From
by Chalmers Johnson
(Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1982)In looking for literature about how classical Confucian values continue to influence East Asian culture today, the most readily available writings seem to be those about Japan. This seems partly due to the fact that Japan has been economically the most spectacularly successful of East Asian countries, and hence has aroused the most interest on the part of Western writers. It is probably also due to the fact that, of all the East Asian countries, Japan has made the smoothest entry into the modern world, giving it a chance to integrate its classical Confucian heritage with modern life and institutions. (This is in striking contrast to mainland China, whose entry into the modern era was marked by severe criticism and rejection of Confucianism as a symbol of backwardness and social oppression.)
This reading describes the origins and workings of an arm of the Japanese bureaucracy called MITI, the "M
inistry of International Trade and Industry@, the organization within the Japanese government that formulates and implements Japanese policy regarding economic development. It has a lot more power over Japanese companies than the US government does over American companies, and exercises much more influence on the Japanese economy than Americans will allow the US government to exercise over the US economy (which is supposed to rely on the "invisible hand@ of the free market, rather than on anyone's conscious planning). Johnson argues that MITI has by and large been very successful - - it was in fact largely responsible for the phenomenal success of the Japanese economy since World War II.I begin with a passage from Johnson
=s book describing the way that the Japanese government bureaucracy grew out of developments in the Tokugawa Period of Japanese history (1603-1867). This is the period when Japan took on a form of government similar to that established in the Han Dynasty in China: A centralized government headed by the Tokugawa Shogun, but administered by a group of men directly responsible to him. Most of these administrators had previously been samurai, soldiers employed by the local warlords (who ruled Japan in the more "feudal@ system immediately preceding the Tokugawa period). The Tokugawa period is when these samurai began to be transformed into government bureaucrats. In this process, they took on many of the ideals of classical Confucianism, imported from China, as their own code. These ex-samurai Tokugawa government officials are the ultimate ancestors of the present-day Japanese government bureaucrats. Observers such as Johnson argue that one reason for the success of MITI is that a rather high degree of idealism and genuine altruistic concern for the country does still prevail. This, and their obvious success, has led the general Japanese citizenry to trust them for the most part, despite recurrent criticisms that MITI is too independent and not accountable enough to Japanese voters.*****
There are many different reasons why Japan has the bureaucracy it has -- it did not grow up wholly out of a conscious plan to maintain Confucian traditions. But it does seem to exemplify some Confucian ideals, adapted to the modern world. I include this reading here for the contrast it provides with American antipathy toward governmental intervention in the free market. Try to think for yourself how what the author describes possibly reflects Confucian values as expressed in the earlier readings from Confucian writings, and the advantages and disadvantages of the institutions he describes.
Samurai turned bureaucrats
The ancestors of the modern Japanese bureaucrats are the samurai of the feudal era. During the two-and-a-half centuries of peace [1603-1867] that the Tokugawa shogunate enforced, the feudal warriors slowly evolved into what one group of scholars has called a "governmentalized class" or a "service nobility." Constituting some 6 to 7 percent of the population, these samurai did not yet form a modern bureaucracy, if by this one means what Weber has called the most rational and impersonal form of state administration...
During the Tokugawa period the samurai became administrative officials rather than warriors, but they still occupied a status for which they received a stipend, rather than offering a particular competence for which they were paid a salary. This emphasis on status rather than on the performance of an occupation was passed on under the Meiji Constitution to the bureaucrats, who enjoyed such a position legally until the Constitution of 1947 ended it, and to their successors, who still enjoy it informally more than thirty years later because of the persistence of tradition and bureaucratic dominance in postwar Japan...
The bureaucrats of prewar Japan were not liked, but they were respected... The new bureaucracy, expertly trained and open to all men who had demonstrated their talent in impartial examinations, was clearly an improvement over [dominance by powerful clans]. The political parties were an alternative to state officialdom, but they always suffered from the weakness of having arrived second on the political scene. The bureaucracy claimed to speak for the national interest and characterized the parties as speaking only for local or particular interests...
