Introduction to Japanese Society, Culture, and Politics

Part I Introduction to Japanese Society, Culture, and Politics

Koichi Hasegawa and Jeffrey Broadbent

Japan occupies on an archipelago of large and small islands off the coasts of Korea and China. The total land area is smaller than the US state of California, with two-thirds of land mountainous and forested. In 2005, this area held a population of 127.8 million, mostly in dense coastal settlements. From antiquity (Jomon Period 14,000 to 400 BCE) Japanese society developed its own indigenous qualities based on hierarchical clan organization. The first strong central state (Nara period 8th century CE) adopted Chinese Buddhist and Confucianist values to codify and legitimize its regime. Its founding Seventeen Article Constitution by Prince Shotoku stressed seeking harmony through Buddhist virtue, respecting others, properly performing one’s social role and making decisions through broad discussion (De Bary 1988). Through such legitimizing documents the Yamato clan authorities sought to establish an Imperial center, pacify clan warfare, and bring the clan gods under a single religious narrative. After alternating between Imperial centralization and civil war over the ensuing centuries and fighting off foreign invasions, the Tokugawa Regime (1603–1868) finally unified the country under a centralized feudalism that again imported Chinese Confucianism to legitimize its rule. Contrary to the Chinese example of meritocratic recruitment to elite bureaucratic positions (despite exclusive dynastic families or clans), Japan set up a society-wide stratification of inherited statuses with the military aristocracy at the top. During famine periods, peasants often erupted in protest movements demand- ing better conditions under the Confucian social contract, only to be violently suppressed. According to many scholars, the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868) solidified some enduring Japanese social and cultural qualities that continue in various forms to the present day (Bellah Murakami 1984). This regime ‘‘chained off’’ (sakoku) the country from then encroaching foreign influences, intensifying an inward-looking attitude of surviving only through mutual reliance. Village society (mura) developed a strong mutual reliance system through the disci- plined collective work demanded by rice agriculture, with severe ostracism for non-conformists. The family system (ie) consisted of an extended hierarchical patriarchy that fit within the larger village society (Fukutake 1989). The 32 K. Hasegawa and J. Broadbent paternalistic hierarchy of mutual aid became a basic template for building social organization (Nakane 1970). This hierarchical social pattern militated against the development of autonomous associations and social movements in civil society even into the post-World War Two period (Sugimoto 2003; Broadbent 2003). Toward the end of the Tokugawa Period, Japanese scholars tried to identify an authentic Japanese essence apart from the foreign Buddhist and Confucian influences. This movement created an ideology of a national body (kokutai) consisting of a unified Yamato people existing under a single Imperial lineage since the time of creation (as told in Japanese mythology). This ideology implicitly criticized the rule of Tokugawa Shogun, which had long displaced the Emperor as the effective center of the society. In 1854, the black ships of US Commodore Perry’s fleet and ensuing demands shocked the Tokugawa feudal system into turmoil. In the Meiji Restoration of 1868, revolutionaries bearing the kokutai ideology overthrew the Tokugawa regime and restored the Emperor to his rightful central role. In the process, they reformed the entire social system so as to make it fit to meet the challenge from the West. This unprecedented revolution from above (Trimberger 1978) adopted Western institutions, abolished feudal privileges, freed the serfs, set up a Constitutional Monarchy ruled by a central peerage and bureaucracy under the Emperor, enacted universal education and conscription, created industrial and finance capitalism, and imported the full range of technology. Japan built up a powerful army and navy and, taking the hint from British and Dutch Imperialism, won wars against tottering Imperial China and Czarist Russia that gained it the colonies of Formosa (Taiwan) (1895) and Korea (1910). The Meiji Charter (1868), like Shotoku’s Articles, called for widespread consultation (including public deliberative assemblies), an end to feudal cus- toms, and the pursuit of new knowledge (De Bary 1988, 79). The Meiji Con- stitution (1889) provided parliamentary institutions and a limited amount of civil liberties. Pro-democracy movements managed to form an opposition political party that gained parliamentary representation and expanded free- doms to the point of universal male suffrage. Pushed by economic hardships during the Depression era, though, Japan’s military suppressed democratic politics at home, invaded China, and sparked off the Pacific side of World War Two (Maruyama 1969). After the war, the victorious American-led Allied Occupation imposed another revolution from above on Japan, intending to remake its institutions to create a peaceful, productive, and prosperous pro-American ally in the Pacific. Defeat had shattered Japanese popular faith in their Imperial system and its military leaders and left people surprisingly open to democratic reforms. The new Constitution imposed by the Allies established popular sovereignty, a liberal democracy with fundamental democratic rights, renounced the right to wage war (Article 9), and reduced the status of the Emperor to a symbol of state. It legalized unions and opposition parties, and gave women the vote. The Occupation destroyed the conservative landlord class by essentially giving the Introduction to Japanese Society, Culture, and Politics 33 land to the tillers, the vast numbers of tenant farmers. It tried to weaken the concentrated economic elite