Statistics for Democracy: Economics As Politics in Occupied Japan

What is the best way to institutionalize democracy? This question was by no means an academic exercise in late 1945 in Japan. The economist Ouchi Hyoe and his four most prominent students to survive the war, Arisawa Hiromi, Wakimura Yoshitaro, Takahashi Masao, and Minobe Ryokichi, all were certain that the right answer was to establish reliable statistics. This essay explores the reasons why.

All five men were economics professors active from the 1920s to the 1980s. The connection between teachers and students is more intense and long-lasting in Japan than in the United States, but even for Japan this was an unusually tight-knit group. They became friends in graduate school, collaborated on books and essays throughout their lives, socialized with each other for decades, and met each other often on various government advisory commissions. When Minobe became governor of Tokyo in 1967, the others served as an informal "brain trust" for him for the next twelve years. They were highly influential as teachers, public intellectuals, and policy advisers. While they did not always agree with each other, they shared a single worldview. Their politics are hard to characterize succinctly, but all were Marxists before and immediately after the war, and then most of them reevaluated that stance in various ways later in life.

The political and economic ideas of these men were intertwined in a variety of ways. In Japan, as in all modern societies, social science argumentation itself is a key strategy for controlling the terms by which power is explained and made either more or less legitimate. Although social science, particularly economics, is most often treated as a set of universal theoretical assumptions that explain the observable world, the gradual acceptance of specific forms of economic thinking is a historical development, one profoundly influenced by political and social contexts. In this regard, Japan is exactly like many other countries. Not only the content of social science thought but also the reasons why many Japanese were and are attracted to the assumptions of social science are typical.¹ This needs emphasis because so much of the work on Japan, including a major recurrent debate on the question of whether or not and in what ways Japanese capitalism differs from capitalism elsewhere, stresses Japanese uniqueness. These men thought in terms of universal economic laws and read Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, and Karl Marx to understand them better. They also proudly thought of themselves as participants in the global community of social scientists, and their work on Japan was always characterized by comparisons to other countries. They all traveled to Europe in the 1920s or 1930s, and their efforts to learn the latest scientific techniques there were very similar to those of the Americans who appear in Daniel Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings, for example.²

The economists also saw their own work as highly political. In recent years, Japan has often been described as having little political conflict. Of course there is, in fact, far more tension than this image suggests, and much of the most interesting work on Japan today explores those conflicts—but even much of that work tends to represent political conflict as expressed only indirectly or as developing only recently.

This view of the Japanese today as relatively apolitical is quite startling when one thinks back only as far as the middle of the twentieth century, when Japan was characterized by widespread and bitter social conflict and an extremely politicized public sphere. While the Occupation years were exceptionally politicized, bitter debates about the rights of citizens and the proper role of the state were the defining feature of Japanese public life through the 1970s. Indeed, much of the criticism launched against Japanese intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s by such figures as Edwin O. Reischauer, ambassador to Japan under John F. Kennedy, was precisely that they were too political in a time when a dispassionate, ideally "value...