Prewar bureaucrats were not "civil servants" but rather "officials of the Emperor" (tenno no kanri) appointed by him and answerable only to him... This high social status linked them back in time to the samurai and forward to the postwar bureaucrats in their possession of intrinsic authority rather than extrinsic, or legal-rational, office. It meant that they were largely free of external constraints. "The present-day bureaucrat," writes Henderson, "is not, of course, identical with the warrior bureaucrat of the Tokugawa regime or even the new university-trained Imperial bureaucrat of prewar Japan. But they have all, until recently, been largely above the law in the sense of independent judicial review."
Rather than a rule of law, Henderson finds that "a rule of bureaucrats prevails." Isomura and Kuronuma concur. Even in the postwar world, they argue, Japan has had an administration "for the sake of the citizenry" and not an administration carried out with the "participation of the citizenry." In their view, this constitutes "administration through law," which is different from the "rule of law."
In addition to their status, the bureaucrats of modern Japan also inherited from the samurai something comparable to their code of ethics and their elite consciousness. Kanayama Bunji draws attention to the frank elitism and sense of meritocracy associated in contemporary Japan with young men (and a few women) who pass the incredibly competitive Higher-level Public Officials Examination and then enter a ministry. He cites the long hours of work they are expected to perform without complaint, their being sent abroad for postgraduate education in elite universities, the theme of "sacrifice for the public good" that runs through most ministries, and the lectures to new recruits during their early years in a ministry by their "seniors," including those who have retired from public service and have moved to powerful positions in industry or politics. He believes that these customs add up to a "way of the bureaucrat" comparable to the old "way of a warrior' (bushido)...
In this section, Johnson wants to counter the tendency of Americans to think in terms of only two alternatives: There are "free market economies
@ exemplified by the U.S, and "planned economies,@ exemplified by Communist Russia (Johnson was writing in 1982 before the fall of the Soviet Union). To understand modern Japan, Johnson says, we have to envision it as a third type different from both these two. The three types are then as follows:(1) In the "market-rational@ American system, the government plays the regulatory role of referee, rationally calculating how to make sure that the free-market economic game is played fairly, and how to offset some damaging effects of a purely free-market economy; the state is not supposed to have a "developmental" role, positively involved in rational planning about what is best for economic progress for the country as a whole;
(2) In the Communist "plan-ideological@ system the government is committed to dominating the economy by central planning, primarily for ideological reasons, rather than out of rational calculation of what is best for economic performance and progress;
(3) In the "plan-rational@ Japanese system, the state plays a key developmental role in rationally calculating and implementing measures that it thinks will benefit the national economy; since pragmatic rational calculation of economic results is primary, the Japanese state is not opposed in principle to the existence of powerful large corporations run for private profit, but has worked out several kinds of business-government partnerships that seem indeed to have worked for the benefit of the Japanese economy as a whole.
One additional comment on Johnson's categories: could it be argued that Americans are ideologically committed to a free-market economy, quite independently of its practical results. It takes very severe cases of bad results to shake their ideological faith, such as the Great Depression of the 1930's, to get Americans to support such anti-free-market and "paternalistic" programs as Social Security under Pres. Franklin Roosevelt. ML
[Among the various schools of explanation for the modern Japanese "economic miracle
@] The... school in which I place myself... stresses the role of the developmental state in the economic miracle. Although the rest of this book is devoted to this subject -- and to some of the non-miracles produced by the developmental state in its quest for the miracle -- several further points are needed by way of introduction.What do I mean by the developmental state? This is not really a hard question, but it always seems to raise difficulties in the Anglo-American countries, where the existence of the developmental state in any form other than the communist state has largely been forgotten or ignored as a result of the years of disputation with Marxist-Leninists... Japan is therefore always being studied as a "variant" of something other than what it is, and so a necessary prelude to any discussion of the developmental state must be the clarification of what it is not.
