emperor and yakuza

HOME ABOUT SUBSCRIBE ARCHIVE CONTRIBUTORS SEARCH Search archive YOUR ACCOUNT BACK TO NLR 8, MAR APR 2001 PDF BERTELL OLLMAN WHY DOES THE EMPEROR NEED THE YAKUZA? Prolegomenon to a Marxist Theory of the Japanese State On june 5, 1999, a junior high school principal in Osaka was stabbed and seriously injured by a member of the yakuza, Japan’s mafia. He had refused to raise the hinomaru—the Rising Sun flag—or allow the kimigayo anthem (‘Let the Emperor Rule Forever’) to be sung at the graduation ceremony. In February, the principal of a high school near Hiroshima had been driven to suicide: conflicting pressures from the Ministry of Education, ordering the use of song and flag, and from his own teachers, urging him to stand firm, had proved unendurable. A show of respect for the national symbols was made mandatory in Japanese schools in 1989, but it is only in the last two years that it has been seriously enforced. What is going on here? And why has a seemingly minor cultural dispute blown up into such a major political controversy, with such dire, even fatal, consequences for some of its participants? It is an odd controversy, for while those who oppose the compulsory use of flag and anthem have not hesitated to give their reasons—chiefly, their close association with pre-1945 militarism and imperialism—the government, though responding to most criticisms, has been strangely silent about what led them to precipitate this crisis in the first place. What did they hope to achieve? Why is it so important to them? And why now? The one-sided character of this exchange, and its overheated style, have led many foreign observers to put it all down to Japanese exoticism. But mysteries, even Japanese ones, generally have explanations. My attempt to unravel this political mystery will seek an explanation for the government’s actions in a Marxist analysis of the distinctive requirements of Japan’s capitalist state. II The Japanese state has never been easy to understand. In the thirteenth century, for example, Japan was ruled by an emperor who was, in reality, the puppet of a retired emperor and his courtiers, who in turn responded to the orders of a military dictator, or shogun, who was himself completely under the control of his regent. Even today, the play of mirrors continues to deflect direct empirical inquiry. Can the Marxist theory of the state help to elucidate what one of the best books on this subject has reluctantly come to view as the ‘enigma’ of Japanese power?footnote1 The typical Marxist critique of the state in capitalist democracies plays down the role of the bureaucracy, treating the government as the chief instrument of the capitalist class. It generally considers only overtly political institutions to be parts of the state, and views demo­cratic forms and practices, such as constitutions and free elections, as the main sources of legitimation. This approach serves quite well for most capitalist democracies, but in the case of Japan it is grossly inadequate in five important respects. Firstly, the elected government here is extremely weak. Secondly, the higher state bureaucracy dominates both the elected government and the corporate sector. Third, a large number of top positions in government and business are held by retired bureaucrats. Fourthly, many essential state-political functions are performed by what appear to be non-state bodies; and finally, the main legitimating agent for the state, for its form and for its actions, is the emperor system—a hangover from Japan’s feudal past. There is no dispute on the first point, though the weakness of the elected government never ceases to shock on first encounter. As Walter Mondale noted, shortly after assuming his post as US Ambassador to Japan, ‘In the Diet, when you see bureaucrats also participating in the debates, answering questions, preparing amendments, preparing the budgets, you realize that this is a society in which the publicly elected side is very limited’.footnote2 As a US Senator, Mondale had had a personal staff fifty-strong to provide him with the information and expertise he needed to be an effective legislator; a member of the House of Representatives would have about twenty-five. His equivalent in Japan has a staff of one or two, Cabinet ministers only a few more. Where an incoming American president appoints several hundred high-ranking civil servants, owing their first loyalty to him, an incoming Japanese prime minister appoints a few dozen. Lacking the means to arrive at well-informed positions, it is not surprising that weekly Cabinet meetings last scarcely fifteen minutes and consist mainly of rubber-stamping what in-house bureaucrats have already decreed. Only once since 1955 has the Diet amended the budget the civil service presents, while the rapid prime ministerial turnover (on average, one every two years; ministers, one per year) also contributes to an elected government that is more shadow than substance. In the crisis following Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo’s stroke in early April 2000, it was a civil servant, Chief Cabinet Secretary Aoki Mikio, who stepped into the breach as acting prime minister—and who seems to have played a decisive role in choosing Mori Yoshiro to succeed. In the past, teaching courses on the Soviet Union, I devoted a whole month to the Communist Party and just a week to the Supreme Soviet and Council of Ministers (who may not have deserved even that). The case of Japan is not so different, although here the ultimate source of power is the higher state bureaucracy: the upper echelons of the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI) and the State Bank. Some have questioned how this could be, given the fact that the civil service in Japan is less than half the size of its counterparts in Western capitalist countries, but this only shows that its considerable power is more concentrated, less diluted by checks and balances of various sorts. The Ministry of Finance’s zaito—a separate fund, made up from the Post Office savings deposits and public pension assets—for example, is two-thirds the size of the official government budget, and is used solely at the Ministry’s discretion. A comparison might be useful: Japanese bureaucrats are not formal advisors to top politicians, don’t move freely between administration and politics, or run for elected office while retaining their posts, as in France. They do not sit in Parliament, as they do in Germany, or serve on presidential commissions, as in the US. Japan’s leading bureaucrats don’t need to do these things to influence the government because, in effect, they are the government. III The bureaucrats’ stranglehold over politicians is matched by their domination of the business community. The high degree of interdependence between private and governmental activities in Japan is well known. But the bureaucracy’s role goes far beyond supplying legislation, capital and expertise; it serves as the planning arm for the capitalist class as a whole, developing strategies and setting priorities for all sectors of the economy. It is they, and not the owners of industry or their much-touted managers and workers, who are primarily responsible for what Japan, Inc. is today. Rather than simply tell businessmen what to do, Japan’s ministries have perfected the old mafia tactic of making people an offer they can’t refuse; they call it ‘administrative guidance’. Should individual businessmen prove recalcitrant, the bureaucrats have a battery of means, ranging from new laws and regulations to licences, subsidies, loans and tax benefits, to exact compliance; but it is not usually necessary to carry out such threats. In fact, there are probably fewer conflicts between the ministries and the business world than there are between different civil-service sectors. Part of the enigma, then, is why capitalists cooperate