Is It Too Late to Save Japan?

[ 213 ] book reviews Is It Too Late to Save Japan? Tobias Harris A review of John Haffner, Tomas Casas i Klett, and Jean-Pierre Lehmann Japan’s Open Future: An Agenda for Global Citizenship New York: Anthem Press, 2009 u 336 pp. Published just as Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) stumbled into the election that drove it from power decisively for the first time since the party was created in 1955, Japan’s Open Future: An Agenda for Global Citizenship by John Haffner, Tomas Casas i Klett, and Jean-Pierre Lehmann was timed perfectly. These three Westerners stepped in with a blueprint for a more open and liberal Japan, based on their intimate familiarity with the country, just as the Japanese people chose the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)—a party that is, if not uniformly progressive, at least more progressive than the LDP. The decay in Japan’s social, economic, and political institutions, the book argues, is well advanced. Having inherited institutions that enabled Japan to pursue and “catch up” with the West economically not once but twice, Japan’s leaders have struggled to adapt to a new, more global age: “Japan’s policymakers stubbornly hold to the untenable dogma of mercantilism— the idea that a nation’s prosperity depends on the foreign trade surpluses it generates, where exports and outward investments are good, imports impoverish and inward foreign investments are bad” (p. 85). In other words, Japan’s foreign economic policy is unchanged from the Meiji period. Married to mercantilism is an outmoded idea of the Japanese nation-state, which the authors argue rests on a constructed, sanitized history that asserts the homogeneity of the Japanese nation and often downplays or excises from official retellings the darker moments of Japan’s past (although the authors acknowledge both Japan’s official apologies and China’s manipulation of the history issue for domestic reasons). The result has been that Japan’s leaders not only have insulated the economy through mercantilist practices but also have isolated the Japanese peoplefrominternationalconnections.Theneo-nationalistnarrativehasmade tobias harris is a doctoral student in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the Japanese politics blog Observing Japan. He can be reached at . [ 214 ] asia policy Japan’s relations with its Asian neighbors trickier, and, by failing to teach most Japanese how to communicate effectively in English, the education system has made it difficult for Japanese citizens to communicate with Americans and other peoples from all over the world. Being less than proficient in English has meant that Japanese are not able to engage fully in the global discussions that occur in the world’s lingua franca. This, the authors assert, amounts to “international autism.” In short, even as the old institutions that insulated Japan from the world decay, those very institutions have prevented the Japanese people from implementing reforms that would revitalize the government and the economy. Haffner, Casas i Klett, and Lehmann have no shortage of proposals to fix Japan’s institutions. They outline how Japan should build a more humane economic system that is at once more open to risk-taking by individuals and involvement by foreigners in Japan’s economy while also providing a more secure safety net and embracing a foreign policy approach rooted not in the nation-state’s traditional concern with security challenges but in solving regional and international economic and environmental challenges. The problem, though, is how Japan moves from the bleak present to an open future. It is one thing to draft proposals; it is quite another to turn those proposals into policies. And it is not enough to change policies. The focus on the linguistic deficiencies of the Japanese people suggests that mindsets— culture, in other words—must change as well. Although cultural change is by no means impossible, such change does not follow the plans and decrees of government officials. The election of the DPJ was surely a step in the right direction for Japan. Not only is the DPJ more open to the concept of global citizenship, but the Hatoyama government’s administrative reforms will ultimately enable more political leadership capable of creative policymaking and reform. Even with more capable...