Abe's neo-statism

This week Prime Minister Abe Shinzō criticized right-wing demonstrations in Koreatowns in Tokyo and Osaka, stating, “The Japanese way of thinking is to behave politely and to be generous and modest at any time.” While it is, of course, good that Abe made a point of criticizing hate speech, it's important to recognize that Abe is pursuing a different program than some of the cruder conservative revisionists in his own party, the conservative media, or the right-wing demonstrators who terrorize the ears of Tokyoites with their sound trucks. The problem with the word "nationalist" is that it obscures more than it reveals.

In an astute article about Abe's program, the FT's David Pilling notes Abe's agenda can rightly be summarized using the Meiji slogan, Fukoku-kyohei (rich nation, strong army). What I wonder, though, is whether it is best to think of Abe as a nationalist or whether it is more appropriate to think of him as a statist, not unlike his Meiji forebears. The distinction is important. The right-wing demonstrators criticized by Abe are little more than chauvinistic ethnic nationalists, intent on showing the superiority of the Japanese people. Abe is interested in the survival of the Japanese nation in international competition, with the state as a kind of avatar of the Japanese people. His way of thinking is steeped in Hobbesian and social Darwinist conceptions of the state, in which the state and people exist in a sort of organic solidarity and in which the state is focused largely on protecting lives and property from enemies foreign and domestic. To compete with other nation-states, the state must be capable of organizing and drawing upon the country's resources and the people's energy in order to compete.

Accordingly, when Abe talks of breaking free of the postwar regime or creating a normal nation, it is with this idea in mind. Nationalism is a means to the end of strengthening the state. Encouraging national pride is useful to the extent that it makes Japanese citizens more amenable to constitution revision, more supportive of an assertive Japanese military, and more eager to stand up to provocation by China or North Korea, just as revitalizing Japan's economy is useful to the extent that it improves the state's fiscal position, swells its coffers, and bolsters national confidence.

The question is whether Abe's neo-statism poses risks to peace and security in East Asia. On the one hand, China arguably views the world along similarly social Darwinist lines, and one can therefore make the case that national survival for Japan depends on embracing a similar way of thinking, making Japan less vulnerable to bullying by China. However, the danger of Japan's embracing a social Darwinist conception of international competition is that it would make every problem between Japan and its neighbors harder to resolve, because every issue would become a question of status in the international hierarchy. When combined with fewer restraints on the use of force by Japan, the risk of outright war would surely increase.

There are still a number of hurdles Abe must overcome before he can remake Japan according to his neo-statist vision — and he must still convince the Japanese people of its wisdom, especially as far as constitution revision goes. But it is important to understand just what kind of nationalist Abe is, and to be aware that whatever short-term tactical concessions he makes, he has a long-term vision of where he wants to take his country.

Regional decentralization is out of reach, for now

Bad news for Aso Taro: progress towards substantial decentralization may be impossible to realize.

So says the government's Prefectural Integration Vision consultation group, which released an interim report on Monday. The whole report is available for download here, in PDF format.

According to Mainichi, the group — which was formed in January 2007 under Mr. Abe — envisions the implementation of drastic reorganization of the relationship between central and regional governments by 2018, but it also announced that it won't have a final report ready for another two years. One sticking point is how the prefectures are to be reorganized. Not surprisingly, drastically redrawing the geographic boundaries of Japan's regional governments draws opposition from existing prefectural governments and bureaucrats in the central governments. Even the LDP and the government have differing ideas about a reorganization, with the LDP's Headquarters for the Promotion of Prefectural Integration calling for consolidating prefectural and local governments into 10 states and 700-1000 municipalities.

And the government's ministries and agencies are, of course, adamantly opposed to a transfer of authority to regional governments.

It's probably safe to say that without the bureaucracy's approval, regional decentralization will not happen.

As I've noted previously, decentralization could have considerable benefits for Japanese governance by bringing government closer to the people and making it more transparent. But there's a reason why this kind of change happens rarely, if at all. (The last major reorganization of regional governments, of course, was in the early years of the Meiji Restoration.) It is easy for politicians and business leaders to appeal to the example of the Meiji Restoration — not surprisingly, this interim report does — but it is considerably more difficult for political leaders to overcome institutional obstacles and implement Meiji-style reforms in the present political environment.

