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88 C H A P T E R 3 NewEconomicsand anExpandingVision ofProsperity A s analysts and reformers articulated a future vision of reconstruction in terms of humanistic technocracy, they simultaneously cast their critical gaze backward over the longer history of modern Japanese development. While not unitary in voice, their analysis, from an often surprising range of observers, amounted to a common diagnosis of Japanese capitalism that described Japan as uniquely inscribed by certain pathologies. Drawing connections between the particular path charted by the political economy of Japan and the disaster of the long war on the Chinese continent and against the Allied powers, many Japanese pinned their hopes for the new era on the chance to redress the failed history of modern Japan by setting the economy right. Laying out the “the peculiarities of the Japanese economy,” progressive intellectuals and planners adopted the prewar analysis of the Japanese state as a backward one in which the transformation to capitalism remained incomplete. Japanese society, they believed, was characterized by “feudalistic ” socioeconomic structures: familialism and paternalism in the countryside as well as the small scale of agriculture and antiquated working conditions. The critics charged that capital accumulation in the relatively small industrial sector had been achieved on the backs of the vast numbers of farmers and those engaged in small business. This “abnormal” coexistence of feudalistic and capitalistic elements, coupled with what was generally lamented as Japan’s “excess population,” a problem now becoming more acute with the repatriation of demobilized soldiers and colonists from the former empire, conspired to depress wage levels, especially among the large agricultural class, critics reasoned. The “purchasing power” of the New Economics and an Expanding Vision of Prosperity 89 masses was limited, thus restricting domestic markets for Japanese manufactures . “Thus was the foundation built,” the Special Survey Committee of the Foreign Ministry damningly concluded, “for Japan’s progression toward becoming a militaristic and aggressive nation.”1 In its condemnation of Japan’s “abnormal” capitalistic structure, the committee’s report reflected the widely held view after the war that a successful economic reconstruction required new economic guarantees to promote the formation of a viable middle class. The emphasis on the structural defects of the political economy in this retrospective analysis of the road to war drew heavily on Marxist debates dating from the 1920s on the so-called crisis of development of Japanese capitalism. Indeed, many of the vocal exponents of this diagnosis, economists such as Arisawa Hiromi and Öuchi Hyöe, had been participants in those earlier debates, which had marked the first efflorescence of rigorous Marxist scholarship on the nature of Japanese capitalism (and many of them had been arrested in the late 1920s for the expression of their leftist ideas in those debates). Though sectarian differences existed, Marxists during those earlier years of debate had been united by a general belief that the structure of the Japanese economy was “backward,” being characterized by great concentrations of wealth in a powerful industrial sector atop a vast “precapitalistic” agricultural and small-business sector operating on minute scales according to irrational, feudalistic practices. The seemingly intractable structural divide between the two sectors was believed to stand in contrast to the supposedly smooth trajectory of development in Western Europe and the United States, in which capital accumulation was seen as complete, and irrational elements universally replaced by the efficiencies of capitalist industry. The tenor, if not the specific terms and conceptual categories, of the Marxist debates of the interwar period, in turn, shared much with a longer tradition of Japanese exceptionalism—a negative exceptionalism—dating from the Meiji period, in which what were seen as a “late-comer” status and general backwardness consistently colored views of national purpose and strategy.2 In the context of crisis and the discrediting of earlier conservative orthodoxies after the war, the Marxist analysis enjoyed an enhanced status, and progressive intellectual opinion was largely united on the immediate postwar diagnosis. But it was not only on the pages of left-leaning journals like Kaizö and Sekai that such reformist attempts to address reconstruction and recovery appeared. The diagnostic vision, though differing in emphases and prescriptions, was acceptable in its general outline to a wide range of educated opinion. The vision soon found expression in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, for example, when its Enterprise Bureau announced in 1949 that postwar industrial rationalization must be pursued through expansion of “consumption markets” at home and high wages. [3.133.108.241] Project MUSE (2024...

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