with the state as fully as they do. Some have suggested that the higher civil service in other capitalist countries—France, for instance—exercises similar power over their private sectors, but this is to miss an important difference in kind as well as degree. With the elected government effectively neutralized, Japan’s leading bureaucrats simply have no rivals as their country’s chief economic enforcers and strategists. This easy acquiescence of Japanese businessmen to ‘administrative guidance’ goes back to the origins of capitalism in Japan. The section of lower samurai who came to power with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 established profitable business monopolies, then sold them at a pittance to a privileged few, mainly from their own clans. It was privatization rather than capital accumulation that gave Japan its first zaibatsus, or business empires. In Western Europe—broadly speaking—capitalists came before capitalism, which, in turn, preceded the capitalist state. Japan reversed this process. Hurrying to catch up with the technolo­gical and military achievements of the overbearing foreigners who had forced them to open their ports to trade, the new state created capitalists rather as the feudal state in Europe had created barons and knights.footnote3 From the very beginning, the Japanese state did all it could to protect its economic offspring and ensure their prosperity and growth. How could the latter not ‘cooperate’? The hostile international business environment in which late-starting Japanese capitalists were operating, and their increasing dependence on foreign sources for raw materials, only strengthened the ‘team’ approach to resolving economic problems, and their reliance on the strategic leadership of the state. As if this weren’t enough to ensure business compliance (they prefer to call it ‘consensus’), the minist­ries also play a key role in top-level private-sector promotions. Many of the banks come to MITI with a short list from which the latter will choose their CEO. There have been sporadic attempts by prime ministers and major corporate owners to reduce their dependence, especially in recent years; but little seems to have changed. The bureaucracy’s continuing control over Japan’s economic and political life poses a major theoretical question about the relations between top civil servants, heads of corporations and banks, and government leaders. It is not an empirical problem, for the main facts, as we have seen, are well known. Rather, it is a conceptual one. If the bureaucracy does indeed dominate the other two groups, in what sense can we speak of a ruling capitalist class? And if the capitalists don’t rule, in what sense can we speak of capitalism? IV An answer is suggested by another well-known fact. After they retire—usually between the ages of 45 and 55—a large number of top bureaucrats take up leading positions in business and, to a lesser extent, in politics. In Japan, where people remain active until quite late in life, that gives them another twenty years or so to pursue their new careers. This is the third major feature that distinguishes Japan from the rest of the capitalist world, with the possible exception of France. The practice is so widespread that the Japanese have a word for it: amakudari, or ‘descent from heaven’ (though the landing—should anyone worry—is invariably very soft). Today, there are several thousand upper-echelon ex-bureaucrats serving as presidents, chairmen, directors and managers of companies, banks, business associations and public corporations—usually in the same field in which they had earlier laboured as agents of the state.footnote4 This is the elite of the Japanese business community. In the US, the Department of Defence probably holds the record for placing retired bureaucrats in the private sector, but their main role is to win government contracts for their new employer; hardly ever does the fledgling businessman become CEO. To appreciate the importance of this difference, we should add that the managers and directors of Japanese corporations have considerably more power in relation to their stockholders than do their counterparts in the US. This is the result of the large amount of cross-shareholding between Japanese corporations, and of their having a much lower equity-to-debt ratio (and therefore being less dependent for their capital on public offerings) than American companies. The bureaucratic elite’s influence on corporations is thus less hampered by market forces than in the US. And the corporation manager most responsible for heeding ‘administrative guidance’ is likely to be a former bureaucrat himself, often from the very ministry now ‘guiding’ him. The situation in politics is only slightly less incestuous: the majority of all Japanese prime ministers and Cabinet ministers since the War have come to politics by the bureaucratic route (though the number of exceptions has increased somewhat since 1980). Again, with the partial exception of France, nothing like this exists, on this scale, anywhere else in the world. A major effect of amakudari is that most of Japan’s leading bureaucrats benefit directly and personally, if not immediately, from Japanese capitalism’s success. The widespread and systematic character of this mid-life career change means they also know that the decisions they make as civil servants will determine their future private-sector ‘posting’ and the fortune that comes with it. Where the transition from state functionary to capitalist is so well known beforehand, the interests of the capitalists also become the interests of the bureaucrats. Meanwhile, knowing the trajectory of today’s top bureaucrats, Japan’s leading businessmen can be confident that the decisions made in the state sector will be to their advantage.footnote5 V If so many of Japan’s leading capitalists are former bureaucrats, and most of its leading bureaucrats future capitalists, it seems to make as much sense to view them as members of the same class—separated only by a temporary division of labour—than as members of different classes. The same reasoning would include the ex-bureaucrats now in elected government, who also benefit enormously from big-business largesse. The common educational background of these three groups, their frequent intermarriage and high degree of organized socializing (in ‘friendship societies’ which bring top officials together with their retired predecessors, most of whom hold leading positions in the same area in the private sector), also point to this shared identity. In 1993, for example, 88 per cent of the Ministry of Finance elite came from the University of Tokyo, chiefly its Law School.footnote6 Karel van Wolferen has argued that the top bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians form one ruling class, which he calls the ‘class of administrators’.footnote7 While this label highlights the bureaucracy’s extraordinary role as an incubator of future capitalists and politicians, it occludes the common pro-business pattern emerging from the activities of these formally separate institutions, and the shared interests and purposes that underlie them. Taking all this into account, a more apt name for these people is ‘capitalists’.footnote8 The state’s apparent domination over the capitalist class—often cited as a reason for the inapplicability of Marxist analysis to Japan—takes on an altogether different meaning when the boundaries between classes are re-set in this way. According to Marx, capitalists are those who embody and carry out the dictates of capital, understood as self-expanding value, or wealth used with the aim of creating more of itself (the contrast is with wealth used to satisfy need, serve God, expand civil or military power, or to obtain glory or status). With capital, wealth becomes self-centered and concerned only with its own growth. Those who