called Red Dust, the book traces the author's journey across most of China in the early 1980s, just as Deng Xiaoping's "Four Modernizations" came into effect.

Before getting into the political and social aspects of the book, I first want to comment on its literary merit. Red Dust is an extraordinary bildungsroman. Although the author undertook his journey when in his early thirties, he nevertheless comes to see through his travels to mistakes of his earlier beliefs and rediscovers his place in Chinese society -- albeit not for long, as he fled China not long after publishing this book -- after years of traveling, mostly in China's remote western provinces.

The travelogue also functions as an extraordinary piece of existentialist literature, as Ma Jian gradually comes to see various forms of belief, beginning with his rejection of Chinese communism from the very beginning and continuing on through Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, Tibetan Buddhism, and rampant consumerism (and I'm probably forgetting a few). Man, concludes Ma, ultimately cannot rely on an system of beliefs to lead him through the universe. He can only rely on himself.

This extreme individualism dovetails with the book's anti-communism, as at numerous points throughout the book Ma Jian points out the corrosive effect of communism on the individual; he writes, for example, "When a country is ruled by a band of thugs, men behave like savages." His critique of communism is deeply humanistic, and Ma should rightly take his place alongside Czeslaw Milosz and others as a great humanistic, literary critic of communism.

At the same time, however, what makes this book of considerable interest today is the picture it provides of China at the beginning of the tremendous period of economic growth that it continues to experience today. Ma shows the tumultuous forces unleashed by economic liberalization combined with severe restrictions on personal behavior. (I was particularly haunted when Ma describes a list of public executions scheduled to take place; one criminal was "guilty" of dancing "cheek to cheek in the dark, forcefully hugging his female dance partners and touching their breasts. Seduced a total of six young women and choreographed a sexually titillating dance which has spread like wildfire and caused serious levels of Spiritual Pollution.") He shows a China that if anything has been made worse by liberalization, because people's souls have remained enslaved even as they've been permitted to practice entrepreneurial capitalism -- rapacious capitalism combined with (and perhaps made rapacious by) a soul-crushing political system. Look at the recent corruption scandals for examples of what happens when markets are combined with a one-party political system.

Ma also calls attention to an aspect of China that often goes unnoticed outside China: namely, that while the Han constitute the overwhelming majority of the Chinese population, there are fifty-six officially recognized minorities, totaling over 100 million people, with some provinces in western China being "minority-majority" (although China's "Great Leap West" has tried to tip the balance in provinces like Xinjiang in favor of Han Chinese). Ma Jian shows that these minorities had been largely left behind even by the rudimentary modernization experienced prior to Deng; one wonders whether their status has changed much since Ma wrote this book. The minority question means that China is not simply trying to modernize rapidly. It is also trying to modernize undeveloped corners inhabited by peoples conquered by Communist China's imperial predecessors who have never been integrated into Chinese society proper (meaning that China is an empire masquerading as a state).

If none of these points is sufficient to convince you to read this book, Ma's descriptions of the landscapes he traverses and the peoples he encounters are alone worth the read.