Japan’s Open Future: An Agenda for Global Citizenship

The eighth seminar in the 2009 seminar series, ‘Changing World Views: International Challenges for the UK and Japan’, took its title from a recently-published book that examines Japan’s role in ‘a more complicated world’. The end of the Cold War, a shrinking domestic population, global instabilities after 9-11, and the global financial crisis have shifted perspectives and created a new world order. How Japan may adapt and evolve was addressed by the speakers as they explored the forces in society that may be seen as agents for change.

Summary

The chair, William Horsley, set the scene by commenting on the magnificent world tour, through the eyes of the UK and Japan, that this year’s seminar contributors had delivered. This final seminar, he continued, would now give the speakers the opportunity of looking at Japan – a country remarkable for its powers of adaptation, for having solved its problems of security and oil attainment and for having been the first non-EU country to join the G-7 but which has, recently, lost its direction.

 

The first speaker, Professor Jean-Pierre Lehmann, began by ascribing Japan’s successful modernisation to a tremendous element of curiosity and a desire to learn from the outside. Lehmann pondered on the ebbing and waning of this curiosity, as he confessed to being perplexed and disappointed with Japan’s failure to live up to its great potential.

 

Reflecting on the remarkable developments of the last 20 years, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ascent of China and the end of apartheid Lehmann said there is no reference to Japan. Lehmann confessed to finding this strange and unhealthy, given what a force Japan has been in the past 100years and its great economic strength.

 

This state of being ‘out to lunch’ virtually all the time belies the expectations held in 1989 when Japan dominated the telecom industries, witnessed the Nikkei Index hitting 40,000 and saw a huge number of government heads attending the Showa Emperor’s funeral. It was impossible to pick up a newspaper at that time without coming across a reference to Japan, which was then at its apogee.

 

In analysing Japan’s lacklustre progress since, Lehmann said that it has gone from being one of the most outward-looking countries to being one of the most inward-looking in the way that it has adhered to linguistic chauvinism, dismissed the rise of China and failed to grasp the importance of the internet. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Japan’s tremendous resilience (to oil shocks) and curiosity were obvious. Tragically, these are not as prominent as they once were reminisced Lehmann, reflecting on the Japanese student movement of 1969 with its accompanying ferment and curiosity, remembering the taxi drivers he had encountered singing French ‘chanson’ and the sheer number of Japanese reading Proust.

 

Japan is not globalised, is not really regionalised either and has not been a very good neighbour lamented Lehmann. Its closed nature has severely limited its talent pool as there is an absence of new blood coming in from the outside and there is a sense of stagnation due to the dominance of an older generation of businessmen and politicians.

 

Ending on a positive note, Lehmann commented that the new Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, may have the opportunity of participating in a regional forum and changing Japan’s course. Though Japan is, at the moment, being eclipsed by China and has lost its curiosity, Lehmann remarked that he has not lost hopes of a renaissance in 2029, for example, as a result of Japan having learnt to open up and embrace globalisation.

 

The second speaker, Dr Masaru Tamamoto, began by identifying several problems with Japan including its 20-year period of recession and the ensuing devastating psychological effects of deflation which have left the Japanese bereft of energy and curiosity. Given that the Japanese tend to be risk-averse anyway and opt for low risk and high return, this has compounded the sense of inertia as innovation is mainly a result of risk-taking. The fact that Japan is a low-trust society, has resulted in a profusion of strict rules precisely due to this lack of trust – leading to an element of ‘anti-society’ almost, as individuals can only feel truly free if they shake off their social obligations.

 

Japan adopted the German model of state in the 19th century and later, continued Tamamoto, it embraced the MacArthur model in 1945, running this into the ground in 1989. The bubble economy seemed to suggest that no other model was necessary; Japan was as rich, per capita, as the leading developed countries. The subsequent economic demise, however, has shown otherwise.

 

Japan, suggested Tamamoto, has never understood modernity’s ‘master’ model or liberalism, which could, possibly, be a solution to the current demise. There have been champions of Japanese liberalism in the past such as Fukuzawa Yukichi in the 19th century, he remarked, going on to say that liberalism is often misinterpreted in Japan as being about individualism whereas it is about creating a liberal society tolerant of openness, dissent, debate and moral autonomy. Japan is witnessing a growth in the number of people dropping out of society as they are not allowed to veer from the well-trodden path. Tamamoto contended that this would happen less in a more open society.

 

It would be wrong, suggested Tamamoto, to assume that the Japanese public recently voted out the Liberal Democratic Party in search of a more liberal society. They were thrown out, affirmed Tamamoto, because they have messed things up over the past 20 years and have destroyed what most Japanese hanker for, ie., a life of security and minute rules and regulations. The Democratic Party (DPJ) of Japan won’t be able to deliver this, posited Tamamoto, as it is very costly and cannot be afforded given the Japanese demographic time bomb.

 

Tamamoto finished by wondering whether the DPJ under Hatoyama will be able to undo some of the restricting centralisation forged in the Meiji Period.

 

A series of questions and comments followed the presentations, including how insurmountable the barriers to greater Asian cultural and economic integration are, the issue of ‘creative destruction’, the fact that Japan and China are good trading partners, the issue of bucking Japan’s population decline through immigration or incentives to increase the birth rate, the absence of NGOs in Japan and the importance of learning foreign languages.

 

Professor David Cope concluded the proceedings by thanking the speakers on having provided a veritable feast orchestrated by some brilliant chairing.

 

‘Japan’s Open Future: An Agenda for Global Citizenship’ by John Haffner, Tomas Casas I Klett and Jean-Pierre Lehmann was published by Anthem Press in 2009.

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