control wealth, use it to this end, and benefit personally from the process (whether or not they are the legal owners of the means of production) belong to the same collective capitalist class. In Japan, some capitalists work in what are formally state institutions, and others in formally private ones—though, as we have seen, most of the leading members of this class divide their lives between the two. The essential thing is that they all function as embodiments of capital, serving its (and, consequently, their own) best interests in whatever way their current positions allow. Other countries, of course, have had capitalists who become high civil servants, major politicians, or both, without ever ceasing to be capitalists. The outstanding example is Nelson Rockefeller, who was a capitalist, an ambassador and a vice-president. But most such figures, the exceptions in their countries, begin as owners of corporate wealth. In Japan, where this career pattern is much more widespread, corporate wealth generally comes later. The qualities that distinguish one as a member of a class can, after all, be acquired over time. Class membership can evolve, like classes themselves. One can join by stages. In Japan, the process of becoming a capitalist begins, for most, with entry into the major ministries. To say that Japan’s top bureaucrats belong to the capitalist class does not mean that we can no longer distinguish them as that part of the class which functions (at present) in the state bureaucracy. But we now have a clearer sense of what they are doing there, and why; and why they receive the degree of compliance from both corporate and governmental leaders that they do. We can also better understand why private-sector capitalists sometimes perform governmental tasks—Nomura Securities drafting the legislation that was supposed to restrict its own behaviour, for instance—without blowing a mental fuse in the way that we think about public and private worlds. The boundary between capitalists in and out of state service is just not as clear or rigid as their institutional forms of power would have us believe.footnote9 The aim of Marxist class analysis is not to arrive at some ahistorical classificatory scheme where no one and nothing moves, but to explain the real workings and dynamics of whole societies. This allows for—even requires—a certain flexibility in drawing and redrawing class lines. In order to capture the distinctive character of Japanese capitalism, I would argue that the notion of ‘capitalist class’ needs to be extended in this way. There are good reasons for the rest of the capitalist class to allow those currently working in the state ministries to take initiatives on their behalf: the latter have the requisite expertise, the best overview and the clearest focus on the interests of the class as a whole. Their view is not compromised by the needs of a particular industry or corporation (as happens with managers and directors) or by those of a party or faction (as happens with government leaders). Freed from such temporary and partial distractions, the bureaucrats are in the best position to serve the general, long-term interests of Japanese capital, and to mediate between rival ruling-class factions when need be. (From its role as mediator, it may appear as if the state is neutral, if one doesn’t notice that it is always a faction of the same class that comes out on top.) The capitalist state excels at concealing its true role on behalf of its class, and while this has been documented again and again, the connexion is always being made as if for the very first time. To hold it fast, we need to develop the appropriate categories of thought and, for the peculiar case of Japan, I would propose the category ‘collective capitalist’. In this light, Japan is still a shogunate; but rather than a military figure, the shogun today is the collective capitalist, with its time divided between bureaucratic, business and governmental functions. The samurai who made the Meiji Revolution chose to reinvent themselves as capitalist rulers, rather than simply taking over feudal powers, as after earlier successful revolts. But before they could do so, they had to create capitalism and a capitalist class of which they could be part. Their success in establishing this new social formation and embedding themselves at the core of its ruling class was undoubtedly one of the greatest feats of social engineering in human history. In most fundamental respects, and despite all the changes brought on by World War II, Japan continues to operate inside the mould cast by these founding fathers. VI The fourth major feature that distinguishes Japan from other capitalist democracies is the number of core state-political functions performed by what appear to be non-state bodies. This practice is not, of course, confined to Japan; but, again, it is the scale and importance of the Japanese usage that need to be explained. To do so, we must first understand what it is that states do. It is not enough to know that they are the prime loci of political power; we also need to know how and for what this power is used. In all societies based on a social division of labour, the class or bloc of classes which control the surplus need society-wide help to legitimate the means by which it has been extracted, and to repress those who refuse to go along. Repression and legitimation, then, are essential tasks of every state. In addition to these, a capitalist ruling class requires two further kinds of assistance, given the way that wealth is produced and distributed in this epoch. The first is with the accumulation of capital, which involves securing the conditions—social, legal and so forth—that underlie the exploitation of workers and the production of a surplus, and creating profitable investment opportunities where they otherwise wouldn’t exist. The second form of assistance needed is with the realization of value, which is a matter of finding, establishing and defending markets in order to make sure that what is produced gets sold. These are the four core functions—repression, legitimation, accumulation and realization—that any capitalist state needs to perform in order for its ruling capitalist class to be able to survive. Failure to provide them would mean that the capitalists would no longer be able to reproduce the conditions responsible for their very existence as a class. If these, then, are the core functions of the state in capitalist society, it is possible to view any body which performs any one of them as being part of that state. The state, here, is simply the aggregate of these bodies; and if some of them also engage in non-political activities, then they are both parts of the state and also part of something else. What is crucial to Marx’s theory of the state, after all, is not this or that quality of political institutions, or their power, or even the privileged position of one class, but rather the relation of all these to the requirements of the specific social and economic system in which they are located. The procedure moves from the whole inward. Thus the first thing to establish is the nature of the whole. Marx describes the state as ‘the active, conscious and official expression of the present structure of society’; and, elsewhere, as ‘the form of organization which the bourgeoisie necessarily adopts both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests’.footnote10 The state can be viewed both as a dimension of the whole—that is, of capitalism—but also as an aspect of the capitalist class, as something which this class does. The first takes us into the realm of ‘capital logic’ (which relates structures to processes inside a historically specific whole); the second, into the realm of capitalists’ class interests (which connects people’s place inside these structures with their activities). Together they represent