Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (33 page)

Despite the stronger floating yen (which made Japanese manufactures more expensive abroad), Japan's penetration of foreign markets continued inexorably. And despite the end of abnormally high annual growth rates, the now-massive economy still grew enormously each year under the more normal rates. Still, it was only in 1979 that the exaggerated phrase “Japan as Number One” appeared on the scene, shocking Japanese and non-Japanese alike, albeit in very different ways. Japan was not number one. It was still a distant second to the United States in overall economic capacity, but every conventional index indicated the gap was closing rapidly. By the mid-1980s the United States had become the world's largest debtor country and Japan the world's great creditor. It was now a financial, not just “economic,” superpower. In the closing years of the Sh
ō
wa period the “spin-on” military applications of Japan's advanced civilian technologies made it clear that, even without a military-industrial complex, Japan's technological accomplishments had made it a potentially significant military actor
worldwide.
³³
Neither structurally nor psychologically were the Japanese or anyone else in the world fully prepared to cope with such rapid, fundamental, and almost entirely unpredicted changes.

In this milieu, conflict over international issues was drastically transformed. Whereas controversy through the 1960s had focused primarily on military and peace issues, economic competition now dominated the scene, and nation-state tensions became far more engrossing than domestic confrontations. Neither in the 1970s nor in the 1980s, however, did the rise of Japan, growing economic strength of Europe, disintegration of Soviet power, and relative decline of a stumbling but still powerful America result in a clearly defined new global order. What existed, on the contrary, was closer to global disorder—and in this situation the most intense conflicts took place within the rickety old San Francisco System. The major disputes occurred, that is, among the capitalist powers and especially between Japan and the United States. Within Japan itself, policy-related conflict became increasingly detached from the public arena and more concentrated among the conservative elites, where expanding international involvement was accompanied by a proliferation of competing interests in both the corporate and bureaucratic sectors.
³⁴
As internal conflict shifted to and expanded among these vested interests, it became less visible. The highly technical nature of international trade and finance—and, indeed, of many new military developments as well—also inhibited wide-ranging public debate. Specialists and insiders now controlled the terms of public discourse.

Isolated individuals and groups continued during this period to try to offer alternative visions beyond unbridled capitalist competition and (a new term for the 1980s) “technonationalism.” They emphasized such global issues as the north-south problem of growing disparity between rich and have-not nations, the social exploitation and distortions caused by multinational corporations in less developed countries, the depletion of global resources by economic powerhouses such as Japan and the other advanced industrialized countries, and the continuing intensification of
the nuclear arms race. Where Japan itself was concerned, they pointed out that remilitarization was accelerating amidst all the hubbub about economics, which was entirely true. During the last decades of Sh
ō
wa the often-mentioned “symbolic restraints” on Japanese militarization all were violated in one way or another. Prime Minister Sat
ō
's famous Three Nonnuclear Principles, for example, were misleading from the start. Contrary to what they proclaimed, nuclear weapons apparently were brought in and out of Japan by the U.S. military as a matter of routine. Furthermore, the LDP coupled the Three Nonnuclear Principles with a less-publicized “Four Nuclear Principles,” which included dependence on the U.S. nuclear “umbrella” and promotion of nuclear energy for peaceful use.

The critics also pointed out that the heralded “One Percent of GNP” restraint on defense spending was deceptive. In the first place, by NATO-style calculations, which include military retirement benefits and the like, Japanese military spending generally exceeded 1 percent of GNP. More important by far, 1 percent of a huge and constantly expanding economy was itself huge and constantly expanding. Thus, for most of the postwar period the rate of annual increase in Japan's
real
military expenditures was the highest in the world.
³⁵
Moreover, in 1987 Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, an astute player with symbols, deliberately breached the one percent guideline. Four years earlier, at the urging of the U.S. government, Nakasone also had terminated another of the vaunted symbolic restraints on Japanese remilitarization by jettisoning the embargo on export of weapons and military-related manufactures. The United States desired to gain access to advanced Japanese technology in developing its “Star Wars” (Strategic Defense Initiative) dreams, and Nakasone's compliance opened the door to an absolutely uncertain future for Japanese activity in advanced weapons systems. Criticism of such developments by the remnants of serious opposition, however, made scarcely a ripple in popular consciousness.
³⁶

