The artful science of raising humans for terminal incorporation
JAPAN'S REPRESSED MIDDLE CLASS
Karel van Wolferen
CEO Magazine article
Nancho Advisory: Over the last ten years, Karel van Wolferen's penetrating critiques of local bureaucracy and corporate society have arguably been the primary source of intelligent controversy within Japan. First greeted with ridicule and revulsion by the local Establishment as a "Japan-bashing revisionist", van Wolferen is now a best-selling author regularly consulted by political leaders and the mainstream media as an influential voice for reform. For more on the craft of Japanese bureaucratic brainwashing, see the Ross Mouer Consultation.
It will be difficult to find a country where corporations have had as great an effect on family life and the shaping of personality traits as in Japan. It is generally acknowledged that Japanese business has had a decisive influence on Japan's policies. But there is more to its power.The large companies have, through their inimitable collective actions, managed to suppress postwar Japan's middle class as a political force. And their influence goes beyond this. The well-connected firms and the industrial associations they have formed in cooperation with government bureaucrats, have been able, to fit Japan's educational system to their purposes. More than that, even, corporate power has created a social .ambiance that actively hinders the development of young Japanese into individual selves, with consequences more dramatic than is generally realized by Westerners who are asked to believe that Japanese people are naturally disposed to be "group-oriented."
Japanese themselves are not very proud of the overall result. The sarariiman (as the postwar white-collar "salaried" workers call themselves) is a figure of gentle and amused scorn, before he is anything else, in the eyes of cartoonists and writers of short stories or social commentary.
The secret of the hold that Japan's corporations have over Japanese life is that they are able to exhaust so much of the mental and emotional energy of their employees that there is little left for a significant family life, and nothing for political involvement of any kind. The corporation claims almost all the waking hours of middle-class males. Little psychological reserve is left for personal attachments outside the company. To reassure the company employee that his sacrifice is for a worthwhile cause, corporate life is replete with ritual and symbolism. A company may, for instance have a "constitution," most of them propagate distinct "ethical" precepts, and they frequently boast a semi-legendary history; all this compelling employees to view their places of work as having an intrinsic worth that goes far beyond the tasks of producing goods or services and making money.
In attempts to reconcile the notion that Japan is a democracy with what appear to be, at first sight, authoritarian practices, many social analysts on both sides of the Pacific have invoked the supposedly "natural" group orientation of the Japanese individual. But, if indeed the Japanese were born with a "group gene" or, a little more plausibly, if the conditioning undergone by young Japanese removed all psychological resistance to a personal "merger" with the firm, the omnipresent hoopla for convincing the recruit that he or she is joining a sacred mission rather than getting a job for making ends meet, would not be necessary. The larger firms have meeting facilities in resort areas where they isolate recruits for intensive practice in togetherness, mutual confessions and what would be an anthropologists' delight of purification and initiation rites. For periods ranging from the first six months to a year, or even longer, the new sarariiman is made to put up with bootcamp conditions at company dormitories. The famous company "loyalty" is primarily prompted by the positive attitude of making the best of an inescapable thing. Changing companies without losing much in the bargain is only possible for, at most, the first two years of one's working life as an office employee.
During the first couple of years of his marriage, generally until the first child is born, it is understood and tolerated that the young Japanese middle class male has some outside interests. But after that he is expected to take his involvement in the company even more seriously and no longer to indulge in "egoistic" family concerns. There is nothing "natural Japanese" about this. When visiting rural areas, or urban neighborhoods where one still finds family workshops, one may observe that most Japanese have no inherent difficulty with a social life centered on the family.
Japan's official "explainers," in government agencies, business associations and among academics, like to think of their compatriots as basically different from other peoples, because of a supposed innate drive to achieve social harmony. But Japanese are clearly not different enough. The coercion in the companies, without a possible escape from that world, has wreaked havoc upon Japanese individuals and families of the kind that one would expect anywhere. The Japanese human being starts life with psychologically the same potential as Americans or Europeans. Forced groupism, blocking the natural growth of the individual, leads to just as much repressed hostility and personality disorder as it does in the rest of the world. George DeVos, one of America's foremost scholars on Japanese social psychology, describes prevailing middle class family relations simply as "pathological".
Sarariiman society is a postwar phenomenon. And some three decades of husbandless and fatherless middle class families have produced new sarariiman who tend to be psychologically more dependent on superiors than their predecessors used to be. It is generally acknowledged that this results from the extraordinarily dominant role played by their mothers in their upbringing. Many sarariiman wives compensate for the shortage of affection from husbands who are also married to their companies, by an excess of attention to their sons, which often becomes unhealthy. Extreme cases of mother-son incest, very rare in most societies, are regularly heard of in Japan. In fact, gauged by requests for advice that telephone help lines receive, and by what psychologically troubled young Japanese males tell their girl-friends, incestuous behavior in varying degrees of intensity is relatively common.
Japanese are as capable of generating human warmth as any people; in fact, the kindness and concern shown when one meets with misfortune can sometimes be very moving. But Japanese emotions frequently come up against blocked channels. Because of the smothering mothers and smothering corporations, and puerile behavior abetted by peer pressure, relations of sarariiman with persons from the opposite sex are often bleak and sterile. Judging by the manga, the ubiquitous comic strips for grownups to be found in many weekly magazines and thick manga books, sexual fantasy abounds in activity with rope, spears, and calloused hands that cannot but be painful to the females in the pictures.
