MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 307

Japan's high-growth system was the product of one of the most painful passages to modernity any nation has ever had to endure.

It may be possible for another state to adopt Japan's priorities and its high-growth system without duplicating Japan's history, but the dangers of institutional abstraction are as great as the potential advantages. For one thing, it was the history of poverty and war in Japan that established and legitimized Japan's priorities among the people in the first place. The famous Japanese consensus, that is, the broad popular support and a willingness to work hard for economic development that have characterized the Japanese during the 1950's and 1960's, is not so much a cultural trait as a matter of hard experience and of the mobilization of a large majority of the population to support economic goals. The willingness of the Japanese to subordinate the desires of the individual to those of the group is markedly weakening as generations come on the scene who have no experience of poverty, war, and occupation. To date Japan has not faced the egalitarian problems of other states for the simple reason that all Japanese were made equally poor by the war and postwar inflation and because, for all practical purposes, it bans immigration into its social system.

The priorities of the Japanese state derive first and foremost from an assessment of Japan's situational imperatives, and are in this sense a product not of culture or social organization or insularity but of rationality. These situational imperatives include late development, a lack of natural resources, a large population, the need to trade, and the constraints of the international balance of payments. It may be possible to borrow Japan's priorities and institutions, but the situational nationalism of its people during the 1950's and 1960's is something another people would have to develop, not borrow. During the 1920's and 1930's Japan tried to solve the economic problems it faced by handing over to the state the responsibility for economic development. It goes without saying that what the state did during the 1930's made the situation worse, not better, but the fact that there may have been preferable alternatives to the ones adopted does not detract from the rationality of the priorities. The same situational imperatives still exist in Japan today, even though they have been mitigated by overseas investment, trade surpluses, diversification of markets, and so forth. Nurturing the economy has been a major priority of the Japanese state because any other course of action implied dependency, poverty, and the possible breakdown of the social system. Regardless of the drastic changes of political regime that have occurred during