the objective and subjective sides of the same complex relation. What the state does, therefore, as well as the specific forms through which it does it, are internally related to what the ruling class is and what its interests require. It is in this sense that Marx considered the state to be a ‘dictatorship’ of the ruling class in all class societies, whatever their degree of democratic content. This should not be understood instrumentally—with the suggestion of arbitrariness and of an external relation between a state and its ruling class—but expressively: the state is the set of institutional forms through which a ruling class relates to the rest of society, part of what it means for this ruling class to rule. It is, in other words, an essential feature of the class itself. To approach the parts of the state from the vantage point of the whole allows us to see beyond their ideological self-presentations. We can recog­nize that in Japan it is not the elected government which governs, that democracy doesn’t give citizens power, that administrators don’t simply administer; and that overtly political institutions perform only some of the political work. It also gives us the flexibility to redraw the boundaries of what is ordinarily taken as the state to include other institutions and groups that perform essential political tasks. Ask a practising economist to define the boundaries of the firm and she will give one answer today and another tomorrow, when she is working on a different problem: it is the problem itself that defines where the boundaries lie. The same is true for the state: its boundaries, too, will vary as the problems confronting it change, and as the means available to it alter. The state remains, as in the popular view, the repository of ultimate social power, but it doesn’t have to comprise the same set of institutions in every society; nor need these institutions be fixed, or single-purpose. Nor do the various elements of the state all need to be housed under one roof, either functionally or conceptually. Indeed, there are often practical advantages for the ruling class in organizing them another way. Since the elected government in Japan is so weak and the top-level bureaucrats unelected, the Japanese state has been forced to incorporate a number of other bodies in order to perform all the functions required of it. Among the more important of these are the major business associations—often run by ex-civil servants—which participate in economic planning and coordination, helping with the accumulation of capital and the realization of value. (The chairman of one of these, Keidenren, is popularly referred to as the First Minister of business.) Another is the US government, whose armed forces still occupy over 150 bases on the archipelago and which, colonial style, retains the legal right to quell internal disorder. A third key element is the emperor system, which, as we shall see, plays a crucial role in legitimatizing the social order. Still other elements are the major media, educational institutions and foundations, religious organizations, Rengo, the main trade union and, as I will argue, organized crime: the yakuza. There should be no difficulty in viewing this strange amalgam—along with the elected government, the courts, police, armed forces and, of course, the civil service—as the Japanese state, if we understand the latter to include all the bodies that perform essential political tasks for the ruling class. This doesn’t rule out recognizing that there are major differences and disputes between these various bodies (and, indeed, within each one); or that one of them, the bureaucracy, possesses by far the greatest influence; or even that subaltern classes can occasionally use this disarray to score minor victories in some of the state’s more distant outposts. This wide distribution of political power has led to the complaint that the Japanese state is plagued by an absence of accountability; but where a state has served its ruling class so successfully, the absence of a clear centre to which representations can be made, and against which pressure can be brought, should perhaps be viewed as one of its major strengths. VII What emerges most clearly from this collection of political oddities—the exceptionally weak elected government, the extraordinarily powerful higher civil service in symbiotic relationship with the capitalist class, and the distribution of essential political functions among many apparently non-political bodies—is that the Japanese state is in dire need of legitimation, of a clear and compelling reason why one should obey the state even if one disagrees with its policies. Without such a reason, no amount of military and economic power can secure a state against the possibility of being overturned. Under feudalism, it was perfectly clear that the state belonged to the ruling social and economic class; but, operating under one or another version of the divine right of kings theory, people generally accepted that this was the way it was supposed to be. The capitalist ruling class enjoys the same relation to the state but, unable to make the same appeal to religion, it is much harder for them to have their interests equated with the general interest. For the state to serve capitalists’ interests effectively under these conditions requires the appearance of independence and neutrality, and is usually achieved by hiving off political from economic functions, and getting the former performed by non-capitalists. But when the class that benefits most from capitalism also makes and administers the rules by which they benefit (as distinct from the state’s simply being heavily influenced by capitalists, or following an objective logic inherent in capital), the biased character of these rules stands out in sharp relief. Typically, capitalists have succeeded in displacing a feudal aristocracy as the ruling class where their state appears to be independent of all class ties. In Japan—where leading state functionaries who are simultaneously capitalists make the major economic decisions—this process is very incomplete. While this may help to explain the Japanese state’s ability to act in such a decisive manner on behalf of the capitalist class, it also accounts for its greater vulnerability to fundamental criticism and its outsized need for effective legitimation. In the US, the three main sources of political legitimation are the constitution, democratic elections (such as they are) and, to a certain extent, the office of the presidency, the main locus and symbol of national unity and power. Most Americans accept the right of their political authorities to rule because they have chosen them, both by adopting the constitution and through voting, especially in presidential elections.footnote11 These sources of legitimation are not available to the Japanese state, where the constitution was drafted by nameless foreigners and forced upon the country after its wartime defeat, and where elections, though technically ‘free’, bring to office a government that practically everyone knows has very little power.footnote12 The Japanese state must find its legitimation elsewhere; and it does. In part, the rule of the bureaucracy is legitimated through the widespread belief that the top civil servants are simply the smartest people around and that they do their best to serve the national interest. The state’s success in helping to build a prosperous economy was also a legitimating factor, until economic stagnation set in. Arguably, the postwar polity’s reflection of American democracy, still popular among many Japanese, lends some legitimacy to the political order. The media, schools, big trade unions and religious institutions also add their bit by playing up the team aspects of Japanese life and pretending there is no legitimation problem to be resolved. But even given the