PERSPECTIVE ON JAPAN : ‘Empty Center’ Allows for Success : The revolving door of prime ministers has had little effect, since top decisions are made collectively by others.

At first glance, Japanese politics appears to be in total chaos. Prime ministers come and go with a frequency rivaled only by that of Italy. The Hosokawa government lasted barely six months, and the Hata government recently resigned after less than two months in office. To make matters even more complicated, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party and the left-leaning Social Democratic Party of Japan have just joined forces to elect SDPJ President Tomiichi Murayama as Japan’s 52nd prime minister. How long this arrangement will last is anybody’s guess.

Yet, as anyone who knows Japan--or who has followed the upward progress of the yen in recent weeks--will readily attest, the country continues to function at peak efficiency, despite the absence of a strong political center. Essential services--telecommunications, the transportation network, health care and education (at least at the primary level)--are still as good or better than in any other first-world country, including the United States. To be sure, Japan is still mired in a post-bubble-economy recession, and unemployment has risen sharply in recent months. But exports are up, and life goes on with few if any real disruptions, despite the daily political soap opera that has come to dominate the media.

How can this be? How can a country lacking a strong political center manage to do as well as Japan has done? It would seem to violate all of our cherished theories about how modern nation-states are supposed to work. But if one looks closely at the way the rest of Japanese society works, from neighborhood associations to business management, one finds that strong “centers” are conspicuous by their absence. What emerges is a phenomenon I call the “empty center”: the absence of strong, active leadership in the Western sense of the word.

One of the paradoxes of Japanese social organization is the clear separation between decision-making and deference. The person at the apex of a given hierarchy in this most hierarchical of nations is rarely the one who makes important decisions. Rather, those decision are made collectively by persons in the middle ranks; the person at the top, although exaggeratedly deferred to with a superabundance of deep bows, hyper-polite language and ritualized gifts, is generally expected to react rather than act. Once a decision has been arrived at in a quasi-democratic way by extensive informal consultations among the persons concerned, the “leader” simply adds his (or her) stamp of approval and announces the new policy, product, rule or whatever. The leader is thus an “empty center,” a necessary vacuum, as it were.

The Tokyo neighborhood associations I have studied, most of which are concerned with the organization and management of a local Shinto shrine festival, are prime examples of “empty-centered” systems. A decision taken a few years ago, to allow women to carry portable shrines during the festival, is a case in point. The decision was made by consultation among the members of several interlocking neighborhood associations long before it was presented to the president of the residents association. He simply acknowledged the fact and formally invited the young women to participate.

There have been, of course, some major exceptions to this rule. The first shogun, Yoritomo (1147-1199) was one; so was Hideyoshi (1536-1598), who aspired to the Chinese imperial throne. And a few modern business leaders, like Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, and Panasonic’s Konosuke Matsushita, have also been forceful leaders when the occasion demanded.

But for the most part, whether in industry, neighborhood associations or even the military, to say nothing of modern politics, the “empty center” has reigned supreme.

When all is said and done, it doesn’t matter who becomes prime minister, any more than it does who becomes emperor--perhaps the quintessential example since antiquity of a Japanese “empty center.” Thus the hierarchies continue to consult and to make collective decisions, and the system not only survives but prospers. As long as somebody occupies the central bench in the Diet, Japan will continue to thrive.