Who can overcome the opposition that proposals like regional decentralization necessarily attract? (And is there actually a majority in favor of sweeping reform? People may be unhappy with the current political situation, but that does not necessarily translate into support for broad change.)

Constructing modern Japan

Every social scientist must struggle with the question of human agency. Are human societies the product of grand social forces or are they the product of the decisions of individuals — Carlyle's heroes?

The question is particularly important for Japan, which was pushed on to a drastically different path in the late nineteenth century when confronted with the encroachment of imperial powers into Asia. But was Japan's modernization the result of powerful impersonal forces — the international system, economics, Japanese culture — or was it driven by the decisions of the elites who forged the new system?

This is the swamp into which MIT's Richard Samuels waded in Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan. Samuels, in essence, "brings the individual back in" to a discussion of the winding roads followed by late-developing Japan and Italy during the 150 years of their existence as modern states. And he succeeds admirably — in the process explaining in rich detail how Prime Ministers Yoshida and Kishi, building upon the prewar past, designed, for better or worse, the Japan we see today (the Japan that their heirs are struggling to bring into the twenty-first century).

As Samuels suggests in his introduction, the comparative analysis of Japan and Italy strikes many as counterintuitive, perhaps because Italy needed Fascists to make the trains run on time. But beyond the superficial dissimilarities — including the widespread stereotype that Italy has dynamic leaders and poor followers, while Japan has faceless leaders and obedient followers — he finds that despite facing similar conditions, constraints, and opportunities as Gerschenkronian late developers, each made drastically different decisions about governance of the economy and society, liberalism, foreign relations, and, in the postwar period, how to rebuild their states and reconstitute their political systems under the American aegis.

There is far too much in Machiavelli's Children to do it justice in this space, and, as such, this is my latest book recommendation. (NB: I will henceforth give book recommendations on a monthly basis, or else whenever I feel like it; recommending one every week was too grueling.)

Revision as redemption

Ozawa Ichiro, DPJ president, laid into the prime minister on TV Asahi this morning, emphasizing that he disagrees not just with the prime minister's position on constitution revision, but with the prime minister's philosophy root and branch.

I'm with Ozawa on this one (and not because I work for a member of his party).

Back in January, I wrote that instead of looking back to Japan's postwar nationalists, including Abe's grandfather Kishi Nobusuke, it was more appropriate to view Abe as governing in the same vein as the Choshu oligarchs who built the Meiji state, conservative pragmatists who combined the desire to forge a strong, unified — heavy emphasis on unified — independent state capable of competing with the European empires with tremendous tactical flexibility. And let's not forget, of course, that the oligarchs had no trust in the people whatsoever. Wrote Richard Samuels in his Machiavelli's Children:

Never liberal...the Meiji oligarchs believed that public opinion encouraged political dissent, which was seditious and weakened the state. Ito captured this view by referring to "the onslaught of extremely democratic ideas" that had to be resisted. Ito would incorporate the people to achieve national unity, but not as a matter of any innate right to self-government. He chose to avoid popular control by appealing to "a higher transcendent moral order...that would deny any notion of private interest"— the emperor.

While I won't go so far as to call Abe anti- or un-democratic, I do think that he shares with the Meiji genro the desire for an independent and unified Japan. Perhaps in some way Abe's desire to revise the Occupation-era constitution is akin to the Meiji leaders' burning desire to amend the "unequal treaties" imposed on Japan in its time of weakness.

In fact, political scientist Douglas Lummis apparently has alluded to the Meiji Constitution, according to an article by Eric Johnston in the Japan Times last week: "He believes the LDP would prefer the kind of society Japan was in the years immediately before the war." I don't necessarily share the same alarm as Lummis, but I think he's right in observing that constitution revision is bigger than article nine.

