Japan: From ‘80s Avarice to Holy Poverty in the ‘90s

Japan at bay. This phrase has not credibly passed American lips in more than 40 years. Such has been the impact on American consciousness of Japan’s bold postwar rise to economic ascendancy in the Pacific.

Even U.S. critics of Asia’s economic superpower greet the suggestion of Japanese failure with skepticism, and rightly so. After two years of bitter recession, Japan’s trade surplus with the rest of the globe stood at $120.4 billion in 1993.

Yet, the sense of an ending in Japan is strong and palpable. The air in Tokyo, the dynamo of the national economy, is tinged with a distinct weariness. The most depressed pundits have seized on shrinking markets for consumer durables and falling grocery prices as evidence not of market liberalization, but of a general deflation such as Japan has not experienced since the 1940s.

But the real change may be even more radical: History may be forcing the Japanese elite to abandon its century-old ambition to overtake Europe and the United States ( O-bei ni oikose ) and to discard the philosophy of national sacrifice that has underwritten its drive for supremacy. The policies and institutions of Japanese economic nationalism--protected markets, producer cartels, lifetime employment and consumer subsidies to industry--are being called into unprecedented question, not by foreigners, but by the Japanese themselves.

The urgent cries for Japan to curb the powers of the bureaucracy and business cartels to encourage price competition have spawned an influential literature. This includes Akio Morita’s famous essay, “Japanese-Style Management Is in Trouble”; Professor Muneyuki Shindo’s book-long assault on that panoply of bureaucratic powers that travels under the name of “administrative guidance” ( gyosei shido ), and the economist Ryuichiro Tachi’s demand that his country abandon the nationalist “Japanese model” in favor of the “Anglo-American model” of unrestricted market forces.

The bursting of Japan’s economic bubble has given new prestige to people such as Kenichi Ohmae, the business guru, who leads that country’s small army of important advocates of economic deregulation. The proposals for reform set out in his “Riso no Kuni” (Ideal or Admired Country), which has sold 60,000 copies since last spring, are debated with a seriousness undreamed of even two years ago.

But having been marched to the brink, the Japanese people are still refusing to take the plunge. Ohmae’s ideas are so out of step with conventional Japanese nationalism and business common-sense that it has taken a recession of unprecedented severity to force this extraordinarily rich and successful nation to entertain the vision of Japan reborn. It should be recalled that a similar vision animated the postwar labors of Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur, the American shogun who presided over the last attempt to alter Japan’s national essence.

The simple fact is that many Japanese remain unconvinced that their country needs to be “normalized” to better conform to Anglo-American political and economic ideals. Japan is changing not because most Japanese have come to regard Adam Smith’s free-market theory as sensible or desirable, but because they recognize the force of an irresistible global trend toward freer markets. Necessity, not reason, is at work here.

Caught in a crisis of confidence, Japan is grasping after old certainties. Japanese intellectuals and writers are brushing the cobwebs off the refined language of premodern cultural idealism. One of the most remarkable manifestations of the new mood is Koji Nakano’s “The Idea of Holy Poverty” ( Seihin no Shiso ). This hardback book, with its celebrations of visionary tea masters and parables on the venerables ancients of Japanese literary and religious tradition, appeared in late 1992. More than 600,000 copies have been sold. “Holy poverty”--not destitution but the simple life--has become a precept of post-bubble Japan.

Indeed, the expression has pricked the conscience of a public contrite from the greedy excesses of the 1980s. The Buddhist and Confucian verities have come back to haunt a nation that temporarily abandoned its rooted suspicion that to accumulate riches is to deprive others, that overreaching materialism is always linked to power, and power to corruption.

In contrast to the temptations and dishonor that attend great wealth, “holy poverty” forms part of the moral axis of Japanese sensibility: the imperatives of purity, self-sacrifice and all restraints on egotistic assertiveness.

Whatever the pain inflicted on Japan by the bursting of the bubble, there has been a profound sense of satisfaction, especially among the older generation, at the current troubles of those who profited most from ‘80s avarice. The new psychology is reflected less in systemic political or economic metamorphosis than in a Buddhist bonfire of the vanities. But Japan always makes a fresh start by first rebalancing the scales of the psyche.