The decline of intense public debate on such issues reflected an
erosion of democratic ideals and practices at a time when Japan was, in fact, being called on internationally to offer a new vision of national goals and responsibilities commensurate with its new power. Indeed, there almost appeared to be a correlation between the rise to global eminence and decline of political idealism. Japan had become a prosperous superstate by mobilizing its population and resources resolutely behind productivity and economic nationalism, and its accomplishments drew understandable admiration and envy from throughout the world. The line between mobilization and regimentation is a fine one, however, and the Japanese state of the 1970s and 1980s also appeared to many observers, especially abroad, to have stepped over that line. In part, this perception reflected the partial success of the conservative hegemony in perpetuating the occupation-period “reverse course” and steadily undermining what were called the “excesses” of early postwar political idealism. Once “democratization” was replaced by economic development as the overriding objective, most Japanese had little choice but to become socialized to corporate and national goals. As time passed, such regimentation was sweetened by the material rewards of prosperity and hardened by nationalistic appeals. The emergence of a mass consumer society created an ethos of “middle-class” homogeneity and contributed immeasurably to depoliticization (or preoccupation with personal and local matters). Global eminence, in turn, nurtured not only legitimate feelings of national pride but also more ominous attitudes of exceptionalism and racial and cultural superiority.

In theory both Japan's emergence as a global power and the rapid growth of consumerism and middle-class ideologies should have stimulated an increasingly cosmopolitan outlook at all levels of society. In many respects, a broader supranational attitude did materialize: internationalization (
kokusaika
) was perhaps the most overworked catchword of the 1980s. The opposite, however, occurred as well. Insular, nationalistic fixations became stronger side by side with the intensification of international contacts. This apparent paradox is not difficult to account for, for the pride that
Japanese felt at being called “number one” was compounded by fear and anger at the negative response of other countries to Japan's suddenly awesome competitive power. As foreign criticism of Japan's economic expansion mounted—emerging in accusations that the Japanese practiced “adversarial trade” or “neomercantilism” or “beggar-thy-neighbor” capture of markets, for example, or that domestic “nontariff barriers” and “structural impediments” made the Japanese market unfairly difficult for outsiders to penetrate—a defensiveness bordering on siege mentality developed in many circles. Mistrust and tension that had been latent within the old San Francisco System erupted openly. Strains of “victim consciousness” that had always existed across the political spectrum were drawn to the surface. War imagery became fashionable on all sides, albeit now in the post-Cold War context of “economic war” among the capitalist powers, especially the United States and Japan.
³⁷

In these circumstances, pride-inspiring and fear-inspiring at once, many Japanese began to turn inward and argue that the differences between the Japanese and other nations, races, and cultures were greater than the similarities and that Japan's contemporary accomplishments derived primarily from these unique characteristics—more so, that is, than from more general factors such as unanticipated historical opportunities (like war booms), global circumstances (such as the decline of the United States for reasons fundamentally having little to do with Japan), external patronage (notably the U.S. economic and military umbrella), transnational market mechanisms, rational (rather than cultural) policy structures and decisions, and, indeed, the consolidation of power in the hands of a competitive and diversified but still remarkably close-knit hegemony of business leaders, bureaucrats, and conservative politicians. Eventually this insular and usually narcissistic preoccupation with so-called traditional values took on a life of its own in the mass media—primarily in the runaway genre of writings and discussions devoted to the uniqueness of “being Japanese” (
Nihonjinron
)—but from the outset such introversion was promoted as a clearcut ideology by the conservative leadership.
³⁸
In
1968, for example, the LDP showed its hand clearly in this regard when it attempted to turn centennial celebrations of the Meiji Restoration into an occasion for repudiating the most liberal ideals of the early postwar period. “We have forfeited the inherent form of the Japanese people,” the party lamented in an important statement, and to rectify this loss it was desirable to reaffirm the great values of the Meiji era and bring about “the elevation of racial spirit and morality” (
minzoku seishin to d
ō
gi no k
ō
y
ō
)
.
³⁹