Abe, in a manner similar to Charles De Gaulle, father of the French Fifth Republic with whom I've so often compared him, has une certaine idée de Japon, but do the citizens he supposedly represents as prime minister share his vision, and if they don't, is Abe willing to modify his vision? Or are the prime minister's plans for the education system a way of bending twenty-first century Japan to his vision, much as Mori Arinori's reforms of the education system in 1885 served as a means of inculcating Japan's youth with the Meiji oligarchs' vision of Japan? (See chapter three of the Ministry of Education's white paper, which discusses the creation of the modern education system; this section is especially revealing.) If that is the case, then it is necessary to ask whether Abe's vision — again, arguably the direct descendant of the ideas of the Meiji oligarchs — is appropriate for twenty-first century Japan in the first place.

But for all Ozawa's opposition, I'm not quite sure from what quarters opposition to the prime minister will come, if it comes at all. Certainly not, it seems, from within the LDP. Nor, if this post at Global Voices Online surveying opinions on constitution revision voiced by Japanese bloggers is indicative of anything, will it come from the Japanese people.

My problem, mind you, isn't constitution revision: my problem is Abe's obsession with it, which is the mirror image of the tendency of some defenders of the constitution to treat it as a kind of sacred totem. For Abe is intimately wrapped up with the constitution, revision being as much a personal as a political matter for him — just look at how he writes about his grandfather in his book.

If Japan is to revise its constitution, it should do so under a prime minister who is capable of soberly assessing the matter, not one who is utterly consumed by the idea of revision as redemption.

Revolution from below

This article at Mainichi online, on ceremonies to commemorate Northern Territories Day, caught my eye for a couple reasons.

The first is that I can't help but wonder if a push to resolve longstanding territorial disputes with Russia is driven by rising fears of abandonment in the government of Japan. Outside the alliance with the US, after all, Japan is short on reliable friends, and perhaps Abe reasons that, with this irksome issue resolved, Russia might be open to cooperation on initiatives in East Asia, especially regarding China (don't forget about those Chinese migrants flooding into the Russian Far East). Russia, of course, is no substitute for the US in Japan's foreign relations, but better relations with Moscow would at least somewhat mitigate a sense of isolation.

I found, however, that more interesting than the strategic reasons behind this campaign is the language used by Abe to promote this effort.

The territorial issue is a matter of national concern, and it is important for each person to be interested in the problem to mobilize efforts.

There, in one sentence, can be found the reason why Japan's political system has proven so resistant to change, and points to the kind of change needed.

The Meiji Restoration looms large over the Japanese political system; both parties struggle to claim the mantle of the proper heir of the restoration's legacy. But the Meiji Restoration was a top-down revolution, and the modern state to which it gave birth has been indelibly marked by its origins at the hands of the Meiji elite. Even after the "second opening" that was the US occupation of Japan, the outlines of the state shaped during the Meiji era remain. All the US did was change the content of the state, infusing it with a touch of New-Deal liberalism without destroying the fundamental character of the Meiji state: change would be managed and directed from above, by bureaucrats and their politician allies.

Accordingly, overriding national goals have had considerable resonance in Japan in the past, as in the 1960s, when rapid economic growth was the great national project that moved all.

All of this was supposed to have changed in the 1990s, when confidence in the bureaucracy collapsed following the bursting of the economic bubble, the mismanagement of economic recovery, the woeful response to the Hanshin earthquake and Aum subway attack in 1995, and so on. In place of bureaucrats, power was supposed to shift to politicians -- and in some ways, it has. But that's precisely the problem. Substituting politicians for bureaucrats without changing the way Japanese society thinks about policy and governance simply substitutes a new class of corruptible leaders for the old (cue The Who).

Hence the title of this post. Politicians' appealing to the Meiji Restoration misses the point, which is that rather than have yet another top-down revolution, as Abe intends with his talk of dismantling the postwar regime, the Japanese people need to step up and claim the political system for themselves. Instead of talk of national goals about which "it is important for each person to be interested in the problem to mobilize efforts," it is time that the elite step back and let the people learn to speak for themselves.

Anything short of that will simply invite the same problems with corruption and stagnation that Japan has experienced in the recent past. Politicians of all stripes may talk about dynamism, but a truly dynamic Japan will only emerge if the system opens up to competition in policy and politics, as well as economics, if the Japanese people claim leadership of society.

