Harakiri nation

Hara-kiri nation
The start of the current century brought the news that Japan has posted its first ever trade deficit in more than two decades. The start of this century is markedly different from the start Japan saw in the beginning of the last century when Japan, a small Island had emerged victorious against the mighty Czarist Empire.

The Japan in the early 20-th century happened to be the most sought after country in Asia. Anti-colonial activists for example the likes of Ras Behari Bose and Subhash Chandra Bose travelled from India to Japan in order to learn from Japan the tricks that it had mastered. Japan was seen as the model upon which Asian countries, long subdued under the yoke of European colonialism, wanted to follow for achieving their dreams of becoming sovereign nations.

How far are those days of the last century to our times!!! Now Japan instead of being a model is considered as a shadow of it’s own self. The super-fast bullet trains of Japanese economic growth seemed to have been over-shadowed by those in China and India. Japan as a society is growing older very fast and the Japanese government seemed to be present in a self-imposed exile from important international events for the last six decades.

So what happened to the Japanese model after all? Why hallows of the Japanese model faded after all?

To discuss all these we need to understand the historical processes that made Japan rise as the empire of the rising sun at the beginning of the last century and then fall into sunset at the end of it.

According to historian Neil Ferguson, Japan was the first amongst the nations of the East to crack the codes of what enabled the West to make progress and modernization. The process of Westernization or modernization can be classified into two periods. First among them was the Meiji restoration period from 1868 to1945 and the post-war Japanese republic period from 1945 till our times.

The Meiji restoration period was the first of the modernization period. The Japanese elites understood the technological and military backwardness of their country when commodore Perry, a naval officer of US army had landed in Japan in 1854. This had ended a more than two-century old period of national seclusion for Japan.

The arrival of a foreign navy at Japan alerted the Japanese elites about the backwardness of themselves. To make up for their losses they had to modernize quickly and be strong so as to prevent their nation being enlisted in the list of the European colonies.

This was the beginning of the Meiji restoration period. In the previous centuries the Japanese emperor had become a puppet at the hands of some of the Tokugawa Shogunate overlords now he was restored into absolute power by the rivals of the Tokugawa clan. Japan from 1868 became an absolute monarchy whereby the empire had become the symbol of Japanese power. This was the period of Japanese empire.

Though the Japanese lagged behind their European counterparts in terms of technological progress but they had one great quality. They could learn very fast as well as apply and adopt whatever they learnt very quickly. The Japanese invited Western technocrats and began to reorient their institutions into Western styles and remold their thoughts by adopting Westernized discourses. The qualities of quick learning and quick adaptation enabled the Japanese to become one of the strongest powers in the World whose unabated rise continued till the end of the Second World War.

The Japan during the Meiji restoration period was the nation which had become a model for the rest of the Asian intellectuals and would-be freedom fighters. This followed from Japan’s rapid economic and industrial progress in the late 19-th and early 20-th century and the successful military campaigns against the Czarist Empire.

Things however began to change following Japan’s conduct in Korea and China and then in the South-East Asian nations later on. The Japanese elite of the time considered the ever-expanding Western empires as the ideal form of socio-economic system and strived to achieve a Japanese colonial realm at the expense of their fellow Asians in Korea, China and rest of the South-East Asia. The attitude of the Japanese towards their newly conquered people was not too dissimilar from their erstwhile Western colonizers.

The mass-killing of Chinese civilians in Nanjing in the 1930-s, the subsequent inhuman medical experiments that some of the Japanese scientists perpetrated upon their conquered Asian populace as well as forcing many Chinese and Korean women to become “comfort women” for the Japanese military men during the 1930-s did not help the image of Japan in the eyes of rest of Asia. Although these gruesome events did not stop freedom fighters from India and elsewhere in Asia to seek Japanese aid in their prospective freedom struggles against their European colonizers, however by the end of the Second World War the Japanese had destroyed the goodwill and warmth that fellow Asians in places like Korea, China and Indo-China used to feel for Japan.

The end of the Second World War and the subsequent military occupation of Japan by American forces, forced the leaders of Japan to embark upon their second wave of Westernization.

Unlike the previous Meiji restoration period however, this particular period of Westernization was something that the Japanese post-war leadership had to accept since they had very little choice to do anything else.

Their home Islands were all occupied by a foreign army and their emperor - the very symbol of Japan was also a prisoner at the hands of that very same foreign army and two of its biggest cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki lied in ruins. Japan had to adopt the conditions the victors were imposing on it. Thus began the second period of Japanese Westernization.

This was the period when Japan after initial years of hard work and reconstruction started to grow significantly in the end of the 1960-s and early 1970-s. This period is marked by rapid advances in technological advances and giant leaps made in terms of industrial and commercial automation in Japan. The rapid progress that Japan made once again started to make others consider seriously the economic growth model of Japan. When leaders of South Korea , China and the rest of South-East Asia decided to adopt the ways of economic modernization it was the Japan of 1970-s which was their ideal.

But like the previous phase of Westernization, this later phase also came to an abrupt end in terms of prosperity and hope for Japan. From the early 1990-s , the Japanese population growth rate had slowed down considerably thereby ensuring an ageing population and increased government burden to provide health care and support to this rapidly ageing populations. The lack of growth in terms of population ensured a fall in domestic demand which resulted in a prolonged period of stagnation for the Japanese economy.

