This book fills an important niche in Western commentary about Japan. It provides a passionate, coherent narrative that ties together many aspects of Japanese history, political economy and even society, written by someone who's lived here a long time and who cares about the country's future. As a roughly 400-page book from a major academic press, it may seem a bit odd that it lacks a proper bibliography and set of foot- or endnotes. But even though I wished that the sourcing were better in a couple of places, this book doesn't seem intended to serve the purpose of a usual academic study. A better way to think of it would be like a transcript of a two- or three-day orientation seminar about modern Japan by a very intense expert who wants you to see through the conventional wisdom.
I certainly didn't agree with all of it, and I would have emphasized some topics that the author mentions only in passing, if at all. But if you're not already convinced that Japan's problems stem from economic inefficiency, protectionism and a racist population that refuses to acknowledge history, this book will vindicate your reluctance to accept such clichés. And if you admire Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz, or believe the Obama Administration is more high-minded in its foreign policy than was its immediate predecessor, this book could give a healthy shake to your confidence in your views.
In what follows, I'll start by explaining what's special about this book's point of view (1), and highlight some points that most aggressively challenge the received wisdom about the country's current condition (2). Then, after mentioning some missing details that would have lent even more support to the book's argument (3), I'll conclude with a focus on some significant blind spots (4 and 5). Although I'll go on at some length about this last category, you can see from the star rating that these criticisms, though substantive, don't greatly dim my overall recommendation of this book.
1. Let's start with how this book differs from more conventional works about Japan. Most Westerners' access to information about Japan is filtered through people who are just passing through, physically and/or intellectually. There are a few classic types: General news reporters sent here for a couple of years of purgatory before going someplace they believe is really exciting, like China, some war zone, or at least Seoul. Business reporters who freely spout off about what Japan needs to do, based on ideas they learned from Econ 101 and the investment bankers they interview. Long-term bureau chiefs who've figured out what types of stories will fit the preconceptions of their editors in New York, D.C., Atlanta or London, and who write a longish memoir around the time they leave Japan to become one of those editors. Callow grad student and post-doc bloggers who spend a couple of years here before returning to a perch in the US or elsewhere from which to continue pontificating without having to suffer the consequences of policies implementing their thoroughly conventional advice. And let's not forget op-eds by superstar economists who spend a couple of tightly-packed days here wheeled around in a pumpkin coach, visiting suitably august members of the Japanese elite. (To be fair to superstars, I got the impression that Thomas Piketty was more willing than others to speak truth to pumpkins during his January 2015 whirlwind visit here -- but on the other hand he doesn't show up so often in the New York Times.)
The author of the present book (RTM) is distinguished from this motley bunch in at least two ways. First, he's already been here more than 20 years and has put down emotional roots in the country. Second, he's a former investment banker who later published in New Left Review, so he's capable of evolving his views.
Of course, there are a number of long-term foreign residents and maybe even a handful of short-termers, both academic and not, who have very valuable and insightful things to say abut Japan. But all too often their material is hard to find, stays close to some specialty (e.g. civil liberties, energy policy, etc.), and in some cases may even affect to disdain the word "should" when they write about Japanese policy. A virtue of this book is that RTM presents a much more encompassing and interconnected view than you can get even from excellent monographs or online articles. And it's a view that isn't afraid to say that something bad is bad -- nor, by the way, to offer a variety of idiosyncratic commentaries about pop divas, TV shows, anime songs, handsome politicians and schoolgirl fashions, among other things. At least when it comes to matters of politics rather than pulchritude, this isn't so much "bias," as an opinion backed up by an historical argument.
2. Apropos of that encompassing view: Part I of the book is a review of pertinent Japanese history and institutions, from roughly 1500 years ago until the 1980s. This provides some foundation for Part II's deeper focus on Japan's postwar economy, business, social trends (or some of them) and politics. RTM's professional experience in finance shows in his very clear explanations of some features of Japanese industrial and fiscal policy. He also sounds a clear and correct alarm about some of the serious dangers to Japan from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal being negotiated as of this date -- the same trade deal that at least one of the callow bloggers mentioned above insists "has the potential to save Japan's economy." And unlike many financial types, he's not an economic reductivist, spending a lot of time discussing Japanese politics from a truly political point of view.