Again, Japanese specialists have observed that the prevailing psychological dependency of the son on his mother in the small (one or two child) saraiiman families often blocks the ability of Japanese males to achieve genuine intimacy later in life with their spouses or lovers. Aside from that, passionate love, no matter how mature, is frowned upon if not actively discouraged. While Japan has no religious tradition branding sexual activity as sinful, strong love bonds are seen as disruptive of the social order. Numerous sarariiman marriages are based on introductions arranged by company superiors. Very large companies have programs to encourage employees to select their brides in-house, since it is believed that these are already trained never to consider company demands on their husbands' time and emotional energies as excessive. When such demands and the interests of the family come into conflict, there can be no question that the family adjusts.
That has been regarded as mainly a social phenomenon is of enormous political significance for Japan. Even if Japan's office workers did have time and energy to spare for involvement in political causes, they all understand that such behavior would ruin their careers. The effect of such awareness reaches deep. Could he be part of a politically free and energetic middle class, it is very likely that the sarariiman would challenge the way in which Japan is governed. Although the mechanisms that belong to a democracy, like regular elections, do exist, they are rendered all but meaningless through the fact that elected politicians perform little more than ornamental roles, leaving the actual government to bureaucrats. Together with the business bureaucrats in the industrial associations --which coordinate much corporate activity - and those at the summits of the keiretsu conglomerates, these government bureaucrats engage in a type of rule characterized by the preeminent American scholar on Japan's postwar industrial policy, Chalmers Johnson, as "soft authoritarianism." Politically significant labor unions were crushed in the 1950s. While some groups, such as the farmers and small shopkeepers, have been able to secure privileges through organized pressure, the interests of the sarariiman, and for that matter Japan's blue collar workers, are not represented, which is reflected, to name only one of many signs, by a pitiful housing policy.
It is beginning to be accepted that whereas the United States and Europe have "consumer centered" economies, that of Japan is "producer centered." But there still exists much confusion concerning the choice the Japanese people themselves have had in shaping things that way. Through the suppression of a politically influential middle class, Japan's authorities can continue to deprive the public of such a choice. In European history, the emergence of a middle-class culture basically changed political relations, leading to greater individual freedoms and establishing the conditions for democracy. More recently this has also happened in Asian countries such as South Korea and Thailand. The Japanese middle class, in the early postwar period, also took a hesitant few steps toward becoming such a disturbing political influence. But the coercive corporations have effectively stopped it.
What of the future? Foreign correspondents and assorted Western fact-finders have, for decades now, been telling their readers that Japanese society is about to undergo fundamental changes under the weight of public dissatisfaction. It is time to look at this again. While Japanese society is no doubt changing, the large corporations are, if anything, consolidating their power, as they absorb the assets of many medium-sized and smaller companies.
Radical changes in the conditions that now support an, ultimately unaccountable, elite of administrators in the seamlessly joined government and business bureaucracies, would come about if a genuine labor market were to develop. This would make it possible for the sarariiman to switch employers, and would clear the way for middle class political action. Trends in this direction have so far been effectively controlled.
Keidanren (the most important political organization representing and influencing big business) has inveighed against what at one point appeared to be an emerging trade among the large companies in personnel with relatively rare and much sought after skills, such as software engineers. The Recruit scandal --which dominated Japan's newspaper headlines between the summer of 1988 and the spring of 1989 -- was about many top political figures receiving much money from an upstart company; but it was also about squashing the hesitant beginnings of what could have become a labor market. The central culprit, Hiromasa Ezoe, had built a small business empire on publications offering job placement information, having accurately identified a huge market. Since the demise of what he began, it is no longer even possible to place anonymous help-wanted ads with box numbers in Japanese publications.
Sexual discrimination continues unabated in the Japanese work place. Female company employees are expected to leave and marry before they turn 29 (except at banks, government offices and branches of foreign companies), which is why I have been referring to "he" until now. Numerous political action groups have been formed by Japanese women over the years. But they have all been marginalized, undermined or swallowed by harmless umbrella organizations. While on the whole astonishingly sophisticated, young Japanese women are kept on a fairly tight leash. They are, for instance, deprived of access to birth control pills, by bureaucrats who have understood that in other countries these have been a major factor in the emancipation of women.
Japanese women are, however, beginning to fight back; not knowingly in groups, but entirely on their own. Recent statistics show that Japanese women marry nowadays at a very late age compared to women anywhere else, and that a staggeringly large proportion has decided not to marry at all. An unprecedentedly large proportion of those women who do marry has decided not to have children. The administrators, in response, have initiated a campaign encouraging Japanese women to make more babies. A number of Japanese social commentators have interpreted this trend against marriage and children as a silent protest against the sarariiman order of Japanese society. And there are other women, young mothers of school-age children, who protest individually against the often ridiculously arbitrary disciplinary methods in many Japanese schools - such protest may take the form, for example, of encouraging their children not to wear their school uniforms.
But protest in the sarariiman world remains politically ineffectual, as no institutions exist any longer that could translate it into power for taking on the bureaucrats in government agencies, and the bureaucrats running the vast corporate hierarchy. The conquest of civil society by Japan's giant corporations is an achievement at least as amazing as their conquest of international market shares.
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