The issue is not one of state intervention in the economy. All states intervene in their economies for various reasons, among which are protecting national security (the "military-industrial complex"), insuring industrial safety, providing consumer protection, aiding the weak, promoting fairness in market transactions, preventing monopolization and private control in free enterprise systems, securing the public interest in natural monopolies, achieving economies of scale, preventing excessive competition, protecting and rearing industries, distributing vital resources, protecting the environment, guaranteeing employment, and so forth. The question is how the government intervenes and for what purposes.
This is one of the critical issues in twentieth-century politics, and one that has become more acute as the century has progressed. As Louis Mulkern, an old hand in the Japanese banking world, has said, "I would suggest that there could be no more devastating weakness for any major nation in the 1980s than the inability to define the role of government in the economy." The particular Japanese definition of this role and the relationship between that role and the economic miracle are at once major components and primary causes of the resurgent interest in "political economy" in the late twentieth century.
Nowhere is the prevalent and peculiarly Western preference for binary modes of thought more apparent than in the field of political economy. In modern times Weber began the practice with his distinction between a "market economy" and a
@planned economy"...I must stress that for purposes of the present discussion... the Soviet-type command economy [is not the only kind of "planned economy"]. Economies of the Soviet type are not plan-rational but plan-ideological. In the Soviet Union and its dependencies and emulators, state ownership of the means of production, state planning, and bureaucratic goal-setting are not rational means to a developmental goal (even if they may once have been); they are fundamental values in themselves, not to be challenged by evidence of either inefficiency or ineffectiveness.
In the sense I am using the term here, Japan is plan-rational, and the command economies are not; in fact, the history of Japan since 1925 offers numerous illustrations of why the command economy is not plan rational, a lesson the Japanese learned well.
At the most basic level the distinction between market and plan refers to differing conceptions of the functions of the state in economic affairs. The state as an institution is as old as organized human society. Until approximately the nineteenth century, states everywhere performed more or less the same functions that make large-scale social organization possible but that individuals or families or villages cannot perform for themselves. These functions included defense, road building, water conservancy, the minting of coins, and the administration of justice. Following the industrial revolution, the state began to take on new functions. In those states that were the first to industrialize, the state itself had little to do with the new forms of economic activity but towards the end of the nineteenth century the state took on regulatory functions in the interest of maintaining competition, consumer protection, and so forth. As Henry Jacoby puts it, "Once capitalism transformed the traditional way of life, factors such as the effectiveness of competition, freedom of movement, and the absence of any system of social security compelled the state to assume responsibility for the protection and welfare of the individual. Because each man was responsible for himself, and because that individualism became a social principle, the state remained as almost the only regulatory authority."
In states that were late to industrialize, the state itself led the industrialization drive, that is, it took on developmental functions. These two differing orientations toward private economic activities, the regulatory orientation and the developmental orientation, produced two different kinds of government-business relationships.
The United States is a good example of a state in which the regulatory orientation predominates, whereas Japan is a good example of a state in which the developmental orientation predominates. A regulatory, or market-rational, state concerns itself with the forms and procedures --
the rules, if you will -- of economic competition, but it does not concern itself with substantive matters. For example, the United States government has many regulations concerning the antitrust implications of the size of firms, but it does not concern itself with what industries ought to exist and what industries are no longer needed. The developmental, or plan-rational, state, by contrast, has as its dominant feature precisely the setting of such substantive social and economic goals...In modern times Japan has always put emphasis on an overarching, nationally supported goal for its economy rather than on the particular procedures that are to govern economic activity... Only during the 1970's did Japan begin to shift to a somewhat regulatory, foreign-policy orientation, just as America began to show early signs of a new developmental, industrial-policy orientation. But the Japanese system remains plan rational, and the American system is still basically market rational.