Abe inaugurates "The First Year for Creating a Beautiful Country"

Political Japan's long holiday is over, as the 166th session of the Japanese Diet opened Thursday, with Prime Minister Abe delivering his policy address Friday.

His address, available in English here and in Japanese here, confirms much of what I have already written about Prime Minister Abe. He even quoted Fukuzawa Yukichi, leading intellectual during the Meiji period, and approvingly cited the Meiji Restoration:

Yukichi Fukuzawa once said that the samurai spirit is distinguished by "a willingness to face daunting challenges and persevere to accomplish the tasks." It must have been that challenging spirit, which dares to take on difficult tasks optimistically, that enabled our country to forge the modern Japan from the Meiji Restoration.

As I wrote here, Abe is in many ways acting as a successor of Japan's state-building Meiji oligarchs, although in his case -- as he makes very plain in this speech -- his task is the rebuilding of the Japanese state.

I'm not going to examine his policy proposals in detail -- they run the gamut, including support for Japan's IT industry, greater economic ties with other Asian countries, creating a more diversified labor market, substantive policies following on last year's revision of the education law, decentralization, and "proactive diplomacy" -- but the picture that emerges from Abe's litany of proposals is of a substantial, long-term program: "my mission," he said, "is none other than to draw a new vision of a nation which can withstand the raging waves for the next 50 to 100 years to come."

Unconventional is the democratic politician in any country who makes policy decisions looking fifty to one-hundred years into the future, instead of to the next election, and Abe deserves praise for focusing on "big" politics, to borrow a phrase from an mid-1990s essay by Nomura Research Institute Chief Economist Fukushima Kiyohiko. His obsession with completely overhauling the post-war "regime" is a departure from his predecessors, even from Koizumi, whose reforming ambitions were a big departure in their own right. I think politicians in other developed countries need to be having similar discussions, including in the US in advance of the 2008 presidential election. Every developed country is in some way using jury-rigged industrial-age institutions to deal with twenty-first century problems, and, as can be seen in various European countries, national institutions leftover from the industrial age aren't particularly capable at solving the problems facing states today.

That said, it is impossible for a leader to undertake even a fraction of the ambitious reforms outlined in this speech without public support, which Abe continues to lack, as this and other recent polls show. The linked poll is an Asahi poll showing support for the Abe Cabinet has fallen to 39%. While that number must be taken with a small grain of salt, polls conducted by organizations more sympathetic to Abe have shown that the precipitous decline in his popularity continues unabated. So while Abe may talk about a Meiji restoration for the twenty-first century (at the same time that the DPJ's slogan is the highly ambiguous "生活維新" -- seikatsu ishin [life restoration] -- very clearly riffing off the Meiji Restoration), if he cannot find a way to rally the public behind him, he may not last long enough in office to take even the first steps towards his ambitious goals.

And yet, despite the scandals that have dogged the Abe Cabinet, it seems that the DPJ is also tainted (more on this later), which means as a result that the scandals and missteps that have surrounded the Abe Cabinet may be less of an issue. Instead, the months leading up to the July Upper House elections and the election itself may actually be focused on policy questions, including the specific question of constitutional reform and the larger question of how Japan should be governed in this century.

Finally, references to the Meiji Restoration aren't out of place, but the Meiji Restoration was as much about how Japanese live as about how Japan was governed. Many of the changes required to achieve Abe's vision of Japanese society have little to do with politics or government and everything to do with culture -- and culture is notoriously resistant to change from above.

Abe as oligarch?

Political Japan's long holiday is winding down, with the regular session of the Diet due to begin next week, and both the LDP and the DPJ are preparing for the session and the run-up to the July elections with conventions this week.

At the LDP's convention, Abe surprised no one by declaring that he intends to make constitutional revision the central issue of the election. In the TV coverage of the convention that I watched yesterday, though, Abe looked bored in the midst of the pageantry. Who could blame him, after a week spent playing the statesman in Europe and the Philippines?