cumulative effect of all this, there remains a very large legitimation deficit. Enter the emperor system (and our fifth point). VIII Japan, though formally a democracy, is mainly governed by a small group of people whom no one has elected and whose decisions chiefly benefit their own class. To the extent that the Japanese people know this, and most do to one degree or another, why do they accept it? The usual answer is that this is what the Japanese are like—culturally, psychologically, or both. But this is to introduce as the main explanation that which itself must be explained. Where does this element of Japanese culture or psyche come from? Who benefits from it? How does it work? And how do those who benefit manipulate it to help them deal with their most pressing problems? Without refusing either culture or psychology a place in the total explanation (or, it should be added, accepting a particular version of them), these questions redirect our attention to the rational dimension of our inquiry, to the kind of account people give (or could give) as to why they willingly obey the established authority. Japan’s rulers never had a popular mandate. That’s why the shoguns, Japan’s traditional military rulers, retained the more popular emperor as figurehead. After the Meiji revolution in 1868—carried out by elements of the lower samurai from only one section of the country—the need for legitimation was especially severe. No less important at the time was the need to unite the nation in a common front against the latest exactions from the West, particularly the US. Solidifying the ties between the Japanese people and the emperor must have seemed the ideal solution to both problems. The new rulers of Japan began by bringing the emperor from Kyoto to Tokyo, the centre of government, and proceeded to issue all their proclamations in his name. They reinvigorated a largely dormant Shinto religion, adding divine stature to the emperor’s already popular role as ‘father of the people’. Then, in 1873 they promulgated the doctrine of kokutai (‘national essence’), which asserted that the emperor embodied in his person the will of the nation. Thus, he knew what the Japanese people needed, what was good for them and how they should live. The new political arrangements drawn up by the government were presented as a gift from the emperor, a manifestation of his perfect wisdom and benevolence, for which people were expected to be eternally grateful and loyal. All criticism of kokutai was made illegal, and it became the centrepiece of education, both in schools and in the military. There is little evidence that the emperor had been viewed as such a benevolent figure before the ‘national essence’ doctrine was declared, or that people had reacted to his supposed benevolence with the same fervent gratitude that they subsequently expressed. (So much for essentialist cultural or psychological explanations of Japanese exceptionalism.) With state Shintoism and kokutai firmly in place, the legitimation of Japan’s real rulers was secured for almost a century. In 1945, with Japan’s defeat in World War II, all this was supposed to have come to an end. Under General MacArthur’s direction, Emperor Hirohito announced in his 1946 New Year’s address to the Japanese people that he was not a living deity and that the War had been a tragic mistake.footnote13 At a stroke, two mainstays of the emperor’s hold on the Japanese people—his divinity and his infallibility in matters of public interest—disappeared. The emperor was not given any political role in the new constitution, where he is only mentioned as a ‘symbol of the Japanese state and of the unity of the people’. The role itself is said to derive ‘from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign political power’—although unnamed bureaucrats succeeded in rendering the term ‘will’ here as ‘integration’ in the Japanese translation.footnote14 As a result of these developments, most students of postwar Japanese politics have treated the emperor as a simple anachronism, less important even than the British monarch. (Unlike his British counterpart, for example, he plays no role in appointing ambassadors and has no right to see state papers; nor does legislation require his seal.) I consider this to be a major misunderstanding. In my view, the emperor remains the Japanese state’s main source of legitimation. Despite all formal changes to his status, he continues to do for Japanese capitalism what the constitution and free elections cannot do, and what the other sources of legitimation mentioned above can only partly achieve. How he does this is also rather unique. As titular head and most striking symbol of the Japanese nation, the emperor is in a position to get people to accept existing political arrangements and their biased outcomes by eliciting a transfer of sentiments: shifting the loyalty people feel toward their social community (to which they belong as members of an ethnic group), on to the political community, or the state (to which they belong as citizens and members of different social classes).footnote15 By presenting the emperor as standing astride both of these communities, Japan’s rulers hope to conflate the two in the popular mind, to confuse, in effect, that which has constituted the Japanese as a people with the form of rule that has been constituted over them; and to get them to react to the latter in ways evoked by the former. The emperor achieves this remarkable feat not by anything he says or does, but simply by virtue of what he is (or is taken to be), and through the importance that the Japanese attach to their relation to him. Once he assumes his position as head of state—the actual title used is less important than the nature of the connexion that is conveyed; hence the relative unimportance of the actual wording in the constitution—it requires but a small shift in focus to mistake the state for the political embodiment of the social community, the necessary means by which it acts upon the world. In which case, citizenship in the state merely formalizes the rights and duties that each individual already possesses as a member of the ethnic community.footnote16 The Chinese character for ‘state’ used in Japan means ‘family of the country’, which suggests that the state is a natural rather than an artificial construct, and puts the head of state in the position of the father of the family. To enforce this link, the father’s special role in the family is even mentioned in the Japanese constitution. An emperor, of course, is in a better position to make use of this analogy than a president would be. The US president, for example, may attempt to project a fatherly image, but his partisanship and impermanence make it impossible to present him as everybody’s father, or to pretend that all members of the national family are of equal concern to him. The Chinese character employed for ‘bureaucracy’ would also seem to indicate the importance of the emperor’s legitimating role. It originally meant ‘to serve the emperor or heaven’, with the emperor also standing for the people. Today it is the latter which the bureaucracy is supposed to serve. The total and public acquiescence to bureaucratic rule by the emperor, still viewed by many as a kind of father (with all the fairness and benevolence that this conveys) is easily misconstrued as an assurance that the top civil servants are doing a good job for everyone, and not just for the privileged few. No other royal family can point to origins as ancient as those of the Japanese emperor. As the ‘father’ of the Japanese people, in a relation that is presumed to go back over 2,000 years, he does not need constitutional endorsement to exercise the influence attributed to him here. Since the kind of obedience he exacts can never be taken, only offered, it may even be that the lack of formal power actually helps him in this. When the ancient Spartan king, Lycurgus, wanted his people to adopt a new constitution, his first move was to abdicate, so that his subjects would not be constrained to accept his new law. Only then, he believed, would it be possible to obtain their unqualified support. Similarly, the emperor’s influence on people’s sense of who they are and how they are related to the state could only be as profound as it is because he has no apparent means to impose his will. From his position above the political fray, without any responsibility for governmental legislation and lacking any power to enforce his own views (should he have any), the emperor has been distilled into a spirit of pure concern for the well-being of the Japanese people. This was not always the case. