A Whale of a Tale: Hatoyama’s 'New' Japan

When the factory ship of a Japanese whaling fleet collided with and sank the Ady Gil early in January 2010, radical conservationists cried not only ‘foul’ but ‘attempted murder’. The Japanese countered with claims of harassment on the high seas, including attempts to foul propellers, and that the activists were armed and dangerous. Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s call for mutual restraint drew from Tokyo ‘the toughest public stance a Japanese government has taken towards Australia on … [any] issue—in recent times’, and was ‘highly unusual in singling out for criticism a senior member of a friendly government’. Shortly after the seas yielded up grizzly evidence of earlier Japanese naval action, when the torpedoed hull of AHS Centaur was located, an Australian hospital ship whose war-time sinking in May 1943 claimed 268 lives. A week later it was reported that major U.S. marine detachments might be redeployed from Okinawa, where they were no longer welcome, to tropical north Queensland. By mid-January normally placid relations with Australia’s most important trading partner were suddenly tense. Were these incidents minor, and of little consequence to the overall relationship, as Canberra claimed? Or were there indications here of more fundamental changes, which the new governing coalition in Tokyo has promised to usher in, that might have a direct bearing on Australia’s future?

For decades Japan has offered abundant evidence of being a stable, prosperous, well-organised nation state, committed to peaceful international action and disinclined to countenance radical political departures at home. Yet despite gleaming, futuristic structures and a technologically savvy workforce, all was not well. Since the bursting of its bubble economy in the late 1980s the country has seemed to many observers directionless. Reforms faltered, and society at large appeared content to drift until the 2008-2009 world-wide recession brought home the precariousness of its export-dominated economy. Japan’s GDP suffered an annualised contraction of 11.7%, the highest among industrialised nations, and this shock was accompanied by record levels of unemployment. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party asked for more time to allow its emergency measures to take effect. The verdict of voters was a resounding ‘no’ to the LDP which, after more than five decades in power, was widely viewed as corrupt, moribund and intellectually bankrupt. The Japanese electorate chose in late August 2009 a largely unknown opposition, much as Australians did the untried Labour Party of Gough Whitlam late in 1972. They and the world awaited with trepidation the outcome.

The current situation is too recent to have produced an iconic representation, but a strong visual analogy exists in the well-known painting ‘Quo vadis?’ of 1949. In it Noboru Kitawaki reiterated the timeless classical question of ‘where are you going?’ to his generation and the nation as a whole. Pictorially Japan has been reduced to a blank, featureless plain. The foreground is dominated by an anonymous man with his back turned to the viewer. A sack of possessions hangs over his right shoulder, a solid book is clasped under his left arm. To his right is a diminutive but blank signpost. To his left lies a similarly enigmatic, conch-like shell. His gaze seems fixed on a distant column of miniscule people, devoid of discernible origins and goals. Conjecturally the toneless emptiness is a commentary on the failed policies of a discredited regime, while apparently the destitute viewer and distant multitude are forlorn survivors who, in unforeseeable ways, must rewrite and reanimate their world.

Today Kitawaki’s canvas has lost surprisingly little of its relevance. Once again Japan finds itself confronting the need for epochal change and acutely uncertain about its prospects. Whereas the victory of Barack Obama and his mantra of change were greeted with great optimism at home and abroad, the post-election mood in Tokyo was noticeably subdued, at times almost pessimistic, in comparison, and has remained so. Are the problems faced by the coalition headed by the Democratic Party of Japan so much greater and intractable? Or does this more low key, muted reaction arise from far different political, social and personal circumstances? The answer lies, in part, in the enigmatic book clutched under the arm of Kitawaki’s Everyman. It arguably alludes to traditional behaviour, practices and learning, all of which will have an important bearing on any efforts to achieve substantive change.

One obvious cause for scepticism is the intransigence of Japan’s powerful elites. Irrespective of ballot outcomes, government tends to remain in the hands of political dynasties, and there are unsettling signs of kinship between the dominant parties. For instance the new Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, is the grandson of an illustrious prime minister, former Prime Minister Aso enjoyed a similar pedigree, and one of the most warmly debated topics in 2009 concerned whether parliamentary positions could be inherited by the children of incumbents. Numerous are the sitting members for whom politics is an established family profession, while a number of key players in the DPJ, including Hatoyama and its former leader, Ichiro Ozawa, served their political apprenticeship in the LDP and are currently embroiled in donation scandals—dampening hopes of a decisive break with the political corruption of the past.

In addition, dreams of reform are held in check by an entrenched bureaucracy, responsible for shaping legislation and the practical business of governing, which Hatoyama has vowed to rein in. His promise ignited a pre-election rush to fill key bureaucratic posts, and provide sinecures for the party faithful, a practice dubbed ‘amakudari’, or ‘descent from heaven’. Symbolically the new government began by halting the construction of a massive dam (a favourite LDP form of pork-barrelling), and threatened to undo a last-minute senior appointment to the consumer affairs agency by the outgoing Aso regime. But who will ultimately prevail, a coalition inexperienced in the realities of government, or career bureaucrats, who present themselves as proof against natural disasters from typhoons and earthquakes to political landslides?

