Political Economy of Japan - Essay Example

As many theorists have already pointed out, Japan's economic development has not been simply because of the adaptation and import of the liberal logic from the West. There has been a subtle conflict between the newly imported liberal logic and the local tradition of mercantilism. This became most evident when Japan tried to expose itself to the West at the Meiji Restoration. In order to keep tight control of the elite over people, the hegemonic class of Japan selectively hired some elements from the liberal logic and the traditional ideology1 . In terms of liberalism, the main element employed by the Meiji Japanese leaders was the idea of equal opportunity, which allegedly guaranteed that everyone could get awarded according to his/her talent. However, the elite group did not go as far as providing total individual freedom in order to achieve the unified population, which was essential for the process of catching up with the West in terms of industrial capacity as well as people's living standard. Instead of the western liberal ideas, they invented and employed some social ideas allegedly from the feudal society of Edo-tradition in order for the leaders to keep the power in their hands. This was where many of contemporary understandings of the supposed Japanese tradition were originated (Gluck 1998). The result of this mixture of the imported and historically retrieved concepts of social organization has been most obviously seen in the educational institutions. In the current educational system in Japan, which Barthes calls the "Empire of Signs", to graduate from one of the best universities directly provides a ticket to obtain a secure, well paid, and lifetime employment. In order to study at one of the best universities in Japan, one has to be trained at one of the best high schools and follow the technique of answering standardised questions, which would be likely to be asked in entrance examinations of the universities. To do so one has to be trained at one of the best junior high schools. Surprisingly this process goes down to the kindergarten level 2 . In fact, this system is prevalent, evidenced, for example, by 40 percent of medical students at Tokyo University, which is known as the most prestigious university, being from the top four private high schools (Lorriman and Kenjo 1994: 47). Many students do not care about the subjects of their study, but do the reputation of the universities, which they graduated from or are studying at. This means that the ranking becomes the most important criteria in selecting universities. Students' concern is not with what they study or what sort of knowledge they can get out of universities, but where they study, how it is socially regarded - crave for better ranks, thus better signifier. As a result, they often apply for several departments in one university (Horio 1997: 75). The Japanese education system is famous for its notorious competition among students on the basis of the market-like competition among individuals as well as educational institutions for better signifiers. This educational setting forces students to become commodities, parents to be consumers, universities to be competitive businesses, teachers to be instructors, and the curriculum to be a set of bureaucratic requirements. All of them are institutionalised and mechanised to stimulate the consumption of, and demand for, education among consumers. None of them are related to the quality, principle or ethics of education. They are exclusively concerned with their rankings and social status. Behind the logic of harsh competition among students, there is, as I mentioned above, an imported logic of liberal economics. While students compete each other, their competition will supposedly achieve the most desirable and efficient allocation of resources. More talented students will engage in more difficult and specialised jobs while the rest will work as un-skilled labour. This is supposedly the equilibrium, which maximises the economic welfare of the society as a whole. It is this moment when the Hobbesian state of nature is justified and even regarded as favourable. The ranking procedure not only forces individuals to internalise the values and norms of the nationalist/patriotic logic through the liberal economic logic, it also promotes the fragmentation of them. The students in the case of education are competitors and fighters against the rest. They have to obtain higher social reputation - in Japan's case, an enrolment in higher ranked universities and getting jobs at companies with a good reputation, means gaining a victory over the others. This prevents students from forming united movements among them, which are essential for protecting students' rights. It is rare that students organise protests and demonstration in Japanese universities for welfare of all students; If they protest against the main body of their university, students' business careers after graduation will be put in jeopardy or uncertain. This process is not simply forced to individuals, but voluntarily practiced by them in the name of consumption. While it is represented by production and reproduction of the identity of "rational economic man" in the production dimension, it is also represented by consumption of money for signs. As the production and reproduction processes individuate people, the consumption process also fragments them. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote: "Men travel on rubber tires in complete isolation from each other. The conversations in their vehicles are always identical and regulated by practical interests." The families in specific income brackets spend the same percentage on housing, movie, and cigarettes as the statistics vehicle. When visitors meet on Sundays or holidays in restaurants whose menus and rooms are identical at the different price levels, they have become increasingly similar with their increasing isolation (Adorno and Horkheimer, 221-2). This is also the case in the Japanese education. Students having obtained relatively better ranks enter high ranked universities. However, they receive more or less the same education. Despite the similarity of educational contents in different universities, the students can enjoy lives with relatively higher income and better standards after their graduation. This fragments and isolates students, and many of them get spoiled and start to think that their lives have been already set at the first year of their university period. Production and consumption become the forces of totalisation and fragmentation in this way. The dialectics of globalisation in this context occurred not simply because of the end of the Cold War, but also, and more importantly, because of the embedded liberal logic of economics in society, and of modernity of signs, which is most evidently reified in the educational institutions. It is because of the permission to exploit neo-liberal economics issued to the hegemonic class, and because of the linguistic process in which signifiers determine the nature of the signifieds. In terms of Japanese social hierarchy, the most problematic dimension to its stability is the decreasing birth rate and the aging population. Now the growth rate of population is slowing