last highlighted date: 2024-11-14
Highlights
- 1955, the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) united many of the progressive factions, at least superficially, while a month later the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), despite its progressive sounding name, brought together many of the conservative faction
- While this plan had to be adjusted as time went on, the LDP from now on was associated with high growth and the American alliance; the JSP (Japan Socialist Party), the Japan Communist Party and other Marxist groups, by contrast, seemed too tied to radical unions and unpopular positions for many Japanese voters to accept.
- LDP regularly won about twice as many seats in the Diet as the progressive partie
- This stability in turn encouraged what has often been called Japan’s “Economic Miracle.”
- Japan’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased by a rather amazingly large average of 9.2% between 1956 and 1973, and even after the world recession caused by the rise in oil prices in the 1970’s, still grew by an average 4.1% up through 1989.
- Exchange rates may have made the figure somewhat misleading, but by 1987, Japan had a higher per capita GDP than the United States. Certainly a poor country was now statistically rich.
- Emblematic picture of a shinkansen (“bullet train”) passing in front of a Buddhist temple in 1966.
- Furthermore, because Japan had few old people at the time and a relatively low birth rate, the percentage of the population that was working also dramatically increased.
- to this process was the role of such key government offices as the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). These highly trained and capable bureaucrats helped regulate Japan’s banks and trading companies, which provided long term loans to various companies, who were in turn closely linked (in a so-called horizontal keiretsu) to other powerful businesses and/or (in a vertical keiretsu) to their suppliers and dealers.
- the public’s desire for high growth, LDP dominance, an expanding pool of able workers and an effective bureaucracy combined to help the government encourage certain key export oriented economic alliances.
- Central to all this was a business practice known as the “permanent employment system”. The notion that firms would rarely let workers be fired, it should be emphasized, was almost exclusively limited to males in the more prosperous large companies or hence to no more than 30% of the work force; it was necessarily balanced by temporary workers, many of them “OL” or “office ladies” who worked for a few years before retiring to marry and raise a family
- for job security, these Japanese men joined enterprise unions rather than, as in the US, craft unions.
- They tended to work hard, be flexible in their job assignments, strike less and socialize more with their workmates than with their families. Though their wages and bonuses did not always keep up with their productivity improvements, their real wages did increase each year, and their lives got better.
- in turn received tax breaks and protection from cheaper US and Asian rice import
- even Japan’s staunchest defenders would have to admit, however, this “economic miracle” was not without social costs. By the early 1960’s, for example, it became apparent that a number of Japanese were suffering horrible illnesses because certain big companies dumped pollutants into the air and waters near their residences.
- “Examination Hell,” as this system was called, was linked in the minds of many to women’s issues in Japan. During this period, women admittedly became better educated, wealthier and more urban. On average, they married later, had fewer children and lived longer, thereby increasing the time that they had available for other pursuits.
- Other barriers to full equality also existed. Tax laws, for example, penalized couples where the spouse made more than a certain amount of money.
- Adding to the problem was the fact that for many women, not having to work as hard as their farm ancestors or put in the long hours of the salary-man seemed highly desirable. Many women in this period thus became “OL” or temporary “office ladies” (workers) performing useful but not highly paid tasks until marriage age. Then a role as a stay home mother, cynically defined as “three meals and a nap”, seemed a natural role to play.
- The Soka Gakkai (Value Creation Society), for example, was actually started prior to World War Two, but merits the “New Religion” designation because it only really became popular during this period of high growth.
- Soka Gakkai also created the Clean Government Party (Komeito) that played an important role in politics.
- American gift was to become complacent about the manufactured goods that they were producing. By the 1970’s, hardworking Japanese firms had improved on such American inventions as the car, the transistor and the VCR to make extremely high quality goods that easily appealed to US buyers. Soon the United States bi-lateral trade deficit was as high as $60 billion dollars a year.
- negotiators in the so-called Plaza Accord of 1985 (negotiated at New York’s Plaza Hotel) agreed to intervene in world money markets to increase the value of the yen. Designed to make Japanese exports more expensive, but imports to Japan cheaper and hence more attractive, the negotiators overlooked both the fact that the Japanese could now keep their export prices down by importing raw materials more cheaply, and that the powerful Ministry of Finance would counter pressures to raise the value of the yen by putting more money into circulation.
- began buying such American icons as Columbia pictures and the Rockefeller Center. This led to openly hostile demonstrations against an alleged Japanese takeover of the US economy.
- “economic giant but a political pigmy,” or noted that Japanese claims of a homogenous nation was contradicted by bigotry towards the Ainu in the north and resident Koreans, guest workers and Burakumin (people of the buraku, or ghetto; “untouchables”) elsewhere. A society that claimed that “the nail that sticks out gets hammered,” Japan Bashers noted, was not inclined to respect individuality.
- Finally, critics could easily find evidence of sexism and racism in Japan, and yet the United States in this era was itself hardly free of guilt.