After watching his performances in Brussels, London, Berlin, Paris, and Cebu, I was led to consider the prime minister's peculiarities. I think many observers have made a mistake in pegging him as a doctrinaire conservative. In his first months as premier, Abe has shown that he is anything but doctrinaire. I think it is for that reason that he has been surprisingly adept at diplomacy, particularly in Asia; he is above all a pragmatist, which means that he is more interested in ends than in means, in this case the end of a Japan with more power and influence. As such, why shouldn't Abe seek reconciliation with China and South Korea, if it yields substantial benefits for Japan?

Thinking about Abe's pragmatism, then, I was led to think about a group of leaders, many of them from Choshu (now Yamaguchi Prefecture) like Abe: namely, the Meiji genro, the oligarchic group of elder statesman who guided Japan during the Meiji period. They were the consummate pragmatists, more concerned with the goal of a Japan that was independent, secure, and capable of wielding influence in the region than the particular goals by which to achieve that goal. Accordingly, this profile of Abe by the FT's David Pilling, written just before the LDP's presidential election in September, seems especially apt. Pilling wrote:

Although Abe was born and educated in Tokyo, his political blood courses through Yamaguchi, a prefecture on the far western tip of Japan’s main island. Abe’s father built his political career there. When he died in 1991, Abe inherited the devotion of his Shimonoseki constituency, which returns him with massive majorities.

Yamaguchi sits at the heart of what was once Choshu, one of four fiefdoms that rose up in 1867 against the 250-year-old feudal rein imposed by the Tokugawa clan. The overthrow of the last Tokugawa shogun - who kept rule over his closed, samurai-policed nation from Tokyo - ended 250 years of Japanese isolation and launched it on the path of modern industrialisation. The rebels rallied in the name of the emperor of the period, Meiji, so this revolution is known as the Meiji restoration. It restored the Japanese emperor to a position of importance after centuries as an isolated and purely symbolic figure under various shogunates.

The catalyst for their rebellion had been the arrival off the Japanese coast in 1853 of the heavily armed “Black Ships” of Commodore Matthew Perry. The American commander was a gun-boat diplomat whose show of force was supposed to persuade Japan to open up, much like other Asian nations had done, to free trade and the hated “unequal treaties”. The Tokugawa period had placed severe restrictions on contact with foreigners, thus hampering Japan’s ability to learn new technology, including the art of war. The Meiji leaders, notably those of Choshu, decided that Japan needed to open up and transform its society if the country was not to fall into the grasping hands of foreign barbarians. Their working thesis was to know thy enemy.

“Abe has the tradition of Choshu behind him,” says Okazaki. “He is concerned about the state, not just about the prefecture. Choshu people think in terms of Japan’s national interest.”

Accordingly, Abe's diplomatic deftness and his apparent lack of interest -- and ineptness -- in communicating with the Japanese public, in other words the duties of a leader in a modern democracy, are not altogether surprising, given his origins in the region that was the heartland of Japan's modernization. I think he not so secretly wishes he could govern Japan much as his Meiji antecedents did; with a sense of noblesse oblige, and the confidence that they, and they alone knew what Japan's interests were and how to achieve them.

He also shares the Meiji oligarchs' interest in state building; Abe has made no secret of his desire to undertake a long march through Japan's institutions. In his first months, he passed the first major reform of the educational system since the Fundamental Law on Education was passed in 1947 and upgraded Japan's Defense Agency to a full ministry, and he has made no secret that he intends to make 2007 the year in which Japan is put firmly on the road to constitution revision, starting with the passage of a law on national referendums (required for revision) this spring.

So perhaps there is another meaning to Abe's New Year's visit to Meiji Shrine, other than that it is not Yasukuni Shrine. While Meiji Shrine simply honors the Meiji emperor and his wife, perhaps Abe was subtly identifying himself with the oligarchs who were the true rulers during the Meiji era, and who were responsible for the policies that constitute the Meiji Restoration, forebears whose feats Abe would no doubt like to emulate as he embarks on a "restoration" of his own.

Admittedly this post is long on questions, short on answers, but I think it provides a way to look at Prime Minister Abe as he resumes his campaign to change Japan's postwar institutions.