5 NOVEMBER 1988, Page 33

Not to be confused with Confucius

Ian Buruma

Is Japan going to lead the world? Will we all look to Tokyo in the way we now look to Washington? Will Pax Japonica replace Pax Americana? It is a question often asked these days, now that the Japanese are propping up the American budget deficit, buying up foreign banks, factories and great chunks of real estate. Soon, one sometimes feels, it will be easier to get sushi in the City of London than steak and kidney pie, Raw fish is already as popular in Manhattan as bagels and cream cheese.

Yoichi Funabashi, deputy economics editor of the Asani newspaper in Tokyo, has answered these speculations in the International Herald Tribune with an emphatic 'No'. No, he said, because Japan lacks the political will to lead. Japanese have no stomach any more for military power. It is in any case better, he argued, for Japan to pay the Americans to remain the supreme superpower, because a possi- ble alternative might be a new Asian co-prosperity zone: 'Given Japan's deep cultural affinities for neighbouring Asia and its emotional rejection of Western power politics, the possibility of such an Asian strategy cannot be ruled out.'

Well, perhaps not. But what does Mr Funabashi mean exactly by Western power politics? And whence the emotional rejec- tion? The trauma of the war, he suggests. But are power politics something especially Western? Is there something alien, indeed incompatible with Oriental culture about the exercise of power? Mr Funabashi appears to believe so. And in this he is not alone. Indeed, the juxtaposition of Asian harmony and peace versus Western aggres- sion and contentiousness — power politics

in effect — is a widely held myth in Asia, and even, here and there, in the West. The proponents of this idea abuse the word `culture' so consistently that one is tempted to follow Goering's inclination. But this, no doubt, is a very Western reaction, to be condemned by those pauvres naffs mesme- rised by saffron robes and sweet incense.

A particularly egregious example of Mr Funabashi's line of thinking was published some years ago in a leading Japanese intellectual journal. The author, a young female academic called Michiko Yasega- wa, argued that Japan had been forced into the second world war by Western imperial- ism, but refound her traditionally peaceful and harmonious spirit after 1945. This 'peaceful world view' is a 'Japanese folk wisdom' the Japanese 'cannot abandon', let alone accept 'one of the confrontational views popular in other countries, which see the world as an arena of powers balanced against and clashing with other powers, for these views run contrary to the Japanese spirit'.

And so we arrive at Mr Funabashi's not very brave conclusion that it is far better to let the Americans, with their confronta- tional views, take care of peaceful Japan's security in a bellicose foreign world. Such views clearly would make Japan a poor superpower. And perhaps we are better off with American leadership, and eat our sushi too. But the myth of oriental peace and harmony hides political sins which might affect us in the long run. They have already affected for a long time the mil- lions of sophisticated Japanese, Singapo- reans, South Koreans and other East Asians, who would welcome more demo- cratic politics only to be told that such `adversarial ideas' may be fine for Wester- ners but not for them, because Asian culture . . . and so forth.

Western European and American power is, ideally, checked and balanced by elected institutions, where interests often noisily contend, hence the power politics. But our adversarial politics are subject to the rule of law. This is true on a national, but, we hope, also on an international scale, where different powers lawfully con- tend. Many East Asians (Indians are a little different), often backed by Western sympathisers, believe that law is too cold and rational an instrument to cope with warm human emotions, and so prefer vaguer and more cultural concepts, such as `consensus' or 'custom'. Consensus can be reached, such people say, because unlike Westerners, Asians, with their traditional folk wisdom, naturally favour harmony.