'nuff said.
Posted on 01/07/2004 12:35:24 PM PST by rmlew
No-one wants to talk about Japan these days. The conventional wisdom is that the bloom went off Japan’s economic rose around 1990 and that the utter superiority of neoliberal capitalism was vindicated by the strong performance of the American economy during the 1990s. Furthermore, everyone is now convinced that China – whose economy is 1/8 the size of Japan’s – is the rising economic power and therefore the appropriate object of attention.
But Japan is, despite everything, still one of the master keys to understanding the future of the world economy, because Japan is the clearest case study of why neoliberalism is false. Simply put, Japan has done almost everything wrong by neoliberal standards and yet is indisputably the second-richest nation in the world.
This doesn’t mean that neoliberalism is wholly meritless as an economic theory or as a development strategy, but it does mean that its claim to be the only path to prosperity has been empirically falsified. Japan’s economy is highly regulated, centrally-planned by the state, and often contemptuous of free markets. But it has thrived.
What follows is for space reasons necessarily a sketch and exceptions, subtleties, and refinements have been left out. Facts have been homogenized and caricatured to make structural fundamentals clear. But a reader who bears this in mind will not be misled, as detail analyses are available elsewhere.
Are We Lied to About Japan?
Contrary to popular opinion, Japan has been doing very well lately, despite the interests that wish to depict her as an economic mess.
The illusion of her failure is used by globalists and other neoliberals to discourage Westerners, particularly Americans, from even caring about Japan’s economic policies, let alone learning from them. It has been encouraged by the Japanese government as a way to get foreigners to stop pressing for changes in its neo-mercantilist trade policies. It has been propagated by corporate interests who gain from free-trade extremism with respect to Japan. And it is promoted by ideologues committed to the delusion that only a laissez-faire economy can prosper.
This is a formidable set of potential liars, equipped with money, technical expertise, transnational reach and state power. The Japanese government is centralized, elitist, and quite capable of fudging statistics if it wants, particularly since there are few Westerners who understand Japanese accounting. National accounting is notoriously susceptible to creative accounting anyway, as the world learned at the time of the Asian Crisis of 1998. So the assumption that the standard published figures about Japan’s economy are true is dubious at best.
Japanese culture puts a premium on maintaining “face” and other forms of polite public presentation that constitute literal falsehoods, or at least fictions, so it is a natural instinct for the Japanese to tell the West what it wants to hear about Japan’s economy. Japan’s government is heir to a Confucian tradition in which the public is told only what the rulers deem it should know. Journalists and academics, who in America or Europe would have challenged its version of the economy by now, are loyal collaborators of the system, not its critics. So from a Japanese point of view, there is nothing immoral, unusual, or terribly difficult about misrepresenting Japan’s economic performance. In fact, because it is in the national interest, it would be unpatriotic not to.
(Excerpt) Read more at btinternet.com ...
This is not what I've been hearing. I'm pinging some Japanese (and Japan-knowledgable) Freepers for input...
For example, it has seen to it that the Japanese cannot just open a brokerage account at Merrill Lynch and invest their money in the American stock market.
Merrill Lynch has offices in every major city. They have just chosen to focus on a very select and rich clientele. There are a number of security companies and banks which serve a huge range of clients. The major banks all offer accounts denominated in major world currencies, including U.S. dollars and U.K. pounds. How easy could an American walk into say, U.S. Bank, and open an account in Japanese yen? Japanese were once heavy investors in the U.S. stock markets. But who wants to invest in a currency denominated at 133 yen to the dollar (when I left) and 107 yen today?
'nuff said.
So many Japanophiles have said it before that it feels foolish to dredge up the old saw again, but Japan is a bit like an onion; peel off one layer, and you'll always find another there lying underneath.
I find myself at times at in awe of Japanese resilience, and then at others dismayed at a certain inflexibility. I heard a Japanese author once write, "Until it's necessary to change, it's important not to change."
My point is that continuity is as much a part of Japan as is change. And then even so, carving out your daily bread with your nose to the millstone there, you sometimes get to cynically thinking that there's no whipping this massive xenophobic burro onto a different path, and then --whoosh-- up she trots onto a different path with no warning at all...
Let me say this; I remember that it was when Japanese began immodestly kicking up their heels about the apparent superiority of their different breed of (non) capitalism that they began their great slide down into Davey Jones' locker. Now, it's been crawling along down there for, what? Thirteen years, now, I guess.
So in spite of our considerably less immodest national nature, let's we Americans not indulge in the same unhealthy haw-hawing. It's unbecoming, yes, but more importantly it's a damned foolish way to keep the breather that fate has afforded us.
The article above plumbs the question of whether Japan is the same critter as us or not --I could go on for hours and hours about that. Alas, some day that will seem an academic question; Japan will rise again, and soon.
With Asia changing the way that it is, I see a not so far off day when Japan will have nuclear weapons. Conisdering the clarity of Chinese national memory, I think she will have a need to use them.
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