Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Read online

  It was at precisely this point that Koizumi seemed to lose interest in the fight. The euphoria of the postal election turned out to be the high point of his premiership. Many expected him to use his newly won authority to push through the radical programme of deregulation and spending cuts he had so long advocated. The prime minister himself stoked expectations that he was about to embark on a Thatcherite crusade. At a press conference following his electoral landslide, he said, ‘We’ve heard the people’s voice in favour of structural reform. We will not stop, but will press on.’42 He seemed to have carte blanche to do anything he liked. Instead he spent another rather inconsequential year in office and then declined to seek re-election as party leader. His popularity meant that he could, perhaps, have stayed on for several more years. Instead, he quietly departed.

  Minoru Morita, a left-leaning political commentator, said Koizumi’s actions betrayed an intellectual shallowness. The usual view, he once told me, was that Koizumi had a grand vision but, opposed by reactionary elements within his own party, lacked the political clout to enact it. The anti-climax after Koizumi’s triumphant victory suggested exactly the reverse. ‘Koizumi has skilfully raised his popularity by waging battle against the forces of resistance,’ he said. ‘But now that he has secured power, he doesn’t know what to do with it.’43 Gerald Curtis, professor of political science at Columbia University and one of the shrewdest observers of Japanese politics, said the same. ‘Koizumi has not said what he will do after postal privatization because he doesn’t really have a clear agenda of reform,’ he said shortly after Koizumi’s electoral triumph. ‘He’s going to be scrabbling around figuring out what to do for an encore.’44

  In the event, there was no encore. Koizumi simply left the stage like a rock star with the sense to quit with his popularity at its zenith. In some ways, it was a heroic gesture worthy of a ‘kabuki premiership’ in which spectacle had been such a vital element. Koizumi retired, to enjoy Italian opera and – if the gossip magazines were to be believed – a series of younger girlfriends. Much of this was pure speculation, though one businessman who entertained him at a high-class restaurant told me with a strange precision, ‘60 per cent of the time he talked about sexy things’. Yet the truth was that, for a figure who had loomed so large in the public imagination, little was known about his private life. Koizumi kept to himself, rarely giving interviews or making public pronouncements. After a premiership of drama and impassioned rhetoric, he simply shrank from view. The rest really was silence.

  • • •

  Once Koizumi was gone his party reverted more or less to norm. Politics returned to its old, unstable ways. None of his shortlived successors had anything like his charisma, undermining the idea that the Japanese electorate would never again tolerate a colourless time-server nominated by party grandees. The public also turned against Koizumi’s neo-liberal agenda. His emphasis on light regulation and the wisdom of markets became less fashionable in the years after the 2008 Lehman crash. There was nostalgia for Koizumi the man and for Koizumi’s style of leadership, but not many people appeared to miss his policies. In particular, he was blamed for exacerbating the gap between rich and poor and creating the so-called kakusa shakai, the unequal society. His policies were said to have produced a harsher, dog-eat-dog Japan of winners and losers. Masahiko Fujiwara, the author who pined for the communitarian values of feudal Japan, criticized Koizumi for ripping the fabric of society. ‘Koizumi is reform, reform, reform,’ he told me. ‘But of course reform does not necessarily mean improvement. Sometimes it means deterioration.’45

  It is true, as we have seen, that, on some measures, the gap between rich and poor had widened, although at a probably slower pace than in many advanced countries. Still, people’s perception was of greater income inequality thanks to the introduction of merit-based pay and, especially, the decline in the number of full-time jobs. Studies showed that the Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, was not that far behind the US, a society many Japanese regarded as ferociously unequal and the antithesis of Japan’s more egalitarian values.46 In the last year of Koizumi’s term, a survey in the Nikkei newspaper showed that only 54 per cent of Japanese considered themselves middle class, with a once unthinkable 37 per cent classifying themselves as lower class. For much of the post-war period, three-quarters of Japanese had consistently described themselves as being in the middle class.47 During Koizumi’s time in office books on the phenomenon of inequality, such as Atsushi Miura’s Lower Class Society (Karyu Shakai), became bestsellers. There was also a rush of books advising people how to live on a meagre Y2 million a year, less than $20,000 at the time. ‘Many Japanese have preferred a society of equals to one where people freely compete against each other,’ said Yoshio Higuchi, a professor at Keio University. ‘Analyses that show social and economic disparities widening have shocked the people.’48

