Contemporary Japan: History, Politics and Social Change Since the 1980s
By Jeff Kingston
Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester
Second edition, 2013
313 pages including index and glossary
ISBN 978-1-118-31507-1
Review by Sir Hugh Cortazzi
In this survey of contemporary Japan Professor Kingston looks at the risks and challenges facing Japan in the twenty-first century. He draws particular attention to Japan’s “demographic time bomb” and the malaise and risks encountered by Japanese families.
His analysis of such problem issues as immigration and the environment is carefully presented. His account of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami is a good summary of the facts of this appalling disaster. He looks as objectively as possible at this stage at the nuclear crisis arising from the destruction of the nuclear reactors at Fukushima.
He includes a perceptive chapter on the Imperial Family in which he rightly stresses the need to ensure that the imperial institution continues to be relevant. He is scathing about Imperial Household bureaucrats and their treatment of the Crown Princess. I agree; it took me years of frustration to get these officials to agree to my translating and publishing an English version of the Crown Prince’s memoir of his stay in Oxford, which was eventually allowed to appear under the title ‘The Thames and I’ [read our review in Issue 1].
His chapter on the yakuza and their future makes interesting reading.
His account of contemporary politics contains some good points and is generally perceptive. Unfortunately although this edition was published earlier this year he was unable to deal with the second Abe government and the party of the unreconstructed nationalists Hashimoto Toru and Ishihara Shintaro. An analysis of these developments will have to wait for a third edition.
Kingston’s emphasis is more on the political and social issues of contemporary Japan than on the economic challenges. He is right to stress the risks to families and the young arising from the changes in employment practices under which greater flexibility in the labour market has been achieved through a decline in the permanent staff of companies and an increase in the number of temporary staff who are paid less and have fewer rights. He estimates that if the number of subsidized jobs were added to the number officially unemployed “Japan’s unemployment rate would have been 9.3 per cent rather 5.7 per cent as of mid-2009.” This makes the Japanese unemployment rate comparable to that of some European countries.
Against this background Kingston is not an advocate of greater liberalisation and further labour market reform, but he fails to suggest alternative policies to kick-start growth in the Japanese economy. The expansionist policies of Kuroda, the new governor of the Bank of Japan, were, of course, instituted after this book was published.
I found one reference to the Olympus scandal. It deserves much fuller treatment in any future edition as does the whole topic of corporate governance.
Kingston comments on the issues of the national flag and national anthem and on attempts to instil patriotism and notes that only one Japanese University makes the world list of the top twenty universities. I would have welcomed more on the problems of persuading young Japanese to question their teachers and elders and on their reluctance to travel and study abroad.
These caveats apart Kingston’s book seems to me to be a good introduction to contemporary Japan. But I hope that in any future edition he will take a hard look at some sentences in the introduction which left me with the feeling which is, however, belied by the subsequent analysis that he had succumbed to the myth that Japan was victim rather than aggressor in the Pacific War.
On page 5 Kingston writes: “Given the extent of excesses and atrocities committed by Japan, the US, and its allies.” I realize that some actions by allied service men during the war and after were not in accordance with the Geneva conventions and that in battle things may have happened which should not have been allowed, but I do not accept that such acts, which were not approved by allied governments, were in any way comparable with what the Japanese military did in e.g. Nanking or Singapore or in the construction of the Burma-Siam railway, to say nothing of the surprise attack before war was declared on Pearl Harbor. If Kingston was thinking of the American carpet bombing of Japanese cities and of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he should bear in mind the casualties which the Americans had suffered in the battle for Okinawa and take note of the responsibility of Japanese leaders for what happened in 1945. Prince Konoe in January 1945 realized that Japan faced defeat but his obstinate and morally blind colleagues refused until it was too late to come to terms with the inevitable.
In the same paragraph Kingston states that during the occupation “American troops did commit serious crimes against the civilian population, including murder, rape and assault.” He qualifies this by noting that Japanese had feared worse knowing how Japanese forces had behaved in occupied territories. Having served with the British occupation forces in Japan in 1946/47 I am not aware of more than a few serious cases and I wonder if the incidence of violence against Japanese by Americans was any greater than it would have been in the USA. Certainly our judge advocate general insisted on fair trials of offenders and there was never any attempt to condone of justify violent behaviour.
On page 7, referring to the legal proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), Kingston asserts that the proceedings were “deeply flawed.” “In addition, Allied war crimes went unexamined and unpunished, leading many observers to dismiss the whole spectacle as ‘victor’s justice.'” Certainly there have been many criticisms of the IMTFE, but to dismiss the IMTFE in these words is oversimplifying and pandering to the Japanese nationalists who call for judgements of the tribunal to be abrogated. Moreover to refer to “allied war crimes” without explanation or specification is surely misleading.
Jeff Kingston is Professor of History and Director of Asian Studies at the Japan campus in Tokyo of Temple University.