Meanwhile due to their cheap labor advantages, the economies of first South Korea and then the South-East Asian countries like Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong etc began to rival Japan in terms of economic growth. They were quickly joined by China, the biggest and perhaps the most significant nation in the whole of North Asia. With this rising competition at abroad and a sluggish economy at home , Japan’s rising sun began to lose some of its brightness and as years went on , it ultimately passed onto decline.

During this second Westernization period, the Japanese nation as if took a self-imposed exile from the International events. When it came to important events like the cold war and the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea and in West Asia, Japan stayed on the margins depending upon others to ensure her objectives were met.

With a rapidly declining population and a stagnant economy Japan at the beginning of the 21-st century looks to have lost all the luster, and admiration, it had shown at the beginning of the previous century. The future for Japan is seemingly can be in two ways, either turning into another self-imposed long break from history as it has done so often in its past or slowly but surely turning into oblivion as an unique and distinct civilization.

Japanese society also has been showing rapid signs of decay. Even though Japan is one of the most advanced countries in the World, it is one of the leaders when it comes to suicides in the industrial World. It seems ironical that though the Japanese discarded their ancient institution of Samurai at the beginning of the last century in order to facilitate their modernization and Westernization, they still are holding to the most dramatic of the Samurai tradition i.e. the Hara-kiri. Will the land of the rising sun end this current phase of history as the Hara-kiri nation?


An Image of its idol

The most common pattern that can be traced from the two previous periods of Japanese modernizations is a yawning lack of customization on the part of Japanese elites for choosing a particular socio-economic system for their nation. In the early 19-th century Japan choose the model of rapid Westernization. The model of the modern European nation-states having large overseas colonies and interests was the ideal for the Japanese modernizing elite.

It was this attitude that the Japanese elite looked upon their fellow Asian brethren in the places like Korea, China and elsewhere as the colonial European overlords saw them. This was the same European attitude which had led to many inhuman tragedies perpetrated upon the Asian colonial subjects by their Western overlords. It was only inevitable that the same European attitudes towards their colonial subjects adopted by the Japanese elite would lead to the horrors of Nanjing and the plight of the countless “comfort women” in Asia.

Ironically the wholesale Westernization as adopted by the Japanese did not uplift their overall status in the eyes of their Western counterparts. When President Truman decided to test the horrors of the atomic bombs he choose two Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki not Rome or Berlin , two masterpieces of the Western civilization. So in the end, despite their Westernization efforts for more than half a century, Japan had to contend with the fact that to the perception of the Western statesmen, the status of the Japanese was not too dissimilar from those of the other Asians whom the Japanese used for their medical experiments during the war.

The Japanese post-World War leaders derived some other conclusions from all these. They thought they had adopted wrong aspects of Western society and they went on wholeheartedly adopting what they considered right aspects of Western society i.e. rapid individualization, technological progress and free market capitalism.

Like the previous model of imperialism, this current Western model also ensured progress for Japan till a certain time in history. But alike the previous model, the perils of the current model also has caught up with Japan and currently leading it to decline and stagnation that is on view for the last two decades.

Japan’s struggles with modernization and progress can be compared with that of China. The Chinese also adopted a non-Chinese philosophy i.e. Marxism as their governing principle but the Chinese leadership never forgot the importance of making customized changes to their system which would make it suitable considering the unique culture and history of the Chinese society. Mao Ze-dong did not imitate Stalin when he talked about “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and Deng-Xiao-Ping did not imitate the masters of Leis faire economics when he talked about “It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”

Customization did work wonders for China. China was spared the inevitable chaos and confusion at the fall of USSR and it was China which emerged from the ashes of economic devastation following the economic crisis in 2008.

China could manage to come out of these crises since the Chinese leadership was aware of the pitfalls of their adopted models and made sure that they customize their models according to the norms of their society.

This is something that the Japanese missed out to do. To them it was the model itself which was the most important and thus with their initial successes they were oblivious about the pitfalls of their ideal model.

The time for adoption is however running out for Japan to make amends to their model. But without making changes to their existing system, Japan risks oblivion from the pages of history.

There is historical precedence of a country changing its course. Turkey which has been hitherto in the pro-Western camp has started an independent course for itself following the election of the Justice and Development Party in the new millennium. Japan itself took a decision to change its course following the visit of commodore Perry in 1854.

Will the current Japanese leadership pay heed to the calls of history or will it continue its current journey towards further irrelevance and oblivion?


References

1. Daniel Gros. “The Japan Myth.” In Project Syndicate, 2011-01-06. (Online Source : http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/gros18/English)
2. E B R Desapriya*†, N Iwase*. “New trends in suicide in Japan” In Injury Prevention 2003; Page - 284–287 (Online Source : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1730993/pdf/v009p00284a.pdf)
3. XIA Liping. “The Trends of Japan's Economy And Foreign Policy” In Shanghai Institute for International Strategic Studies. (Online Source : http://www.ndu.edu/inss/symposia/pacific99/liping.html)
4. Kevin Rudd. “Tomorrow’s Pax Pacifica” In Project Syndicate 2012. (Online Source : http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rudd1/English)
5. Pierre Buhler. “The Shrinking North” In Project Syndicate 2011. (Online Source : http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/buhler4/English)