The Enigma of Japanese Power

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1989 by James Gibney

The Enigma of Japanese Power. Karel van Wolferen. Knopf, $24.95. One reason Westerners know so little about the way Japan works is that few of them can stand to live there for long. Witness the Bain & Co. consultant who opened an interview in Tokyo by telling me that American companies should send their best people to Japan and closed it by saying he couldn't wait to leave. That kind of thinking is fine with the locals. For all their talk about the need for greater outside "understanding" of Japan, most Japanese instinctively feel that the less we know about them, the better. In that respect Karel van Wolferen's book is likely to make any Japanese who reads it very uncomfortable. This is an excellent guide to the Japanese polity. You may wonder how van Wolferen, a Dutch journalist, could spend 15 years in a country that bothered him so much, but you won't regret that he did. His study of how power is exercised in Japan does more to explain the roots of the "Japan problem" than the work of legions of anthropologists, journalists, and political scientists before him.

What distinguishes van Wolferen's book from other broad-brush portraits of Japan Inc. is that it provides political rather than cultural explanations for Japanese behavior. The standard line, for example, about why Japan has so few lawyers - one for every 9,924 people, versus one for every 360 in the United States - and lawsuits is that the Japanese as a people are culturally disposed to avoid conflict and prize harmony. But as van Wolferen points out, "The judiciary and bar are kept artificially minuscule by strict controls over entry into the legal profession." Confirmation can be found in van Wolferen's observation that in a recent year only 1.7 percent of Japanese law school graduates passed their bar exam, compared to 74 percent of American ones. Clearly, the difference isn't the test-takers - Japanese students have typically excelled at rote learning in U.S. schools - it's the test.

Restricting access to legal recourse is just one of many ways in which "the System," as van Wolferen calls the powers that control Japan, keeps the people in line. Throughout Japanese history, any idea or force that threatened to disrupt the natural order of things was either crushed (like Christianity in the 17th century) or neutralized (like many American democratic reforms during the Occupation). Even today, expressions of dissent are tightly channeled and permitted only if they don't threaten the national interest. Labor unions notify management beforehand about when and where they will stage demonstrations. Gangsters call a truce when they realize turf wars are hurting their city's image. Presiding over all this is a network of government ministries, corporate conglomerates, elected politicians, and other groups that function as competing semiautonomous components, with no ultimate authority at their head. One thing the Japanese powers-that-be agree on is the need to preserve the status quo. Hence, van Wolferen asserts, they don't really believe in things like free markets and free trade, which introduce too many uncontrollable elements. The absence of a strong, accountable central authority enables the System to deflect not only internal calls for change but external ones as well. As van Wolferen says, "There is no place where, as Harry Truman would have said, the buck stops. In Japan, the buck keeps circulating."

A classic case of the circulating Japanese buck is the Recruit bribery scandal. Although it has triggered widespread popular outrage, caused the arrest of 16 influential politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen, and forced the resignation of 44 officeholders - including Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita - it's unlikely to change the way Japanese money politics works. In fact if past history is any guide, Takeshita - who has refused to give up his parliamentary seat - is likely to retain considerable political power. Fifteen years ago, when Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka was forced to resign in the wake of the Lockheed bribery scandal, he stayed in the Diet and went on to secure his status as the most powerful postwar Japanese politician, engineering the appointments of several of his successors.

Van Wolferen, who wrote his book before Recruit hit the news, argues that the staying power of Japanese politicians and their general unresponsiveness to voters (as opposed to interest groups) makes the Japanese political system antidemocratic. but it's not clear these features make the Japanese way of governing very different from ours. True, in the United States, politicians like Jim Wright and Tony Coelho have paid for their moneygrubbing with their political lives. But now that thy're gone, Congress (not unlike the Diet after Recruit), is already to put the issue of ethics behind it - and resume life with a 98 percent incumbency rate, honoraria, and PAC money.

In similar fashion, when van Wolferen describes Japan's main pork-barrel enterprise, the public works industry, he doesn't seem to register the strong parallels with American practices. "For a construction firm to be allowed to bid on a public works project," he observes, "it must first bribe a powerful politician. It will then meet with all the other nominated contractors for a negotiating session, called dango, at which it is decided which of them will get the job .... The dango system ensures that all participating contractors get to work on a government project at one time or another." What van Wolferen doesn't seem to get is that by changing just a few words, that passage could easily describe the birth of the B-1 bomber.