THE UNTOLD TOKYO STORY
The press: Paul Johnson argues that we ought to learn more about Japan BRITISH newspapers are gradually react- ing to the dramatic growth of the money industry as a source of news. Financial stories are increasingly leaving their City section ghetto and invading the front page. But one important element in this new adjustment is still missing: coverage of Japan in proportion to its growing signifi- cance in the world. Ideally, every good British newspaper ought to have two full- time correspondent in Japan, one to cover the financial markets, the other to deal with the political and social news. In practice, coverage of Japan is scrappy and heavily dependent on part-time stringers (there are some notable exceptions, such as the Financial Times). Very few British journalists know even a smattering of Japanese. Then too, running an office in Tokyo is dauntingly expensive and becom- ing more so as the yen rises inexorably against the pound.
Yet the fact of Japan's impress on world events can no longer be ignored. If present trends continue, Japan will inevitably over- take the United States as the world's leading economy. In many areas it is already the largest manufacturer. The Sun- day Times reported that, late last Friday afternoon, the value of shares on the Tokyo stock exchange, $2,661 billion, overtook Wall Street, at $2,652 billion, for the first time. (Both are about five times bigger than the London market) This is not in itself of critical importance but it does reflect the trend in relative growth. The Japanese banks collectively now do more business than the American ones, which means that more and more people, all over the world, are beginning to think in terms of the yen rather than the dollar. With the yen a much stronger currency than the US dollar, the time is coming when it will usurp the dollar's role as the primary currency of world business and trade, just as the dollar replaced sterling in the 1940s and 1950s.
As yet, however, we have simply not adjusted to treating Japan as a key country in the world. We are lamentably ill- informed about what goes on there, even on the surface of events, let alone in Japanese minds. Although by all the nor- mal criteria Japan is an open society and China a closed one, I suspect we have a better understanding of what the Chinese are up to, and where they are heading. In some ways we in the West have more in common with the Chinese than either of us have with the Japanese. Japan has been described as 'modern since pre-history'; it is also immeasurably ancient in its mod- ernity. The Japanese are the most remote of all great peoples and the most xenopho- bic; they have, when they choose, an unrivalled capacity to absorb what is useful to them from other civilisations, while preserving their essential cultural values completely intact. They are becoming a major, soon perhaps will be a dominant, force in the modern world while remaining isolated from it. Our ignorance of them, and what little I know of their hisotry, fills me with foreboding.
In the best book I have read on Japan, Kurt Singer's Mirror, Sword and Jewel: A Study of Japanese Characteristics (a British edition appeared in 1973), the author draws attention to the restless violence of Japan's climate and the effect this has on collective behaviour: 'Relentlessly this archipelago is rocked with seismic shocks, invaded by storms, showers and pelted with rain, encircled by clouds and mists. . . . It is not space that rules this form of existence, but time, duration, spontaneous change, continuous movement.' Certainly the Japanese are prone to violent oscilla- tions in national conduct, which to us are wholly unpredictable. For the first time, however, a sudden change in Japanese mood could have a calamitous effect on our peacetimes lives. I doubt if people have yet grasped the dangers inherent in creating wholly electronic international financial markets capable of displacing and relocating trillions of financial units not in days or hours but theoretically at least in minutes. Last week, the market got an inkling of what a crisis involving Japan might mean. At the not, as yet, very serious prospect of US trade sanctions, the Tokyo Nikkein-Dow index fell, early last week, by 550 points, in turn provoking alarming falls in London and New York, before equally sharp recoveries. The Japanese have a strong trading economY based on high industrial productivity and superb entrepreneurial skills but their physical economy is weak — they have virtually no natural resources except peo- ple — and they are uniquely vulnerable to trade restrictions. In the 1930s Western action against cheap Japanese exports helped to spur Japan into aggressive empire-building and so into the Pacific war. Today a far more likely outcome would be a Japanese national panic with a crash on the scale of 1929, or worse, beginning not in Wall Street but in Tokyo. We have a world bull market at present but it has many febrile symptoms and it is a daunting thought that its future, for good or ill, may be in the hands of a people with a record of violent change and whose underlying impulses are mysterious to us.
This is one good reason why the media, including perhaps especially television, which treats Japan as an exotic rather than an important country, should make a bigger effort to convey knowledge and understanding of the Japanese. But a second reason, in the long run, is even more weighty. When the 1868 Meiji Res- toration, as it was called, first brought Japan with dramatic speed into the modern world, its object was expressed in the aim of making Japan fukoku-kyohei, 'rich country, strong army'. The two are con- nected. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Japan's military power, and the extraordin- ary speed and daring with which she used it, were the most obvious facts about her. Since 1945, with pacifism virtually written into her constitution, Japan has seemingly forgotten the 'strong army' side of the equation and concentrated on the 'rich country' side, with astonishing success.
However, there is no case in history of a power achieving economic paramountcy in, as it were, a military vacuum. The notion that Japan can steadily overtake the United States economically and financial- ly, to the point where it actually owns a huge chunk of America's wealth, while at the same time being entirely subordinate to and dependent on US military protection. is not in the long term tenable. The imbalance between Japanese economic strength and political-military weakness is already a historical anomaly, and the march of events has a way of correcting such anomalies. During the 1990s, it seems to me, Japan will inevitably become a great power again, and in view of the past behaviour of the Japanese the event will take place with devastating speed. The media ought to be preparing us for it.
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