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the emperor’s admission that he was neither infallible nor divine, together with the spread of anti-militarist, egalitarian and republican ideas (particularly in the schools), made it very hard for him to resume his pre-war role as chief legitimator for the established order. The postwar political turbulence had many causes, but one that has not received the attention it deserves was the inability of the regime to obtain the legitimacy it required without the help traditionally supplied by the emperor system. Japan’s bureaucratic rulers worked hard to re-establish the authority of the emperor in whatever ways they could, given the relation of class forces at the time. The main aim was to bring people to think of the emperor once again as head of state. This involved frequent attempts—in violation of the constitution—to have the emperor act in this role on ceremonial occasions, and pressure on schools to introduce more traditional teaching about the imperial system into their programme. It is only in this context that we can make sense of the importance Japan’s nominally democratic government attaches to having students sing a national anthem that presents the country as still under the rule of the emperor. Have I made too much of the emperor in my account of Japanese politics? Many, if not most modern Japanese, after all, will say they are indifferent to him. I consider this claim suspect, however, especially if made to foreigners. Most Japanese will also say that they don’t believe in Shintoism, but many of them will recite a Shinto prayer before building an office or a house. Religious conviction may have waned in Japan, but superstition of all kinds is alive and well. Even if practically no one considers the emperor divine these days, his status as father of the Japanese people is reasonably secure; and given the strong sense of ethnic identity that still prevails in Japan, this is more than enough for him to perform his role as chief legitimator of the state. IX It is not an easy task to re-establish an irrational tradition in an increasingly rational world, especially when people are still very aware of the high price they paid for following it in the past. The Japanese regime’s first line of defence against criticism of the emperor system is utter contumely and, when possible, refusal to even acknowledge it. There was a procedural crisis recently in the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly when a Communist Party deputy referred to the ‘brutal tenno [emperor] system’ in a speech on Japan’s role in the Second World War. This resulted in a five-day halt in legislative business as the conservative majority tried to get him to withdraw the ‘insulting remark’ and apologize. He refused, and in the end the Speaker simply deleted the offensive words from the minutes. The second and, undoubtedly, more effective line of defence is outright repression. It helps enormously if those inclined to criticize the imperial tradition are afraid to do so. In Japan, the task of frightening them is carried out by the yakuza , who threaten, beat up and even kill anyone who publicly opposes the emperor system. The yakuza member who stabbed the junior high school principal for failing to raise the Rising Sun flag and have the ‘Let the Emperor Rule Forever’ anthem sung at graduation was only too pleased to give his motive: ‘I want all the Japanese people to respect the hinomaru and the kimigayo. If I killed the principal, and this were reported in the mass media, it would serve as a warning to those organizations which oppose the hinomaru flag being hoisted and the kimigayo song being sung in the schools’.footnote17 Who can doubt that this message, and others like it, have had their effect? This is not something any official governmental agency could do: not as systematically and therefore not as efficiently—not as long, anyway, as the state pretended to be a democracy. Government involvement would also make it appear that the emperor, as putative head of state, was in some way connected with extra-legal violence, detracting from his presumed neutrality (to say nothing of his benevolence). But the yakuza, with its well-known conception of honour and its many ties to the far right in Japan, can carry out this task in such a way that the government escapes most of the blame. The great latitude the yakuza enjoys in repressing critics of the emperor, and the remarkable freedom with which it conducts its more traditional criminal activities, would not be possible without active governmental approval. They argue for a more functional conception of the yakuza’s role in Japanese society than is usually offered. Given their heavy involvement in the construction industry, the extraordinarily high government spending on public works (currently higher than the US defence budget) might also be viewed as partial payment to the yakuza for services rendered.footnote18 The yakuza’s ties to the state go back to the late nineteenth century, when they did strong-arm work for local conservative politicians, controlled labour unrest and served as spies and assassins for the government (going so far as to murder the Queen of Korea in an incident that triggered off a war with that country in 1895). The close collaboration between the yakuza and the new bureaucratic rulers of Japan was no doubt facilitated by the fact that both groups emerged out of the lower samurai of the previous period. Their cooperation continued into the twentieth century, where the list of victims—often at direct government request—broadened to include communists and student radicals. During the Second World War, the yakuza helped the Japanese army to pillage occupied Manchuria and China, forcing drugs on the Chinese in a replay of British policy in the 1840s. A new era was supposed to have begun after the War, but the political role of the yakuza does not seem to have diminished. The Liberal Democratic Party which has dominated electoral politics since 1945 was largely founded with the money of Tsuji Karoku, who liked to call himself the ‘Al Capone of Japan’.footnote19 Kodama Yoshio, the LDP’s most important figure until the late seventies, also had wide-ranging yakuza connexions, as did several prime ministers and a host of their Cabinet colleagues. In 1963, a coalition of yakuza chieftains felt sufficiently concerned about the squabbling between different factions in their party to send a letter to all LDP Members of Parliament urging them to end their infighting, as it could only benefit the Left. But perhaps nothing reveals the yakuza’s close ties to the government better than a speech given by Ohno Bamboku, LDP Secretary General from 1957 until 1965, to 2,500 yakuza at a reception for Kobe’s new godfather: Politicians and those who go by the way of chivalry [yakuza] follow different occupations, but they have one thing in common, and that is their devotion to the ways of giri [obligation] and minjo [human feeling] . . . I offer my speech of congratulations hoping that you will further exert yourself in the ways of chivalry so as to make