Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth-Century Japan (review)

Laura Hein begins this engaged and original study by noting the greater economic sophistication of Japanese than of Americans today—and one need only browse the extensive popular economics section of any Japanese bookstore or look at the use of economic charts and statistics in Japanese print and television news to see that this is so. To achieve national economic literacy was a major goal of the tight-knit cohort of progressive economists who are the subject of Hein's book. Why then, she asks, has Japan failed to develop the vibrant democratic culture that these economists expected naturally to follow?

Reasonable Men is a study of Ouchi Hyoe (1888–1980) and his five most prominent students, Arisawa Hiromi, Omori Yoshitaro, Wakimura Yoshitaro, Takahashi Masao, and Minobe Ryokichi, whose careers spanned the years from the 1920s to the 1970s. As a collective biography, Hein's approach yields sociological insights into Japan's meritocratic elite that would not emerge from individual biography or conventional intellectual history. Group projects, decades of weekly meetings, and shared social visions united these men, all public intellectuals whose activity ranged from government advising to socialist party politics. There is a paradox at the heart of the story: critical, Marxist scholars intimately associated with a conservative, royalist state. Indeed, as Tokyo University professors, members of the Ouchi group were civil servants themselves and, more than that, teachers of the governing elite in a country where the exclusivity of the teacher-student relationship is revered as a near-filial bond. Their influence was greatest during the quarter century after World War II, when Marxism most strongly shaped the Japanese intellectual landscape; paradoxically or not, the years since then, as Hein sees it, have seen the steady contraction of Japanese political life.

Ouchi, probably Japan's most prominent academic economist during his lifetime, began his career contemporaneously with the founding in 1919 of the Economics Department of Tokyo Imperial University, which is the institutional heart of this story. He also ran immediately into political trouble and spent a two-year study exile in Weimar Germany, a scholarly pilgrimage most of the others later made also. Of the others, Arisawa especially is famous, a key advisor on dozens of government planning commissions, who retrospectively appears as the most important theorist of the Japanese model of state-guided economy (see Bai Gao, "Arisawa Hiromi and His Theory of Managed Economy," Journal of Japanese Studies 20 [Winter 1994]: 115–53). Minobe, the youngest of the group, became even better known, ending his career as an academic (and television) economist by serving as the popular governor of Tokyo from 1967 to 1979—a progressive counterpoint to Tokyo's present neonationalist governor, novelist Ishihara Shintaro, a political turn exemplifying the post-1970s reverse course that Hein suggests. The economists experienced such an age of "contraction" themselves, in a vastly more severe way. All were arrested in 1937–38 for their earlier activism in the "Labor and Farmer" (Rono) group of noncommunist Marxists. The problem was not their criticism of capitalism; it was their criticism of militarism and war, and in fact Arisawa's planning ideas were influential in the Japanese government both during and after the war. Ambiguously, after being released from jail, all collaborated to varying degrees with the wartime government (except for Omori, who died soon after). This was their part in a national failure. "I don't see any place where we could have had the decisive battle to protect liberalism," Arisawa later explained. "Successive little changes for the worse added up until we were caught in the net. The changes didn't seem important, but their implications were being worked out behind the scenes and we should have paid closer attention" (p. 84). The economists then worked actively with the U.S. occupation authorities, and it was under...