  Koizumi’s policies may have contributed marginally to the widening wealth gap. Cuts to health provision undoubtedly made life more difficult for some. A further liberalization of the labour market allowed manufacturers to hire casual staff with lower wages and benefits. There were record numbers on welfare. Koizumi also broke his party’s modus operandi of siphoning money from the cities and spreading it around the countryside. In stemming public works and clamping down on tax transfers to local governments, he may have exacerbated the already widening gap between isolated rural communities and Japan’s giant metropolises where wealth tended to concentrate. In truth, though, his policies probably didn’t make a huge difference. Mainly, he was channelling trends already in progress since the economy had slowed in the 1990s and the transition from manufacturing to knowledge-based industries had intensified. It was true that some of Koizumi’s advisers did advocate an end to what they saw as the paternalistic, ‘socialist’ policies of the past and the creation of a society where individual responsibility and hard work were better rewarded. Yet the truth was that inequality had been rising for many years before Koizumi took office. Much was the consequence of international trends, particularly the incorporation of hundreds of millions of Chinese workers into the global workforce after Beijing’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. The middle class has been squeezed all over the world. Yuriko Koike, a prominent politician who had become close to Koizumi, dismissed the idea of yawning inequality. ‘Among the capitalist societies, Japan is almost like a socialist country. The disparities in Japan are 0.01 of an inch,’ she said, holding her well-manicured thumb and forefinger in the air by way of illustration. ‘The disparities in the rest of the world, in places like Russia or China, are more like the distance between the moon and the earth.’49

  Yasuhiro Nakasone, prime minister from 1982 to 1987 and the only Japanese leader in three decades to rival Koizumi’s influence, agreed with Takenaka that Koizumi had done too little, not too much. I spoke to him shortly after Koizumi had refused to allow him to stand for re-election on the very un-Japanese grounds that he was too old. Koizumi had set an age limit of seventy-three for parliamentarians as a way of flushing out what he considered the reactionary old guard of his party. At the time, Nakasone, who had been a parliamentarian for six decades, was eighty-five. He was still fuming at the affront to his dignity and quoted me a haiku, of his own composition, on his feelings about being pushed out. (‘Everything is human theatre/The autumnal sun is now setting.’) Koizumi, he said, was a showman who lacked gravitas. ‘Reform has ended up as a mere slogan.’ Nakasone pointed to his own record of privatizing the railways, a far more meaningful endeavour, he thought, than tampering with the post office. ‘I believe that politics should focus on constitutional reform, education, social security, financial reform and diplomacy, particularly relations with other Asian countries,’ he said at the time. ‘His tendency to get sidetracked by less important projects rather than more substantial concerns facing the country has earned him criticism, which, in my view, is well-founded.’50 Nakasone was not the only critic of Koizumi
, whose reputation for grandiloquent rhetoric had earned him the nickname ‘Nato’ – short for ‘No Action, Talk Only’.

  • • •

  Like a kabuki actor, whose garish make-up and larger-than-life gestures are meant to enrapture spectators, Koizumi loved nothing more than playing to the gallery. When he wanted to privatize the road corporations, he set up a televised commission that brought to light the lavish expenditure of those opaque bodies. Critics charged that the privatization itself was a fudge. For Koizumi, though, the grand gesture of opening up wasteful spending to public scrutiny (and outrage) was the policy. It sharpened the appetite for change by engaging and energizing the public. To call Koizumi a showman was not necessarily to criticize him. It was to identify his strength as a politician.

