The rise of Japan

However, all these developments took place within a specific political context. Before the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan had had nearly 300 years of peace and stability. During this period (1606 to 1868) under the leadership of the Tokagawa family, Japan was integrated into one nation by creating one central authority under the leadership of the Shogun (military ruler). Under this shogunate, the emperor reigned but did not rule; he lived in the imperial capital of Kyoto (east city) while the Tokagawa shifted the administrative capital to Tokyo (west city). I suspect having a unified national culture is an important asset in development.

Then the USA navy under commodore Mathew Perry came to Japan and forced them to open up. There were also the British and the French seeking to enter Japan. Seeing the threat of external invasion and conquest, the Tokagawa family realised they could not handle this foreign intrusion and its possible implications. It, therefore, transferred power back to the royal family. The emperor decided to open Japan to trade with the West. The emperor did not have absolute power but acted as the British monarch and even worked with other samurai families to govern.

The Japan that opened up to the West for trade was not only advanced in technology, it had a highly literate population. This was largely because education is a highly valued thing in Japan. Even under the Tokagawa Japan was a highly literate society, indeed more literate than western countries even for its women. This made modernization easier! In those old days, Japanese used to study writing and calculation. There was the equivalent of university education!

Secondly under the shogunate, many samurai (soldiers) had grown businesses over very many years! There had been, in some way, the development of capitalism. Its major (but not only) weakness was limited access to western technology and markets. Japan also had a centralised bureaucracy based on meritocratic recruitment long before western influence or before the West itself adopted it. The system was open to everyone as it allowed anyone to climb the social ladder regardless of background. Any kid regarded talented and was ambitious could progress to the top.

This brings me back to cultural theories of development. For many cultural theorists, Japanese culture with its penchant for punctuality, hard work, speed, honesty, trust and diligence is the main explanation behind its rapid development. Yet one wonders whether things like hard work and punctuality (which increase labour productivity) are causes or consequences of development. To understand the weakness in these cultural explanations, we need to look at the impressions Europeans travelers had of the Japanese.

In his book, Bad Samaritans, Ha-Joon Chung, a South Korean economist at Cambridge, has a host of stories to tell about this. In 1905, an Australian management consultant who had been invited by the Japanese government told its bureaucrats: to see your men at work made me feel that you are a very satisfied easy-going race who reckon time is no object.” Sidney Gulick was an American missionary who lived in Japan for 25 years from 1888 to 1913. He spoke fluent Japanese, even teaching in Japanese universities.

In his 1903 book, The Evolution of the Japanese, Gulick said that many Japanese “give an impression of being lazy and are utterly indifferent to the passage of time”. Interestingly, he also found them “emotional, possessing lightness of heart and freedom from all anxiety for the future – living chiefly for the present.”

Beatrice Webb, a leader of British Fabian socialism, after her tour of Japan in 1911-12 described the Japanese as having “objectionable notions of leisure” and that “there is evidently no desire to teach people to think.” She described Koreans as “12 millions of dirty, degraded, sullen, lazy and religionless savages who slouch around in dirty white garments of the most inept kind…”

Yet these stereotypes, Ha tells us, were not only about other peoples. Europeans traveling through Prussia used to describe Germans in the same way. Mary Shelley, a Briton, said of the Germans that they were never in hurry. A French manufacturer who hired Germans complained that they work “as and when they wish.” John Russell, a British travel writer of the 1820s said the Germans were “easily contented people… endowed with neither great acuteness of perception nor quickness of feeling.” He felt they were not open to new ideas. Now look at the Germans today.

If one has read the writings of Timothy Kalyegira about Africans today, he would be struck by how much this Ugandan journalist has borrowed from 19^th Century European stereotypes of other societies. The point is that cultural explanations can be misleading predictors of a nation’s future trajectory. A lot of the observations of laziness as opposed to hard work are mere references to characteristics of a backward society rather than causes of that backwardness. As societies move from agriculture to industry, a sense of time begins to be cultivated in a people’s social consciousness. Punctuality is, therefore, a consequence not a cause of development – and the lack of it an impediment to development.

One important thing is that Japan did not have any religious fundamentalism. During the Tokagawa period Christianity had been banned! There was Buddhism but Japanese Buddhism is very secular. So Japan was a secular society. But does this explain her rapid adoption of Western technology? Max Weber had argued that the protestant ethic was responsible for the raise of capitalism. However, when the catholic nations of Portugal, Spain and Italy rapidly industrialised, this argument lost a lot of its shine.

Cultural theorists have argued that Korean and Chinese culture was built on Confucian fundamentalism, which said making profit is a bad thing! Japan did not have this anti-money making belief. If you made money it was good and fun! However, Christianity also used to teach that making money for its own sake is a sin of avarice and lending money on interest was a sin called usury. As time has shown, neither these Christian teachings, nor the Confucian fundamentalist teachings in Korea and China have stopped the development of capitalism in these countries.

****