our society a better one.footnote20 If the newly revived respect for the emperor has something to do with the ‘further exertion’ of yakuza chivalry, Ohno’s congratulations will have proved well merited. In the US, it is the priestly caste of lawyers who ensure that people show the proper deference to the constitution and Supreme Court. Without this deference—aided and abetted by as much mystification as that associated with the emperor system—the constitution and the Supreme Court could not do their work of legitimation. It is only appropriate, therefore, that two-thirds of all the world’s lawyers practise in the US. In Japan, the equivalent role is played by the yakuza, which, again appropriately, is four to five times the size of the American mafia. As far as legitimation is concerned, the yakuza are Japan’s lawyers. And so far as the yakuza provides the ruling class with an important element of the repression it requires, this also qualifies it—on the criteria I have established—for inclusion as an integral part of the Japanese state. X Japan’s ruling class has been very successful in transferring its rule from one political system to another. With the exception of a handful of generals, there was no postwar purge in Japan similar to those in Germany and Italy. Many figures with appalling war records (although few, of course, could match Hirohito himself) continued to play leading roles in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, government and business—a Class A war criminal became prime minister soon after the American occupation came to a close. No wonder the Japanese government has never been able to offer a full apology for its numerous wartime atrocities, or that it feels so attached to the flag and anthem used at that time (both Germany and Italy have changed their national symbols).footnote21 Similarly, it is not surprising that the leaders of the old system should try to re-establish its essentials as soon as they had a chance. But how does one put a genie back in a bottle? The postwar settlement agreed with the American occupiers had—officially—removed the emperor from politics, abolished the army, democratized the election process, broken up the zaibatsu, given rights to trade unions, and done away with the nationalist curricula and rituals in the schools. The ruling-class response was to re-establish the prestige of the emperor as quickly as possible, with the indispensable help of the yakuza. The legitimation he offered was then used to rearrange the pieces on the board inherited from the Americans. In due time, the emperor has once again become the head of state (in all but name and, with a new constitution in the offing, even that is likely to be corrected). The ‘Self-Defence Force’ is now among the five most powerful military forces in the world. The democratic electoral process has been bypassed by leaving most power in the hands of bureaucrats. The zaibatsu have changed their name to keiretsu and are as economically dominant as ever. Most of the trade unions have become company unions, often with company managers as their presidents—with all that that implies. And, gradually but surely, the schools have been forced to adopt a more nationalist-oriented curriculum, with all the rituals and symbols that ordinarily accompany it. With the economy currently in the doldrums, however, and dissatisfaction with the worsening conditions on the rise, the state’s need to legitimate its capitalist agenda is greater than ever. Hence the intensification of the government’s efforts to bolster the emperor’s prestige in the schools and among the public generally, and the backlash this has provoked among those who rightly fear where it may lead.footnote22 Another salvo in the ‘emperor wars’ was fired by Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro on May 15, 2000, when he announced: ‘Japan is a country of kami [gods] with the tenno [emperor] as its core’, to a meeting of the Association of Shinto Shrines. This is the organization that has been trying to get all Cabinet ministers to pay official visits to the Yakasumi shrine, the burial site of many war criminals. For a prime minister, Mori’s nationalist outburst was a first. The leftist opposition parties immediately demanded a retraction and an apology. They got neither. Another sign of what lies ahead in Japanese politics was the appearance for the first time in an LDP election manifesto in June 2000 of a call to revise the Japanese constitution. Though the LDP did not specify particular reforms, no one doubts that one of the major changes would be to make the emperor official head of state; this would then serve as a springboard for nationalist propaganda of all sorts. The battle over the emperor system seems about to take centre stage in Japanese political life. The bureaucrats who negotiated the terms of surrender at the end of the Second World War clearly knew what they were doing when they adamanantly refused to allow the emperor to be tried as a war criminal and insisted that he remain on the throne, even if deprived of all constitutional authority. In saving a mayonnaise that has failed to reach the right density, one works on a small portion of it until it takes. Then one gradually incorporates the rest of the mixture into the part that has taken until all the mayonnaise has reached the desired state. The bureaucrats knew that the emperor, and only the emperor, could play the role of this redeeming part in reconstituting Japanese society, and have proceeded accordingly. XI If legitimation occupies as central a position in Japanese society as I have indicated, then the politics of delegitimization should play a far more crucial role than it has. Essentially, to delegitimize the state is to make it abundantly clear that it is run by one class, for that class: that it is a class dictatorship, and that everything else it does and says is meant to hide this fact—or, occasionally, is a compromise, forced upon one of its bodies in extremis. Delegitimization generally proceeds by two routes. In the first, the actions of the state become so harmful to other classes, and so transparent, that what needs to be hidden and rationalized away simply overwhelms the means that have been used for these purposes. Economic and political crises offer many examples of this. In the second case, the institutions that serve as the main sources of legitimacy lose their ability to perform this role. In the case of Japan, radicals both in and out of the Communist Party have been very active in trying to unmask the class biases of the capitalist state. Relatively little attention, on the other hand, has been given to undermining the authority of those forces—the emperor system chief among them—that legitimate this state in the eyes of the general public. No doubt the reasons for this are many and complex, and fear of yakuza retaliation must figure prominently among them. Still, on the basis of the analysis offered here, criticism of all the sources of legitimation, and particularly of the emperor system, should be given a higher priority than it now has. The long and careful efforts the state has devoted to reconstructing the emperor system is testimony not only to its importance for the ruling class but also to a brittleness in this legitimating authority which has not been exploited as effectively as it might. With the Japanese economy in serious doldrums and almost certain to get worse—with unemployment (4.7 per cent nationally, but 25.5 per cent for recent college graduates), bankruptcy (debts of bankrupt companies hit a postwar high in July 2000), workers’ suicides, many from loss of work (30,000 in 1998) and death from overwork (so significant that the Japanese have a special word for it, karoshi) all on the rise—the capitalists’ dependence on the emperor’s unique contribution to the status quo has never been so great. The threat