The conservatives never lost sight of this goal, and the closing decades of the postwar era saw them advance steadily toward it. They proved themselves masters of symbolic politics, and most of the controversial neonationalist developments of late Sh
ō
wa reflected this ideological fixation on re-creating a traditionalistic “racial spirit” that would counterbalance the purportedly corrupting influences of excessive internationalization. In numerous ways the government assumed an increasingly active role in romanticizing the patriotic and public-spirited nature of Japan's prewar imperial and imperialistic history. The corporate sector, on its part, made brilliant use of group pressures and “family” ideologies to reassert not merely the primacy of the group over the individual, but also the primacy of the family writ large (the corporation and the state) over the real nuclear family. Collectivist and consensual values were promoted as the antidote to individualistic democracy and the ideals of principled dissent.

The postwar period ended on this discordant clamor, with fanfare about “internationalization” mingling with paeans to “racial spirit” and “being Japanese.” The juxtaposition of external and domestic concerns was familiar, but the contradictions between opening outward and turning inward, cosmopolitanism and exceptionalism, were unusually blatant. What this contradiction boded for the future was unpredictable. In every way, however, it seemed a far cry from the earlier and more visionary era when large notions of “peace” and “democracy” had defined the parameters of political consciousness.

__________________

^*
After this essay was written, the Liberal Democratic Party briefly relinquished the premiership between August 1993 and January 1996 and then, fifteen years later in 2009, suffered an electoral defeat that paved the way for cabinets under the centrist Democratic Party of Japan that was founded in 1998.

In 1999 I published a book titled
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
that focuses on the period between August 1945 and April 1952, when Japan lacked sovereignty and was under the rule of U.S.-led Allied occupation authorities. The book's title and subtitle eschew reference to “the U.S. Occupation of Japan,” for although the great majority of studies of this period approach the subject from the conqueror's perspective and through the voluminous English-language documentary record, this is not what most interested me. Rather, I wished to explore the early postwar years as a
Japanese
experience. Without in any way denying the inordinate influence of the Americans, I saw the Japanese people themselves, at every level of society, as the paramount agents in determining how they would rebuild their lives and society
.

The working title of the manuscript during the years it was being written was not
Embracing Defeat,
but
Starting Over.
The latter title was vetoed by the publisher's publicity department, on grounds that it would mislead readers into assuming the book was a manual for divorcées; and in retrospect I regret that I did not hold my ground more firmly and adjust my title more adroitly. What the book is about—what a better title would have been—is “Starting Over in a Shattered Land.” Almost all of the many chapters focus primarily on the Japanese and their
extraordinarily diverse, resilient, and creative—as well as cynical, corrupt, divisive, and decadent—responses to disaster and defeat
.

Despite its length, the book as published required substantial cuts, including a projected chapter on Japanese comic strips and cartoons in the years following surrender. The essay that follows here involved retrieving and elaborating on a case study from this jettisoned chapter: cartoon panels based on a traditional “syllable cards
”
(
iroha karuta
)
game that ever since late feudal times had been a vehicle for social commentary combining pictures and pithy sayings. My major case-study ephemera was published just a few months after the surrender, when daily life was very difficult indeed, in the New Year 1946 issues of some small publications. Droll, barbed, colloquial, full of puns and insider allusions, these witty “new syllable cards” were but one of countless modes of popular expression, and venting, that existed beyond the conquerors' ken
.