While I disagree with one prominent aspect of his political narrative in the last two chapters of the book (as I'll expand on below), in many ways this narrative is one of the book's most valuable contributions. For one thing, it clearly calls out President Obama, then-Secretary Clinton and the US and Japanese foreign policy establishments for going out of their way to undermine Japanese electoral democracy, by punishing the newly-elected DPJ government during 2009-2010. What were the DPJ's crimes? Not to roll over and accept US ukase about relocating the (utterly non-strategic) bases in Okinawa, and to send a trade delegation to Beijing. For another thing, the book makes a good case that current PM Abe's main agenda isn't about "Abenomics" and the economy, it's about rehabilitating the elite class structure and non-democratic order of pre-1945 Japan, and especially about rehabilitating the reputation of his grandfather Kishi Nobusuke. (Kishi was minister for Japan's Manchurian colony until 1941, Minister for Munitions throughout the war, and then held briefly as a suspected war criminal. Then he became PM at the end of the 1950s and rolled over in obedience to Eisenhower on the Japan-US defense treaty, while ignoring million-person-strong demonstrations in Tokyo against the pact.) If you can understand Bush 43's Iraq War as a sort of payback for Bush 41's failure to topple Saddam Hussein during the war in Kuwait, then you might be able to imagine the sort of family drama we who live in Japan are being pulled into today. But actually this situation is much worse: for Japan's current Baby Boomer leader, the Good Old Days (which of course he never lived through) were a police state. Unfortunately, the New York Nobelists and other foreign pundits who praise Abe's economic policies are giving him more power to push us back into that future.
It's for this background especially that the book merits inclusion in a series the publisher calls "What Everyone Needs to Know."
3. Every author has to make choices about what to include, but there are a few topics where even slightly more detail could have strengthened the book's argument. I'll give one political and one economic example.
For politics, a little more might have been said about Japan's election law. RTM describes some changes that were made in the law in 1994, but omits to mention that the result is still an extremely disproportional system, i.e., one in which the percentage of of seats doesn't reflect the number of votes received. In Japan's case, the system chosen is one of the most imbalanced, known in political science jargon as "mixed member majoritarian" -- the same as used by Putin's Russia. (Some other more technical choices compound the problems in Japan.) Thanks to our Russian-style system, Abe's coalition could win a 68% majority in the Diet in 2012, with only 42% of the votes cast; in 2014, they won a similar supermajority, still with only around 48% of the votes. Without this background, a reader might believe that the fact that LDP repeatedly gets elected means that they have majority support.
Other important aspects of the election law include the Japan Supreme Court's crucial role from the 1960s to the present in allowing unconstitutional elections to stand again and again (notwithstanding the constitution's explicit and self-executing invalidation (Art. 98(1)) of acts not in conformity with the constitution), and the law's draconian restrictions on political speech. E.g., in 2013, the Abe government pushed through changes that make it a crime punishable by prison to send an email to your mom during Japan's 2-week campaign period recommending she vote for a specific candidate. It also became a crime for you to say anything online about politics during that period if you're under 20 years old. (BTW, the Japan Supremes have always upheld restrictions on free speech, too.) A few factual details like this might make it clearer to the general reader that Japan is nothing like a Western democracy -- and that this is a difference that's embedded in the law, not just in politicians' attitudes.
On the economy, a more nuanced discussion of exports and exchange rates would also have put the LDP agenda into sharper relief. RTM does mention in general terms that Japan isn't quite as dependent on exports as it had been earlier in the postwar era. But this doesn't go quite far enough to blast the clichés we hear daily on the news about Japan's export-led economy: the book doesn't mention that, expressed as a percentage of GDP, Japan's export sector has long been *smaller* than any other developed economy's, except America's. In the early 1980s, it hovered around 13-15% of GDP, and then declined to between 9%-10% during most of the 1990s despite the yen's being much cheaper during most of that period than it is now. Today, the percentage is around 15%-16% -- compared to around 28% for France, 30% for the UK, 45% for Germany, 54% for S. Korea and 72% for Switzerland. (The rate for the US is around 13.5%.)
