A paper delivered at the annual Amagi Conference devoted to the topic of Japan -50 years after the war end - also published in The Japan Times.

by Gregory Clark, Tokyo

And this is the same Japan that some used to see as Number One. What went wrong?

Not much. Japan never was the super-efficient, wellgoverned paragon of much Western imagination It has always been a rather fuddy-duddy, conservative society struggling not very bard to shake off the deeply feudal legacy from almost 300 years of Tokugawa isolation that ended little more than a century ago. What went wrong were our Western preconceptions about Japan, and. our ideas about what makes societies succeed or fail.

Japan succeeded for much the same reasons that the north European peoples succeeded. During its long period of deeply feudal isolation (full feudalism that is, as opposed to the semifeudalism found in many economically backward societies), Japan created a solid foundation of local manufacture and local administration. Feudal localism helped the Japanese develop their strong group ethic, the much-praised work ethic and the strong sense of attachment to the workplace as a basis of identity. Attention to detail, craftsmanship and basic education re other useful byproducts. What today passes as superior Japanese enterprise management is little more than a refined and somewhat democratized version of the feudal IE system - the familial business grouping developed during Tokugawa into which outsiders were recruited, trained and expected to serve loyally till retirement.

In particular, Japan gained greatly from what some more perceptive Western observers now see as crucial to the progress of the north European culture societies, namely the way in which different people thrown together directly in a work or civic activity will tend automatically to cooperate with and trust each other. It is a direct outgrowth of the feudal ethic of close and automatic association with those in one's immediate vicinity. People in older and more rationalistic civilizations require some more clearly defined attribute to serve as a reason for association - caste, class, kinship, religion etc.

Indeed, much of what we see in Japan is pre-feudal in origin. The Japanese speak freely of their mura-ishlki, or village consciousness. 'Village' attitudes go a long way to explain the tightly closed nature of the groups and what the Japanese themselves describe as the narrowness in their thinking - they see us non-Japanese as being much more far-ranging and strategic. I myself have often described Japan as tribal society without meeting any great opposition from Japanese critics*.

(FOOTNOTE: My 1977 book - Nihonjin - Yuunikusa no Gensen (The Japanese - Origins of Uniqueness) sets out this tribal thesis in detail.)

To date we have tended to see village or feudal particularism as a backward element. We see rationalism - the propensity to operate on the basis of argued principles claiming objective validity - as the key to progress. Japan suggests otherwise. Or to put it another way, rationalism has both its plusses and negatives. It allows us to create reasoned systems of economy, science, planning and government. But it also encourages scholasticism, dogmatic attitudes and disregard for the simple virtues of group cooperation and attention to detail.

Besides, the Japanese did not have to rely entirely on feudal/village particularism for their progress. They were able also to borrow the more useful products of other peoples' rationalism. From China they brought in the systems of government, law, science and ideology which allowed Japan to advance from its original clan/village society to create a sophisticated feudal society. Later they were able to absorb the products of Western civilization needed to create the industrialized nation-state. It was a very effective formula for progress.

We peoples of north European cultural origin did much the same. Like Japan, we were relatively isolated for much of our history. We combined the simple, collectivist, work-oriented values of our village/feudal past with the byproducts of a more rationalistically advanced south European civilization to create our industrial miracles and our disciplined, tightly bound nation states.

If Japan seems different from us today that is because its isolation was much longer and its feudalism much deeper. So its groupist particularism was that much stronger. Emotional and antiintellectual values still hold sway, even among the educated classes. The Japanese never felt the need for strong, absolutist ideologies its Shintoist beliefs are little more than primitive animism. With the possible exception of Germany where feudal isolation was also strong, and which until recently at least shared many Japanese qualities, the better educated classes in most north European culture societies have long embraced the more rationalistic approach of south European civilization.

But among our rural or working class populations a preference for a simpler, more collectivist approach remains. This explains why, contrary to all predictions, Japanese factory management has been so successful in non-urbanized areas of many Anglo-Saxon culture societies. Here, as in Japan, people tend naturally to see the workplace as an important source of identity. But Japanese management has been much less successful in the Sinitic culture societies of East Asia, where workers have a much less sentimental approach to the workplace.

Today many see the progress in Japan and the rest of East Asia as a result of a common Confucianist ethic. But little more than a generation ago a very different wisdom prevailed. Then, Confucianism was seen as an obstacle to growth. Japan's progress was said to be due to the fact it was the East Asian nation least touched by Confucian influence.

And the reality? The Confucian ethic does have some growthpromoting merits, As a secular ideology developed during China's feudal era more than 2,000 years ago, it places a useful emphasis on education, extended kinship relationships, obedience to superiors, civility, enlightened government. In this sense it was probably superior to many of the other and more religious ideologies developed by the rest of us on the Eurasian continent. But like all other reasoned ideologies, Confucianism also had its rationalistic faults - excessive emphasis on the principle of blood ties leading to nepotism and lack of trust towards non-kinship related people, excessive emphasis on scholarship and bureaucracy as superior activities, a preference for 'intellectual' economic activities such as trading, financing or speculation rather than construction or manufacturing.

Only in recent years, mainly under pressure from communist rivals, have the Sinitic culture societies of East Asia, including South Korea, begun to get rid of some of these faults, and expand the merits. The result is the progress we see today. But with Japan, Confucianism from the start was seen more as a useful organizational tool than as an all-wise ideology. Most of the faults could be avoided. Buddhism too was also amended and simplified to meet the more practical and emotional needs of a nonrationalistic society, in much the same way as the north Europeans amended the sophisticated but dogmatic Christianity of south Europe into a simpler and more pragmatic Protestantism.

Some have seen Japan's progress as the result of massive Western isation. Better than any of the other non-European peoples, the Japanese were supposed to have had discovered how to borrow our secrets and make them work. But the so-called Western influence was never much more than a practical realization of the need to borrow the technologies and institutions that would allow Japan to catch up with the West, combined with an emotional fascination with the trinkets of Western culture. At heart the Japanese have remained the somewhat feudalistic, emotional, practically-oriented, highly groupist people they have always been.

This in turn explains many of the problems that seem to beset Japan today. To date the plusses in Japan's approach have outweighed the minuses. But increasingly the minuses are coming to the fore. Faced with the practical problem of inventing a more compact TV or putting video technology into production the Japanese do well. But given the more abstract and theoretical problem of devising the information networks of tomorrow the Japanese are weak. But in tomorrow's world the information network will be much more important than the compact TV set.

Similarly in social organization. When it comes to specific problems like supplying basic services or keeping the trains on time, the Japanese can be admirably practical and efficient. But the same commonsense practicality failed badly when it came to the more intellectual problem of realizing the folly of the recent land and share booms. Allegedly sophisticated bankers were rushing to lend money at 8 percent interest rates to land speculators whose maximum possible return on that land rarely could exceed 1 percent. Dividend yields on shares were infinitesimal. It will be years before the Japanese economy recovers from these excesses.

True, booms and busts occur elsewhere. But with Japanese investors there was an almost mythical belief that somehow Japan was different; that the booms would last forever and that it was quite safe for grossly inflated asset values to serve as the basis for loans that allowed even further inflation of values. A little more than a generation ago Japan believed its Emperor was godlike and its nation divine. The national capacity for delusion does not disappear overnight.

Worse was to follow. For the past three years the economy has faced the very real risk of a downward demand spiral: collapsing asset values -> falling demand -> deepened recession -> greater pressure on the yen -> further recession -> further demand fall -> further collapse of asset values -> .... In this situation drastic action is needed to fill the demand gap. But the planners find all manner of specious reason to do little.