MITI and the Japanese miracle

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Before proceeding to sketch the qualities of these types of analysis, let me say that to a certain extent I can agree with all of them. My interest is not in disputing the facts that they have revealed nor in questioning their relevance to the miracle. However, I believe it can be shown that many of them should be reduced to more basic categories of analysis, particularly to the effects of state policy, and that they need to be weighed according to standards different from those used in the past, thereby giving greater weight to the state and its industrial policy.

The national-character explanation argues that the economic miracle occurred because the Japanese possess a unique, culturally derived capacity to cooperate with each other. This capacity to cooperate reveals itself in many wayslower crime rates than in other, less homogeneous societies; subordination of the individual to the group; intense group loyalties and patriotism; and, last but not least, economic performance. The most important contribution of the culture to economic life is said to be Japan's famous "consensus," meaning virtual agreement among government, ruling political party, leaders of industry, and people on the primacy of economic objectives for the society as a wholeand on the means to obtain those objectives. Some of the terms invented to refer to this cultural capability of the Japanese are "rolling consensus,"

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''private collectivism,"

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"inbred collectivism,"

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"spiderless cobweb,"

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and "Japan, Inc."

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My reservations about the value of this explanation are basically that it is overgeneralized and tends to cut off rather than advance serious research. Consensus and group solidarity have been important in Japan's economic growth, but they are less likely to derive from the basic values of the Japanese than from what Ruth Benedict once called Japan's "situational" motivations: late development, lack of resources, the need to trade, balance of payments constraints, and so forth.

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Positing some "special capacity to cooperate" as an irreducible Japanese cultural trait leads inquiry away from the question of

why

Japanese cooperate when they do (they did not cooperate during almost half of the period under study here), and away from the probability that this cooperation can be, and on occasion has been, quite deliberately engineered by the government and others. David Titus's research into the use of the Imperial institution in prewar Japan to "privatize" rather than to "socialize" societal conflict is one creative way to look at this problem of consensus.

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Many instances to be discussed later in this study illustrate how the government has consciously induced cooperation among its clientswith much better results than during the Pacific War, when it sought to control them. In the final analysis it is indeed probable that Jap-