With its "export-led" nonsense the mainstream press isn't merely wrong, but perpetuates a myth that conveniently masks the true politics of today's cheap yen. The point of the Bank of Japan's cheaper yen is *not* to make exporters "ecstatic" (@359), but relates more to the fact that the biggest "exporters" don't export anymore: they manufacture locally. Companies like Toyota, Sony, Panasonic and others have factories overseas and earn most of their profits in dollars, Euro, renminbi or other foreign currencies. A cheap yen means that those profits, as stated on their financial statements, get hugely inflated when converted back into yen. That does nothing to help Japan's GDP and Japanese workers, but it pumps the company's share price, and therefore management compensation; and in a larger sense it helps the stock market and the few who invest in it. The cheap yen is actually a Japanese symptom of the global separation of the financial economy of equity, currency, derivative, etc. markets from the real economy of goods and services. This benefits the members of Japan's big business organizations like the Keidanren, who are among Abe's most passionate admirers and political contributors. In the meantime, the cheap yen makes life difficult for us ordinary salaried folk who live in Japan. In this light, the yen policy can be seen as furthering the LDP project of restoring prewar inequality, which RTM correctly identifies elsewhere (e.g., @272).
4. The book does have a couple of significant blind spots. One is an overly rosy view of South Korea, and the supposed way in which Korean companies are "cleaning Japan's clocks" in many fields (@225-227), including exports of pop culture. (Could this be due more to the relative appeal of long-legged, sexily-clothed surgically-modified women and pretty boys versus tuneless chipmunk schoolgirls, rather than to differences in corporate governance? And does exporting this kind of stuff bring great merit to a country, anyway?) While this view is currently a fashionable trope of Western commentary, it ignores the extent of corruption in the Korean system, the lax enforcement of safety regulations, the exploitation of entertainment workers and many other weaknesses. And sorry to say, but judging my own career experience in tech and other fields, many Korean companies still lag far behind their Japanese counterparts in business ethics. These factors deserve more candid attention before touting Korean business as a role model.
Far more unfortunate, though, is the book's neglect of Japan's regions, the places outside the three major metro areas of Tokyo/Yokohama/Chiba/Saitama, Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe, and Nagoya (Toyota's hometown). They appear in the book only as undifferentiated "poor, `backwards'" areas (@292) or as destinations for politicians' pork barrel projects. In fact, however, these regions are where roughly half of Japan's population still lives, and are rich sources of cultural diversity -- as diverse as the regions of Italy or France, with their own dialects, cuisine, folklore and terroir.
Most regions are simply ignored, but the book does occasionally mention the Tohoku region, whose Pacific coast (including Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima Prefectures) suffered the tsunami in March 2011. Since I live there as well as in Tokyo, I'll focus on it for a bit. First, it certainly was surprising to read that Sendai, capital of Miyagi Prefecture, escaped the tsunami "almost unscathed" (@203). Actually, Sendai was one of the worst-affected areas. (The "unscathed" characterization also doesn't quite fit the book's closing encomium of Sendai skater Hanyu Yuzuru, which mentions that his ice rink was wrecked and his home badly damaged in the quake (@ 389.) [REVISED, 2015/04: In an earlier version of this review, I had attributed this to RTM's ignorance about the region. However, he subsequently communicated to me that he had lived in Sendai when he was young; he was thinking specifically of the downtown area. He's correct that the tsunami didn't reach the city's downtown centre. Since before 2011, though, the city has extended to the coast; and this area was inundated, with terrible loss of life, on March 11 -- on live television, as it happens. The waves reached 10 km inland. We agreed that this wasn't phrased as well as it might have been in the book.]
Second, the "poor, backwards" epithet mentioned above is applied to Iwate Prefecture, but actually that gives a reader a very mistaken impression. Aside from being more agriculturally diverse than other parts of Japan (famous for seafood, beef, dairy, vegetables and rice -- and sake, though the best is hard to get in Tokyo), Iwate has produced a couple of Prime Ministers, a number of other cabinet members, one of Japan's most beloved and internationally-famous authors (Miyazawa Kenji), and a famous educator whose face can still be seen on some ¥5,000 bills in circulation (Nitobe Inazou). The capital, Morioka (pop. ca. 300,000), has the highest per capita consumption of gourmet coffee in Japan, and is famous as a jazz capital and as a test market for overseas fashion. (For what it's worth, guitarist Jeff Beck's 2014 Japan tour included only Tokyo, Yokohama and Morioka -- Morioka is always on his itinerary.) Iwate also had savvy politicians who early on seized the chance to make Morioka the northern terminus of the shinkansen (bullet train) -- today it has more shinkansen stations than any other prefecture in Japan. That's not the only sign of its political clout: roads become noticeably smoother as soon as one enters the prefecture from its neighbours, and post-3/11 repairs were effected there soonest. Morioka also happens to be where I live for a good chunk of each year and maintain a law office, and where my wife's mother's family has been established for generations.