by dispersing the giant industrial conglomerates (zaibatsu). The new political opportunities allowed by the Constitution and the Occu- pation unleashed a huge wave of contrasting and sometimes conflicting popular movements. The newly formed Japan Socialist Party and also the Japan Com- munist Party, each pursuing diverse visions of a socialist future, helped organize a vast expansion of labor unions. Disastrous memories of the war, especially the horrors of the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spurred popular movements to Ban the Bomb and protests against US–Japan military coopera- tion treaties. At the same time, right wing movements organized to oppose the new Constitution and to restore the status of the Emperor as sacred Monarch. In its late 1940s Reverse Course policy, the Occupation leaders decided that the leftist union movements threatened Japan’s economic growth and allowed corporations to fire union leaders, weaken the unions, and establish more docile unions in their place. Japan’s postwar history has often been defined by its stages of economic growth: recovery from wartime devastation (1945–1954), first stage of rapid economic growth (1955–1970), second stage of rapid economic growth after absorbing sharp rises in oil process and environmental reforms (1970–1980), super boom years of Japan’s ‘‘gilded age’’ and global economic power (1980–1990), economic collapse and long recession combined with spread of information technology and internationalization (1991–2009). At the end of the postwar recovery period, faced with a growing Socialist Party, the two conservative parties came together and formed the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) (the ‘‘1955 system’’). This single conservative party controlled the national legislature (the Diet), selected the Prime Minister and decided national policies for decades. The LDP, working closely with the national government ministries and the leadership of corporatistically organized big business, formed a Ruling Triad that monopolized power, judicious compromised with rising demands, and guided the country in its rapid economic growth (Calder 1988; Broadbent 2005). During the Cold War period, the LDP’s pro-US leaders resisted right-wing attempts to roll back parts of the Constitution, but also rejected student and opposition party movements against the 1960 and 1970 US–Japan Security Treaties. Until the end of the 1960s, poor young people with nothing to lose led Japan’s social movements and NGO activities. Guided by progressive socialist ideals, they dreamt of revolution and hoped to achieve thorough-going political reform (Hasegawa 2005). The 1960s saw astonishingly rapid expansion of steel refineries, petro- chemical factories, manufacturing facilities, and fossil fuel-powered energy plants, all emitting extensive pollution into the surrounding communities. The resulting environmental devastation and illnesses spurred a huge wave of local environmental protest movements, sometimes led by activist youth who had returned to their homes (McKean 1981). The resulting political pressure forced the LDP government to make extensive reforms that substantially reduced air 34 K. Hasegawa and J. Broadbent and water pollution (Broadbent 1998). The sudden OPEC oil price rise of October 1973 brought an end to this period of high economic growth. From the middle of the 1970s, though, social movements began to diversify including feminist movements (Pharr 1982) and the media and young people became increasingly apolitical. The 1980s and 1990s youth were the blessed beneficiaries of an affluent society and the leading actors in the consumer society. The end of the Cold War around 1990 rendered the previous capitalist– socialist ideological framework obsolete in Japan. Japanese social activists lost their long-held illusions of the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries as being highly developed welfare societies. The new goal for Japan’s social movements became the building of a liberal, vibrant civil society that would counter the country’s conservative, authoritarian, and paternalistic political tradition (Schwartz and Pharr 2003). In this light, Japanese social movements rediscov- ered the United States as a country of NGOs, a land of citizen activism. A sudden disaster spurred this trend. In January 1995, Kobe, one of Japan’s most beautiful cities, was severely damaged by a strong earthquake that killed over 6,000 persons. In the face of official impotence, community members banded together to help one another. Thousands of people from all over Japan rushed to Kobe to help the victims. The effectiveness of these emergent groups to help the victims of Kobe earthquake dramatically changed old attitudes toward NGOs and NPOs among Japanese citizens, business, and government, opening the way for new legislation. The 1998 Non-Profit Organization Law finally legalized the incorporation of civil society groups promoting a wave of new NGOs and NPOs, whose activities represent the new face of citizen activism in Japan (Hasegawa 2004; Hasegawa et al. 2007). Except for a one-year gap in the early 1990s, despite increasing loss of control over the weaker Upper House (Sangiin), the LDP continued to dominate the more powerful Lower House (Shugiin) until 2009. However, recession and globalization gradually weakened the Japanese Ruling Triad and mutual-reliance system (economic and cultural governance by central ministries, lifetime employment, prevention of bankruptcies), leading to increasing popular disaffection. In the historic election of 2009, the LDP suffered a devastating defeat losing control of both houses of the Diet and ending the 1955 system. In its place, the Democratic Party of Japan assumed leadership. Japan had finally evolved into a largely two party system with both parties supporting a democratic society but differing on political positioning and policy details, conservative or relatively liberal.

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