Japan's Political Sclerosis
R. Taggart Murphy , International New York Times , DEC. 12, 2014
這位美國投資銀行家,是布魯金斯智庫學者，現任日本大學教授。以下是 他對安倍勝選的觀察。他警告的是：日本政治體制的氣脈堵塞不通，其肌理組織又僵化了。 那才是長遠的危機。他分析：日本政府否認二戰之行為，主要來自美國的撐腰。
林中斌 2014年12月19日
TOKYO — THE Japanese have a term for hopelessness — shikata ga nai, “it can’t be helped.” Acceptance of things as they are is deeply embedded in the culture. It also explains why voters are so listless, and even despairing, in the run-up to the national election on Sunday.Japan is in a recession. The popularity of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been in power for all but four years since 1955, is plummeting. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called an early election to pre-empt the coalescing of an opposition that could threaten his party’s control of Parliament.
Mr. Abe says he wants to revive the long-stagnant economy, but his policies have been anything but clear. The government has pumped credit into the economy to raise inflation, weaken the yen and help exporters, but as a result, households have less purchasing power. It has borrowed heavily to finance infrastructure and other stimulus projects, but it has also raised the national sales tax, which sent the economy into a downturn. It wants to make it easier for companies to lay off employees, but it hasn’t found a new way to offer them the economic security they have long expected.
Voters are so dispirited that turnout could be at a record low. Yet the Liberal Democratic Party is expected to hold on — an unfortunate outcome for Japan.
Mr. Abe’s real objectives go beyond reviving the economy. He has moved to stack the leadership of NHK, the state broadcaster, with nationalist supporters. In flagrant violation of the pacifist Constitution, his cabinet decreed that Japan’s military would participate in “collective defense measures” overseas. His government is intent on rewriting the nation’s history of wartime atrocities.
These measures are unpopular, but Japanese voters have been apathetic toward them. A big reason is Japan’s history with the United States. For nearly 70 years, Japanese elites have been convinced that America was an essential bulwark against, first, Soviet Communism, and now an expansionist China. American meddling has hindered the development of a progressive political vision and helped the Liberal Democratic Party stay in power.
Japan’s economic problems result in part from the breakdown of the postwar social compact. To appease restive workers in the 1950s and ’60s, successive governments, including one led by Mr. Abe’s grandfather Nobosuke Kishi, persuaded corporations to guarantee job security.
For 25 years, this arrangement worked. With meticulous attention to quality, an undervalued currency and comparatively low costs for labor, financing, transportation and supplies, Japanese companies took market share from Western competitors.
But once Japan clawed its way to the cutting edge of industrial development, it couldn’t figure out what to do next — a particular danger in a risk-averse culture. The authorities first tried to focus on investments rather than exports; the result was a property and financial mania, followed by a crash in the early 1990s. The economy at last began to revive during the 2001-06 administration of Junichiro Koizumi, thanks largely to demand from Chinese industrialists for Japanese equipment. Then came the global financial crisis, which made clear once and for all that Japanese companies could no longer provide for people’s economic security. The labor agreements of the postwar decades, when lots of young workers were willing to trade modest paychecks today for economic security tomorrow, are no longer tenable.
The Democratic Party of Japan, now in opposition, won a landslide victory in 2009 by proposing to replace lavish public works spending with a strong, Scandinavian-style social safety net that would, in turn, stimulate private consumption. Sadly, three events destroyed the D.P.J. government. The first was a plan to move a United States Marine base in Okinawa to a less populated part of the island (instead of moving it off the island altogether). The second was a proposed sales-tax increase, favored by the powerful Finance Ministry, which can bully prime ministers into submission. The third was the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, which destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
In 2012, the D.P.J. was voted out. Mr. Abe came in and carried out the sales-tax increase, against economists’ advice.
Culture doesn’t explain everything, but the Japanese reluctance to acknowledge contradictions — to act as if everything were the way it should be, even when it isn’t — helps explain the stasis of recent decades. The sense of living in a world where things happen for inexplicable reasons — in which the most one can do is adapt as best one can, while giving one’s all — is pervasive.
An Abe victory could mean reduced pension benefits, more regressive taxes, more public spending that benefits the corporate and bureaucratic oligarchy, and more poorly paid temporary work. The men who seek to carry out this program will not cackle with glee like Wall Street bankers; they will bow low with long faces, persuaded that they are participating in a general sacrifice over which they have no choice.
And they are likely to get away with it because millions of Japanese will shrug their shoulders at the sclerosis of their political system and the unremitting power of Japan’s bureaucracies and corporations. After all, it can’t be helped.
R. Taggart Murphy is a professor in the Graduate School of Business Sciences at the University of Tsukuba and the author, most recently, of “Japan and the Shackles of the Past.”
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