5. This blurriness about Tohoku, and Iwate in particular, might have remained a small nit, were it not for its its impact on the book's political narrative. If the book has a tragic hero, he is politician Ozawa Ichiro, in whose capsule biography the "poor, backwards" terminology crops up. The book suggests that Ozawa's vision of a "genuine two-party system" was thwarted by a vindictive political establishment, treacherous party colleagues and, only slightly less directly, the Obama Administration. Yes, tragic, and a good example of how Japan trips over the shackles of its past -- if only it were true. As it happens, my wife's extended family had been supporting Ozawa for decades, and one or two members were even local politicians under his wing for a while. The fact is that he had been alienating his local base for a long time, with his arrogance and heavy-handed tactics. Rubber masks of politicians are a popular novelty item at Morioka drinking parties; I bought one of the last available Ozawa ones at a shop near Morioka station a few years ago. The caricature on the label portrays him as a white-suited Mafia godfather.
The final straw for Ozawa's Iwate base was his behavior after the March 11 disaster. Not only did he never show up on the coast, not only did he never intercede with his own party, then in power, for more support for the afflicted -- he moved kit and kaboodle to Kyoto. That turned him into a despised figure everywhere outside of his inland home district in the south of the prefecture (and even there it looked for a while like his estranged wife might give him a run for his money). Today, you don't see Ozawa drinking masks in Morioka -- he's persona non grata, an irrelevancy. Unlike what this book suggests, it's not because the establishment he threatened used its forces to bring him down, though yes there was that too at a national scale. But in his base, it's because the people who knew him best saw him for the selfish jerk he is. He betrayed his supporters, not the other way around. (Contrast Ozawa, by the way, with another nationally-demonized politician who caught the ire of Koizumi and eventually served jail time: Suzuki Muneo, who appears here only in a capsule biography in Appendix B. At no time during his peak years of activity in the late 1990s and early 2000s did this man ever appear to wear a halo; Ozawa at times could seem elegant by comparison. Yet Suzuki remains beloved in his home of Hokkaido, and despite his travails retains 1,000-watt charisma in person today.)
There's one more point to be made about the Ozawa narrative: what is so great about a two-party system? Should we regret that Ozawa failed, supposing he had been a sterling fellow? Actually, the US and UK "first past the post" style of elections can also be highly disproportional: in theory, a party that gets just over 50% of the votes could wind up controlling 100% of a legislature. There are other, more proportional systems out there, such as the one used for electing the German Bundestag. Germany has prospered with multi-party democracy due to a national disposition toward working together -- something not so alien to Japanese culture. The German constitutional system also has many other good features, including a constitutional court that's vigorous in protecting human rights and the integrity of the political system: there's something Japan could really use. And Japan has a long history of legal borrowings from Germany, starting with its Mimpou, or Civil Code. The blind spot here -- which, to be fair, isn't at all unique to RTM or this book -- is in the concept of what a healthy politics should look like. It would be more in keeping with RTM's other keen observations to assume that American politics is one of the worst role models for Japan to adopt. From that perspective, Japan maybe dodged a bullet when Ozawa faded from the national scene.
6. The book is is written in a comfortable style. While there's plenty of personal judgment expressed, it doesn't overwhelm the book's usefulness as a source of background information about Japan. I'd have wished for better sourcing and a full bibliography, but I'll probably contact the author about some particular cites I'd like to track down; otherwise, if you can adopt the point of view suggested above -- thinking of this more as a briefing than as a reference work -- the lack of documentation may sting less. The dedication includes a clever musical allusion to a familiar nickname for Japan, though whether this was intentional or more of a coincidence connected to the dedicatee's taste wasn't clear. In sum: despite my reservations above, this book contains much more of what you really ought to understand about contemporary Japan than any other individual book I've read in the past few years.
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Covered With Some Fragrance
I haven’t even had a chance to read the book yet, as it just arrived. However, the book is covered in some horrible fragrance, like some perfume or something has been spilled all over the cover. It stinks so bad I’m going to have to air it out before I can even read it. Not even kidding or exaggerating, it’s so bad. Definitely not happy having purchased this book and it being delivered with whatever this fragrance is...so so bad. 🤢🤮
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