The uncertainty of the self: Japan at century's end

World Policy Journal, Summer, 1999 by Masaru Tamamoto

Masao Maruyama, a key contributor to post-1945 Japanese thought, whose evaluation of Japanese militarism and ultranationalism of the 1930s and early 1940s has helped set the dominant tone with which the country has come to understand that past, argues that the Japanese, despite great dedication and sacrifice, could not even make themselves into good fascists. The social fact of dictatorship is one thing, Maruyama wrote a few months after Japan's unconditional surrender in 1945, but this should not be confused with the consciousness of the dictators: "Dictatorship as consciousness," he writes, "ought necessarily to be linked to awareness of responsibility, but this awareness was lacking in both the military and bureaucracy."(14)

Whether in pursuit of fascism, liberalism, or any other political arrangement commonly understood in the West as an "ism," in Japan's compromise-oriented society, where technique suffices for reason, there is only the scantiest sense of the philosophical underpinnings of political organization, of the necessity of remaining faithful to an ideal as a political goal and social good, and of the need to question why. Even the Russian skeptic Herzen, struggling with life in the periphery of the Enlightenment West, believed in reason.

Echoing Maruyama, Oe asks half a century later why there are so few political leaders with a coherent set of beliefs in postwar Japan, why Japanese politicians and bureaucrats do not seem to mature through the process of reflection, choice, and design, why they do not struggle with the realities of life to improve their personal creeds and, in the end, to see in the quality of their creeds their life's worth.

Japan's bureaucratic mandarins are admired. But when you begin to peel away the layers of this reputed excellence - at least of their mastery of bureaucratic techniques - eventually you find there is nothing at the core. You find no creed, no ideal that gives meaning to the life of an individual. Bound by the value of concrete, immediate goals of identifiable living individuals and their organizations, they remain untouched and unmoved by great historical goals such as liberty, equality, human rights, and human solidarity. Such principles may be approximated as a result of bureaucratic technique. But, as Oe laments, there is no habit in Japan of seeking out men of upstanding character to shoulder the responsibility of political leadership.(15)

How Things Are Done

Societies that emphasize technique over reason place great value on how things are done. The observance of socially accepted rules of behavior often becomes more important than what the results of human activity actually are. To have followed procedural rules with sincerity and good faith often excuses less than desirable results. Societies imbued with these characteristics tend to be ceremonial and ritualistic. In Japanese life, rituals acquire authority, and power flows from them. While rituals serve to preserve social order, at the same time they tend to obscure the underlying purposes of human activity. Japan is a heavily ritualistic society saturated with the logic of technical procedures. The oft-heard complaint of foreigners that Japanese society is closed attests to the importance of rituals in Japanese life.