  Takatoshi Ito, the Tokyo economics professor and a one-time government adviser, praised his leadership skills. ‘I think Koizumi was wonderful. He demonstrated what strong political leadership could achieve and how to make people rally behind him . . . I still think it was a good moment in history.’ Although Ito, like Nakasone, believed Koizumi ought to have pursued more radical change, he argued that the charismatic prime minister galvanized national morale. ‘There has been very little optimism in the past twenty years, when people finally started to believe in the recovery and saw the light at the end of a long tunnel,’ he said. ‘That kind of optimism was limited to Koizumi’s years in office.’51

  Koike, who served as Koizumi’s environment minister, also felt he had brought a sense of direction. ‘Leaders must make decisions and then convince people to do it,’ she said. ‘We are no longer in an age when we should base everything on consensus.’52 Iijima, Koizumi’s crafty political secretary, said much the same thing. ‘For the first time in decades, a prime minister has tried to assert top-down authority,’ he told me. He had also been the first to take Japan’s budget deficits seriously, he said. ‘People say a lot of things about Koizumi. That he’s not good at economy. That he doesn’t know a thing about finance or monetary policy.’ But Koizumi knew one thing, Iijima told me. ‘Japan is the most indebted country in the world. We have to stop pouring money away like this. We have to turn the tap off.’ Many, including Koike, said that what the prime minister had tried to start had been blocked, even reversed, after he left office. Ippei Takeda, a friend who ran a business in Kyoto, compared Koizumi’s agenda to a seed that had been planted but not properly nurtured.53

  In the past thirty years, Koizumi stands out as Japan’s most exceptional prime minister, perhaps the only one with a truly international reputation. He was, in many ways, Japan’s Barack Obama, promising change his nation could believe in. But the public, it turned out, didn’t always know what kind of change it really wanted and Koizumi was not always able to deliver. Koizumi was as much a manifestation of structural shifts already in progress as the actual agent of change. Societal convulsions had long been in train, brought about by the collapse of the bubble, the end of the Cold War and the intensification of international competition. Koizumi’s skill as a politician was to recognize those new realities and to try to articulate a response. ‘Japan has changed so much since the 1990s,’ Gerald Curtis of Columbia University told me in October 2011. ‘The changes are societal and Koizumi has been riding them.’

  Ezra Vogel, who had boosted public morale three decades previously with his book Japan as Number One, told me that, for all Koizumi’s radical break with the past, Japan remained in political transition. A new sustainable system had yet to be built. ‘The country needs a political system with the capacity to respond effectively to problems in a long-term way,’ he said.54 ‘This coherence ended in the 1990s when there was a collapse of the parties. Japan hasn’t built the right political system to put things back together again.’

  A symbol of Koizumi’s ultimate failure to enact change was the fate of his beloved postal privatization. After he left office, the legislation he had fought so passionately to enact became associated with the ills of rising inequality and a less caring society. ‘There has been a very significant move away from the past, more inclusive, way of doing things,’ said Hama, the economics professor who had been so invigorated by the 2005 election. After Koizumi, she said, Japan looked for ways of going back to a more inclusive society, what she called ‘protection against the jungle’ of the free market. If a private post office had become symbolic of an overgrown free market, in 2012 legislators brought out their machetes by passing an amendment to Koizumi’s bill, scrapping the deadline for postal privatization. In theory, that would allow the state to own the post office indefinitely. For Koizumi loyalists, the amendment ripped the guts out of his bill and proved that politicians lacked the nerve to press on with his painful, but necessary, programme. For opponents, Japan had put the former prime minister’s un-Japanese free-market ideas to rest. Of the handful of parliamentarians who voted against the amendment, one was none other than Shinjiro Koizumi, the 31-year-old son of the former prime minister and the fourth generation in the family to occupy the parliamentary seat at Yokosuka. Shinjiro, handsome and dashing like his father, was the great-grandson of Matajiro, the ‘tattooed minister’ who had run the post office eighty years before. Storming Osaka Castle turned out to be more difficult than anyone had imagined.

