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Japan Versus the West
The roots of Japanese impressions of the West
In 1892, the Japanese government asked British Social Darwinist, Herbert Spenser for advice on Japanese policy toward foreign powers. His reply which appears in Endymion Wilkinson's book Japan Versus the West, is as follows:
"...Apparently you are proposing...'to open the whole Empire to foreigners and foreign capital.' I regret this is a fatal policy....There should be, not only a prohibition of foreign persons to hold property in land, but also a refusal to give them leases, and a permission only to reside as annual tenants.
Spenser itemizes a list of similar prohibitions the Japanese should inact and concludes with the following: "The distribution of commodities brought to Japan from other places may be properly left to the Japanese themselves, and should be denied to foreigners."
Just over 100 years since Spenser gave this advice, the policy is only now beginning to change. However, economic reality, not trade sanctions threats over electronics and automobiles, is moving the nation's businessmen and politicians to change.
Slow progress that frustrates westerners results not from government of business footdragging. Rather, Japan's powerful bureaucray, administrator and promulgator of the policy, remains strongly in power, while Japan business and government are weakened by economic and political turmoil.
Furthermore, the Administrative Procedures Law (APL) inacted last year and effective in November 1994 may not hasten reform. Though it seeks to tear down impediments keeping market closed to outside goods, the bureaucrats the APL seek to reform are in charge of the reformation.
To understand the problem requires an explanation of the bureaucracy in Japan. Tetsuya Kataoka, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. explains that the elite of Japan's education system enter the bureaucracy.
It is a profession whose social status exceeds that of politicians and business people. The bureaucrat's popular image is of a selfless intellectual devoting his life to public service. Furthermore it is the only Japanese institution to survive World War II reformation.
Its power is deep and well entrenched and answers to no one. Prime Minister Morihiro Hosakawa made APL part of his political reform effort. He established the Keidanren to ensure it got completed. An association of corporate leaders, the Keidanren was Hosakawa business cabinet says Kataoka.
The group's members began pressuring Japan's bureaucracy to identify procedures to eliminate or streamline that would make Japan's markets more open to foreign goods and services. There are some 10,000 proceduces, many licensing powers, that should be revised or eliminated.
Why would Japanese big business want to eliminate the country's trade barriers? Kataoka says business leaders realize Japan current recession is not cyclical but rather by a structural economic defect--an unrealistically high Yen. It prices Japan's goods out of the world markets.
The solution lies in completing the political reform Hosakawa set in motion, the Prime Minister sudden fall from Grace notwithstanding. Kataoka believes the reform will go forward once a new election is called in the wake of massive parliamentary redistricting that Hosakawa administration inacted.
The West must simply be patient and allow the political process to strengthen Japan's Parliament. Kataoka says only a strong legislator can extract widespread changes in Japan's bureaucracy.
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