is that, once people recognize they have been repeatedly lied to and manipulated, nothing will prevent large numbers of them from turning on those they worshipped just moments ago. Without the legitimation provided by the emperor system, Japan Inc. could come apart at the seams very quickly. While in no position to offer a full set of tactics for carrying out such a politics, I cannot help but note that the emperor’s tie to the yakuza only succeeds in serving the purpose of legitimation if it remains implicit and appears accidental, the result of an irrational patriotic streak in these criminals, and is not recognized as an organic requirement dictated by essential state functions. But once this tie is rendered explicit, its necessity understood, what was an advantage to the system quickly becomes a major liability. There is no place for collusion with organized crime in the neo-Confucian image of a wise and benevolent emperor. The question that Japanese radicals should encourage everyone to ask, then, is: Why does the state use the yakuza to squelch all criticisms of the emperor? Or, more sharply: Why does the emperor need the yakuza? Trying to answer this question would take people a long way down the road toward delegitimizing the capitalist state in Japan. The major debate among Japanese Marxists during the first half of the twentieth century dealt with the nature of Japanese society: was it feudal or capitalist? A great deal depended on the answer, including the kind of revolution (democratic-capitalist or socialist) that one considered necessary. The fact that the Japanese state still uses a traditional feudal institution to provide such a large part of its legitimation may suggest to some that this old debate has yet to be resolved. My own position is that Japan is clearly a capitalist society, and its state a capitalist state, albeit one that for peculiar historical reasons is able to use a major pre-capitalist form to serve one of its essential functions. The revolution that Japan needs is not a bourgeois-democratic but a socialist one, but struggling for the democratic reform of the emperor system could prove an important step in this direction. 1Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power, Tokyo 1993. 2 New York Times Magazine , 5 November 1995, p. 37. 3Though unusual, this process was not unique. Engels, for example, speaks of the Russian state of his day ‘breeding’ a capitalist class. Quoted in Pranab Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India, Oxford 1984, p. 35. 4The fact that the largest banks and corporations hire fewer ex-bureaucrats than their middle-size competitors, who need the extra clout to obtain parity in their relations with the ruling ministry, does not detract from our general point regarding the widespread practice of amakudari or the role we attribute to it. For the relevant figures, see Kent E. Calder, ‘Elites in an Equalizing Role’, Comparative Politics, July 1989, pp. 383 ff. 5Enigma of Japanese Power, p. 146. 6The supposed ‘meritocratic origins’ of the bureaucracy is an idea that founders on the high cost of good crammers—from kindergarten on—without which it is virtually impossible to enter Tokyo University. 7Enigma of Japanese Power, p. 143. 8The problem of how to characterize its ruling class is, of course, just part of the larger problem of how to characterize the Japanese system as a whole. Bill Tabb provides a list of some of the more arresting labels: ‘authoritarian pluralism’, ‘development state capitalism’, ‘laissez-faire oriented intervention’, ‘planned markets’. William K. Tabb, The Post-War Japanese System, Oxford 1995, p. 14. Given the privileged position of capital accumulation, and the exploitative relations between those who own the major means of production and those who work in them, I have no difficulty in labelling the Japanese system a capitalist one, which doesn’t keep me from recognizing its many distinctive qualities. 9Though nowhere near as developed as in Japan, the phenomenon can also be found in the US: ‘many state and local officials are becoming so deeply involved in business activities that it is difficult to tell where government ends and private business begins’, New York Times, 9 December 1985, p. 7. 10Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, New York 1975, vol. 3, p. 199; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Parts I and III, London 1938, p. 59. 11I would like at this point to spike a misunderstanding that may arise from my frequent comparisons between the Japanese and American political systems. I do not believe that the US is more democratic than Japan, only differently democratic, or—more in keeping with the tenor of my remarks—differently undemocratic. If the US has elections for posts that have real political power, Japan has more than one party, including anti-capitalist parties, participating as serious contenders (whereas Republicans and Democrats are simply two factions of the same party), and higher voter turnouts. As dictatorships of the capitalist class, American and Japanese democracies are equally biased on behalf of their ruling class and equally concerned to hide this bias. Neither can be viewed as morally superior. 12Given the peculiar origins of Japan’s constitution, it is no wonder that former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone admitted that it is a taboo (embarrassing?) subject for a large section of the political and academic communities in Japan. Daily Yomuiri, Tokyo, 5 December 1994, p. 3. 13His own role as a war criminal was, of course, studiously ignored by the Allied Military Tribunal. See Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, New York 2000. 14Louis D. Hayes, Introduction to Japanese Politics, New York 1992, pp. 282–3. 15See Marx’s important distinction between the social community—in which the division of labour establishes a mutual dependence and cooperation between all parties for the satisfaction of their needs, leading to a strong identification with other members of the community and an appreciation of their contribution to one’s own well-being; and the political community—in which one class, pursuing its own narrow interests, exercises power over everyone else. Marx calls the latter an ‘illusory community’: unlike the former, it neither belongs to everybody nor serves them equally. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, pp. 74–5. 16Regrettably, for all too many Japanese, it also follows that non-ethnic Japanese can never become full citizens (witness the discrimination against Koreans who have lived in Japan for generations), and that ethnic Japanese who have become citizens of other countries are traitors to their ‘race’. 17 18There is, of course, an ultra-nationalist right in Japan that exists apart from the yakuza, but the overlap between the two is far greater than that found in other countries; the yakuza are simply so much more than a bigger version of the mafia. For the astonishing figures on the construction industry, see Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, Armonk, NY 1996, p. 33. 19David Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: the Explosive Account of Japan’s Criminal Underworld, New York 1986, p. 67. 20Yakuza, p. 82. 21Nor has the American government apologized for its wartime atrocities in atom-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and fire-bombing Tokyo. Unfortunately, most of those who have rightly criticized Japan for its moral obtuseness have given scant attention to this same fault on the part of the US. 22See Gavan McCormack, ‘Japan’s Houdini’, NLR 7, Jan–Feb 2001. Brian Barry, ‘The Muddles of Multiculturalism’ Christopher Prendergast, ‘Negotiating World Literature’ ABOUT CONTACT SUBSCRIBE SUBMISSIONS HISTORY PRIVACY ACCESSIBILITY © New Left Review Ltd 2020 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7734 8830