  9

  Life After Growth

  It was actually a Japanese health minister who raised the spectre of the Japanese people one day disappearing altogether. ‘If we go on this way, the Japanese race will become extinct,’ Chikara Sakaguchi said melodramatically in 2002.1 Sakaguchi was basing his alarmist prediction on extrapolation. If you continue any downward-moving graph far enough into the future it will eventually reach zero. Japan’s fertility rate fell below 2.1, the level needed to maintain a population, in the 1980s.2 Between 2005 and 2010, it averaged just 1.27.3 Although it has edged back up again, not nearly enough babies are being born to replenish the population. Japan’s case is particularly stark since it is more resistant to immigration than most countries in its less-than-fecund position. Britain’s population would be at risk of falling too were it not for a steady influx of outsiders.4

  Part of the ‘problem’ is that people are living too long. Japan’s life expectancy has risen dramatically. It is now the highest in the world, with men living to an average age of eighty and women to a remarkable eighty-six. In 1947, the average was fifty and fifty-four respectively. As a result, Japan’s population is ageing rapidly. In 1950, only 5 per cent of the population was over sixty-five. Today that figure is 25 per cent. By 2035, one in three could be that age. As people retire and fewer youngsters enter the job market, the workforce is shrinking, by roughly 0.6 per cent a year. In 1960, there were eleven people of working age to support every person over sixty-five. By 2010, that number had dwindled to 2.8. On current trends, by 2055, there will be only 1.3 people of working age for every person theoretically retired.5

  The seemingly inexorable maths leads many to depict Japan as a ticking time bomb. It implies there will be fewer workers paying taxes to fund the pension payments and medical bills of an increasing number of retirees. That is true so far as it goes, though as people grow older, they also tend to work longer, thus lowering the notional ‘dependency ratio’. Still, in modern times, we have become accustomed to ever-rising populations. George Magnus, an economist who has written extensively about demographics, describes Japan, and other similarly placed countries, as being on what he calls a ‘demographics death row’. By that he means that, barring a dramatic reversal, Japan’s population will continue to shrink. On current trends, by 2050, there will be 25 million fewer Japanese, cutting the population to 102 million.6 Under the most pessimistic assumptions, the population will drop to 45 million by 2100, the same as in 1910 Meiji Japan.7 The proportion of Japanese in a still rising global population will also fall. In 2005, Japanese made up 2 per cent of the world’s inhabitants. By 2050, they are likely to account for just 1.1 per cent. If population equals
power, then Japan’s national vigour is waning.

  Before we proceed too far down the path of ‘demographics equals destiny’, it’s worth peering a little below the surface gloom. For a start, and to state the obvious, longevity should be counted as a success not a failure. By 2050, according to some projections, there could be as many as 1 million Japanese over 100 years of age.8 Doubtless this will present numerous challenges. Old people tend to fall sick and need caring for. Some are very poor. But the underlying reason for the existence of so many elderly people is that Japan is rich and medically advanced. Whether for reasons of diet, the quality and availability of healthcare, a sense of social wellbeing or some other factor, Japan does a better job of keeping its citizens alive and healthy than any other large nation. Life expectancy in the United States (fortieth in the list of nations to Japan’s first) is a full five years below Japan, at seventy-five for men and eighty-one for women.9

  Similarly, low birth rates, though not always desirable, are often a direct consequence of higher standards of development as women take greater control of their fertility. In Japan’s case, one can certainly argue that women would be more inclined to have children if they felt more economically secure and if society did a better job of helping them juggle work and family. ‘If you ask a married couple what is the ideal number of children, they would tend to say two,’ says Takatoshi Ito of Tokyo University. ‘They are somehow being discouraged from having families of an ideal size.’10 Women are also postponing marriage. The average age for a woman to get married has risen steadily from twenty-three six decades ago to twenty-eight.11 Another reason for the low birth rate may be the widespread availability of higher education. One British study found that 40 per cent of female graduates remained childless at the age of thirty-five.12 Unless our remedy for Japan is to stop educating its women – and no doubt there are a few Japanese traditionalists who would advocate just that – we shouldn’t spring too readily to the conclusion that a low birth rate is a sign of society gone wrong.