A less tangible but no less decisive factor serving as a brake on radical change is the Japanese people, who pride themselves on homogeneity—of race, behaviour and mindset. Their socialisation encourages conformity, group identity and a collective ethos to an extent unimaginable in Western societies. Idiosyncrasy is strictly for the private, not the public sphere; unsanctioned manifestations of independence are not welcomed. Australians acknowledge their tall poppy syndrome; Japanese recite how the tall, protruding nail is infallibly hammered down. The ‘hammering’ is sometimes more subtle than the metaphor suggests. Whereas the motto of Dickens’ archetypal bureaucrats, the Barnacles in Little Dorrit, was ‘It’s nobody’s fault’, in Japan the opposite is true. There an individual’s actions are also the responsibility of the person’s family and/or work-group. When a prominent rock star was found naked and intoxicated in a public park early in 2009, not only was he called upon to apologise publically and profusely for his actions, but so was his entire band, which had been in no way involved in the incident. Similarly, I myself, a foreigner holding a year-long appointment in Australian Studies at Tokyo University, was warned that my actions would not be regarded as an individual matter, but seen as a reflection on the position and impact directly on those who later held the post. Reprisals, in short, would be exacted. Not only you but others will pay—a situation which hardly encourages spontaneous initiatives or deviation from the norm.

Further impediments to change are the familiar Japanese fear of failure, or loss of face, and its corollary: a dread of taking individual responsibility. Failure, which in the West is often regarded as a necessary complement of risk-taking and a spur to perseverance, carries a heavy stigma in Japan, where forgiveness is not readily granted. There it is usually far easier—and safer—to submit to standard procedures rather than to question them, as a banal incident illustrates. A visiting academic reported having raised a storm in a small specialist library by moving one chair away from the three aligned before three computer terminals, designated for catalogue reference only, and by using it at a nearby terminal that was without a chair. At the time he was the only patron in this much under-utilised centre, and well known to the librarian on duty. Normally a model of courtesy and consideration, on this occasion she first expressed consternation, then escalating alarm at his action. When the academic smiled at the notion of returning the chair immediately to its original place so it could be used by non-existent patrons, the librarian in a panicked frenzy literally tore it from under him and returned it to its place. There it remained empty for the rest of the day. How was this out-of-character reaction to be explained? On reflection we agreed that she was probably motivated by fear of being held personally responsible for his contravention. Time-honoured rules trumped a common sense solution and were tenaciously defended. Similar anecdotes are legion, and reveal not only a preponderance of red-tape, but also what often appears to the uninitiated to be stunning inflexibility, obscure reasoning and byzantine decision-making processes.

Overall Japanese society is risk adverse, looks to the state for security and solutions, and readily accepts high levels of policing and control. Opinion polls routinely find strong demand for increased surveillance cameras, while safety fences, intended to regulate crossings or screen off citizens from putative harm, are often carried to extraordinary lengths. Where ten metres of enforced corralling might do, the Japanese will employ hundreds, or in the case of the satellite settlement in which I lived, kilometres of metre-high, mesh metal walls or bars to regulate exactly where inhabitants may cross from their high-rise buildings to the neighbouring forest or farm land. Also pre-election opinion polls recorded an overwhelming preference for a grand coalition of the two major parties, headed by the DPJ. There is little public support for a program of deregulation and market- or dynamic entrepreneurial-led growth, advocated by overseas economists, and likely to produce a ‘forest’ of irregular, unpredictable ‘nails’—a prospect profoundly antithetical to Japan’s consensus-driven, group ethos. Meanwhile more than a decade of falling incomes and eroding certainties, together with the DPJ’s vague promises of reform in place of a concrete agenda, have not led to false optimism.

Nevertheless, acquiescence in a thoroughly conventional and comprehensively regulated external life need not preclude quirky behaviour or thinking outside the square. Even the ever poised and elegantly tailored Hatoyama, so self-evidently a scion of wealth and privileged breeding, has qualities that have earned him the nickname ‘space alien’. These range from a propensity for nebulous, feel-good formulations, such as ‘politics is love’, to a baffling capacity for assuming diverse personae. ‘He can be a Buddhist yesterday, a Muslim today and a Catholic tomorrow’, reported one university friend. He can claim both a Stanford doctorate in engineering and a ‘vinyl single, “Take Heart—Tobitate Heiwa-no-Tri-yo” (“Fly, Dove of Peace”), recorded in 1988 when Hatoyama was elected to the Diet’. Similarly, his equally immaculate spouse, Miyuki, is a former member of ‘an all-female musical troupe’, and claims not only to have travelled to Venus in a spacecraft, but also to have met Tom Cruise ‘in another life’. It is a risky business to over-determine or write off such individuals, or for that matter Japanese society as a whole.

Where to, then, with post-election Japan? Already the Hatoyama government has signalled major reappraisals of domestic and foreign policy, taken important initiatives in global forums, and proposed seminal realignments within Asia. The wish to have the United States relocate forces currently based on Okinawa is one sign of this more independent stance, another the firm official response which Gillard’s comments on clashes between whalers and activists drew forth. Equally significant is Hatoyama’s avowed ‘political philosophy’, which is centred on the Japanese people, their traditions and group identity. They voted, he claimed immediately after the August 30 election, ‘to end the old politics of bureaucratic control and special interests in favor of true popular sovereignty, equal opportunity and a fairer and warmer politics’. Here familiar Western concepts are used with a distinctively Japanese inflection, and the knowledge that Japan, repeatedly in its history, has demonstrated an astonishing capacity for creative assimilation and radical transformation, especially when the nation, directed by dedicated elites, has been united in a common purpose. The cultural high-points associated with the ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto testify to its strength, as do the industrial and technological revolutions of the Meiji era, and the late twentieth century. Where Hatoyama’s efforts will lead is at present unclear. But if he succeeds in mobilising this formidable potential, prodigious changes to the uneasy, Kitawaki-like landscape of contemporary Japan must be reckoned with, while Canberra will have to prepare itself for a more assertive ally as well as for further unexpected, and perhaps unprecedented, ‘waves’ in what it regards as Australian home waters.