down, and it is estimated that the growth rate will go down to, or at least close to, zero by the year 2015. At the same time, however, the percentage of the older population (over 65) in the total population will increase from 7.9 per cent in 1975 to 18 per cent in 2015 (Minami 1986: 426). This creates an extremely difficult problem for the Japanese economy. Signs in the social structure are mainly articulated for men, in other words signifiers are specifically producing and reproducing the society for men as signifieds. This signification processes has not been counting women as potential bearer of ranks in the game. This supposedly requires women to be transformed into some sort of masculine form in order to take part in the men's game for signs and ranks. Women's reaction to this domination of signs has been somehow unexpected, however. Rather than simply jumping into the game of signs, they have started an unorganised revolutionary and silent counter movement by stopping reproducing the population. This is now choking the game of signs as the entire logic of the game was unintentionally taking for granted women's reproduction process of the population. In other words, it was relying on the patriarchal social condition. Women have been excluded from the group of signified in the competition for ranks, and they have been defined with "bodies" while men have "minds" in the signification structure of sex. If the ranking game of signs is entirely a mind game, and also a game for knowledge, then those who are assigned "bodies" are often neglected and marginalised. Women have been largely given a peripheral existence in Japanese political economy too. They were seen as mere housewives or marginal workers who hardly contribute to the market. Because they have not been regarded as participants in market, they have not been supposed to be carriers of signs in the logic of economics. They have never been regarded as main agents or having managerial potential. Despite the recent introduction of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), women's social condition or status have never shown a drastic change. They have been regarded as peripheral members even in trade unions. On some occasions of industrial relations, when women participate in market activities, they become the main targets of business exploitation, to be controlled and tamed by the rational minds (see for example, Shimizu 1998: chapter 6). Women are supposedly less unionised, and their salaries are made lower than men because of the ranks they are assigned according to patriarchal perception embedded in the current structure of signs. Where the society functions according to the market of signs, female workers' promotion is slower than men because of lower signifiers, bodies, they are forced to carry. In order to get over it, women are forced to work harder than men in order to gain equivalent signs to them. This business condition unintentionally resulted in the imposition of two choices for women who have the desire to get promoted and to have children. Firstly whether to give up bearing children in order to work longer than men, or secondly simply to quit their jobs to give birth and give up their careers. The result has been that many women have given up bearing children and have continued to pursue their careers. This is the cause of the decreasing birth rate. However, the choice women have consciously made was not the one the hegemonic class prefered. The smaller population Japan has, the fewer labourers there are in the market. This is a simple logic. Because of the nationalist orientation of the hegemonic class, opening the labour market to foreign workers is not on the list of their possible policies. Under this circumstance, the only possible choice they can make is simply to encourage women to have children. There have been several attempts made by the hegemonic class in this regard, none of them were successful. As a result, the birth rate in 1998 is as low as 1.38, which was the lowest in the Japanese history. The decline in the birth rate has direct influence on educational institutions, especially on universities. The fewer students registered in a university, the more budget constraint the university has to bear. Logic underlying the declining birth rate is, however, not as simply as this. As the main financial resource of private universities is the examination fee for entrance examination, the impact on university budget is multiplied. This is because there used to be a significant number of students who took several university exams in order to make sure they can get at least one ticket to some universities under tough competition, but there are fewer and fewer students of this sort due mainly to the less competitive character of the recent entrance examination. In some universities cases, they do not even have to take the exams to register. What they are supposed to do is simply to take an interview, by which almost no one will fail. To attract students, universities are now changing their curriculum. Whether it is getting better or worse, education in Japan cannot be able to stay the same as it has been in the past. In order to do so, they listen to students' opinions and demands in some case. In this sense, university education may be said to be moving towards more democratic direction at least under some circumstances 3 . Indeed, it is possible to see the tendency of totalisation and fragmentation of globalisation as having been mainly driven by the prevalence of liberal political economic narrative and patriotic logic. Educational institutions supporting the idea of "global citizens" reinforce and encourage the idea of the borderless world, while they force students to be altruistic in order for their home country. This results in liberal political economic hegemony that, in turn, supports the free market ideology and successive profits of MNCs, at the same time its engenders localised particularism. Here the educational institutions utilise the modern technique of ranking in order to force students internalise the prevailing norms and values In the case of Japanese education, ranking procedure is very important. By ranking students, the hegemonic power in Japan has succeeded in letting students internalise the norms of the prevailing social hierarchy of its tradition. This in turn resulted in problems in schools cause by those who refused to compromise for the norms. They are regarded as deviants and anomalies, which should be disciplined. However, the marginalised people sometimes organised movements of resistance, and gave tremendous impact on Japanese society. Women's silent resistance, stopping bearing babies, is probably the best example. Japanese women's resistance has not been explicit or direct, but it has been very subtle and gradual. This movement is now causing a structural problem, which the Japanese economy found extremely difficult to deal with. It is a new type of movement in a sense it is very subtle and unnoticeable. Its impact on the ruling class is extraordinary. I believe this is a new development for the study of political economy, of which the traditional approaches have been mainly concerned only with explicit forms of power relations. 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