This can be seen most clearly by looking at the differences between the two systems in terms of economic and political decision-making. In Japan the developmental, strategic quality of economic policy is reflected within the government in the high position of the so-called economic bureaucrats, that is, the officials of the ministries of Finance, International Trade and Industry, Agriculture and Forestry, Construction, and Transportation, plus the Economic Planning Agency. These official agencies attract the most talented graduates of the best universities in the country, and the positions of higher-level officials in these ministries have been and still are the most prestigious in the society. Although it is influenced by pressure groups and political claimants, the elite bureaucracy of Japan makes most major decisions, drafts virtually all legislation, controls the national budget, and is the source of all major policy innovations in the system...
In market-rational systems such as the United States, public service does not normally attract the most capable talent, and national decision-making is dominated by elected members of the professional class, who are usually lawyers, rather than by the bureaucracy... American economic decisions are made most. often in Congress, which also controls the budget, and these decisions reflect the market-rational emphasis on procedures rather than outcomes. During the 1970's Americans began to experiment with industrial policy bureaucracies such as the Department of Energy, but they are still rather wary of such organizations, whose prestige remains low.
*******
During the late 1940's and early 1950's the [Japanese] bureaucracy fought for its policies, and against interference by the none-too-competent political parties of the time, by invoking the old idea that the bureaucracy speaks for the national interest and the political parties only for local, particular, or selfish interests. General wisdom was said to reside in the state and only particular wisdom in the society... Kojima Akira traces this ideology to the state's monopoly in the Meiji era of the power to establish the "orthodoxy of the public interest," everything not so designated being, by definition, part of the private interest and therefore subordinate.
Interest groups exist in Japan in great numbers, but there is no theory of pluralism that legitimates their political activities. The parties developed what strength they had before the war by representing private interests to the government, and this heritage too was passed on to their postwar successors. One of the reasons that there are so few private members' bills passed is that virtually all of them are based on appeals from constituents or are intended to serve some special interest. Many party politicians themselves accept the orthodoxy of a vertical relationship between the state's activities and their own activities. "They tend," writes Campbell, "to perceive voters as animated almost solely by particularistic, pork-barrel desires rather than by concern over issues of broad social policy..."
The Japanese bureaucracy jealously guards the practice of making no political appointments below the ministerial level; the bureaucrats believe that this helps establish their claim to be above politics and to speak only for the national interest. One of the bureaucracy's greatest fears is "political interference" in its internal affairs or, worse, a ministry's being made subservient to a party or a politician. Even though the minister is legally in command of and responsible for everything that happens in a ministry, a delicate relationship between him and the vice-minister inevitably exists from the outset. The norm is for the minister to fear his bureaucrats and to be dominated by them; one journalist suggests that the only time a minister ever enjoys his post is on the day he is photographed in formal dress at the Imperial Palace as part of the cabinet's investiture ceremony. If this norm prevails, the bureaucrats are satisfied. But what they really want is a minister who will leave them alone while at the same time taking responsibility for the ministry and protecting it from intrusion by other politicians or outside interests, particularly business interests...
A part of the MITI perspective is impatience with the Anglo-American doctrine of economic competition. After the war MITI had to reconcile itself to the occupation-fostered market system in Japan, but it has always been hostile to American-style price competition and antitrust legislation... MITI is highly competitive internationally, but it is often irritated by the disorderly competitive scramble among its domestic clients. As Robert Ozaki says, "Sometimes it is assumed [by MITI] that the adverse effects of private monopoly will not arise if the monopolists are Japanese..."
MITI men are powerful and outspoken, and the Japanese public enjoys reading about them. Several best-selling novels have been written about them, the best of which is Shiroyama Saburo's The Summer of the Bureaucrats (Kanryo-tachi no natsu) of 1975. English novelists sometimes choose bureaucrats as subjects (examples are Maugham's Ashenden or le Carre's Smiley's People), but economic bureaucrats in America or Britain are rarely as interesting as spies or politicians. The opposite is true in Japan, where the power and influence of economic bureaucrats make fictional portrayals of their lives and struggles intriguing.