Lee Poh Ping
Professor
Institute of Malaysian and International Studies
National University of Malaysia
Malaysia

I am very glad to offer interdisciplinary perspectives to the JAMCO On-line International Symposium this year, responding to the JAMCO’s request for my participation as a discussant. I start with the caveat that I am no specialist on the media. I am a political scientist. Hence my comments will be influenced by my discipline. What I propose to do is to select two themes that are found in some of the four excellent presentations. Then my discussion about Japan and its relations with the outside world will revolve around these themes. The themes are the gap between Japanese reality and the images of Japan as telecasted and indeed as are also spread by other channels ( a theme found in one way or the other in all four presentations); and Japanese pop culture as an element of the soft power of Japan.

One of the primary reasons for this gap is that the depiction of Japan by the depicting country is influenced more, as Dr. Lam writes, by its national perspective than by a desire to portray Japan as it actually is.I will comment on this theme by considering the general perspectives of many persons in two countries, the US and Malaysia, of the political and economic system of Japan and of Japan’s place in the world before and after the bursting of the Japanese bubble; and how such perspectives, often not quite accurate, say as much of the depicting countries as they of Japan,

Many Americans in the 1980s and the early 1990s were so impressed with the economic achievements of Japan that they began tosee Japan as a threat to their economic and technological supremacy. This perception was reinforced also by the belief of many Americans that their economy then was losing its competitiveness globally. As a consequence,many Americans developed the picture of a Japanese political and economic system that on one hand was so well managed that it could prove a model to the United States, while on the other hand, was poised to conquer the United States in key sectors of the US market. That system was also providing the capacity for the Japanese to buy up America. Such a depiction of course exaggerated Japanese prowess. It underplayed the fact that while Japan was strong in many of its industries that were geared towards the export sector, therewere many weaknesses in the JapaneseSmall and Medium Industries and in the Japanese distribution system that greatly attenuated Japanese economic strength. Nor was the image of a Japan buying up America quite in accord with reality. Japan made some, if somewhat high profile, purchases in America in this period. But such purchases were few and far between and could not be considered in any objective sense to mean Japan was buying up America. In fact in the late 1980s, at the height of the US fear of Japanese financial power, Japanese investment in the US only ranked second to the British.

Then the US image of Japan changed after the 1990s with the bursting of the bubble. More confident of their economic competitiveness, especially of the perceived ability of the US economy to adapt to the information revolution, many Americans not only no longer viewed Japan as a modelbut began to see the Japanese political and economic system as one that was so badly managed that it needed to be reformed for Japan to recover from its economic stagnation and play its rightful role in the international economy.Thus, just as many Americans overestimated Japanese prowess before the early 1990s, many now underestimate Japanese economic strength. For all the bursting of the bubble, Japan is still the second largest economy in the world and fiercely competitive in many key industries such as for example in the motor car industry.

The gap is also found in the American perception of the Japanese role in the international arena. Before the early 1990s, many Americans, fearful that Japan could marginalize the US in Asia, thought that Japan was tryingto establish a Pax Nipponica in Asia. Such a view of course did not accord with reality as it overestimated Japanese strengthand incorrectly judged that Japan had any desire to create an empire in Asia.However, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme in the period after the early 1990s. Japan is seen now by many Americans and indeed by many Japanese also as a country that is increasingly marginal to Asia, at least as compared to a rising China. This view is encapsulated in the saying that ‘Japan bashing’ has moved to ‘Japan passing” and finally will move to ‘Japan nothing”, such saying suggesting that Japan is now not even consequential enough for America to bash. This again has no correspondence to reality. While Japan has little capacity to establish a Pax Nipponica, it still is an important country in Asia. This can be seen in comparison with China. China for example lacks the technological and corporate strengths that Japan can deploy in Asia, strengths that are important in aiding the industrialization of the Asian countries that host Japanese direct investment. Moreover, Japan, with the highest reserves in the world, can mobilize capital to help Asian countries that might need it. This is seen in the Miyazawa Plan where Japan mobilized US$30 billion to help Asian countries stricken by the Asian financial crisis. While China is now fast closing up to Japan in the amount of foreign reserves it has accumulated, it will be unlikely or unwilling to be able to offer money anywherenear the amount Japan can for the purposes of aid. China, if it channels big amounts of capital outside China, will likely do so primarily for investment in the extraction of natural resources.

If many Americans saw the dazzling economic performance of Japanbefore the bubble bursting as a threat, Malaysians, particularly the Prime Minister of Malaysia then, Dr, Mahathir Mohamad, saw it more as a model to emulate. This view was also influenced by the Malaysian situation.In around the period of the 1980s when Mahathir took over as Prime Minister of Malaysia he was looking for a new model of development for Malaysia. The two existing models, the laissez faire of the Anglo- Saxon variety and the command economies of the socialist type held no fascination for him.He was not very pro-British and at any rate, he feared the laissez faire model, with little distributional element in it, would only increase the gap between the rich and poor, and thus aggravate a racial divide in a country where this socioeconomic divide corresponds to a great extent with a racial divide.On the other hand, the socialist command economies would involve too big a social upheaval for Malaysians to tolerate. What is more they were not very successful in bringing about economic growth. So Mahathir looked at the booming economies of Northeast Asia and decided that Japan should be the model to follow.

Mahathirattributed Japanese success to theexistence of “Japan Incorporated” (hence, he adopted this model for Malaysia calling it “Malaysia Incorporated”).Essentially in the Malaysian case, Mahathir saw Japan Incorporated as one where , unlike what he perceived to be in the case of the laissez faire system, government and the private sector were not confrontational towards each other. In particular, he was somewhat enamoured with what he considered to be the success of Japanese industrial policy where government can select sunrise industries for development and can phase out sunset industries. While Mahathir may have been right about the non-confrontational government-private sector relationship in Japan, he had been less accurate about the success of industrial policy in Japan. Many sunrise industries developed in Japan then without being picked by the bureaucracy. And indeed the practice of Industrial policy was not very successful in Malaysia. Some of the heavy industries, such as steel making that the Malaysian government encouraged did not turn out to be successful.

With the bursting of the bubble and the subsequent revelations of the inefficiencies and indeed the corruption found in Japan Incorporated, Malaysia is no longer that enthusiastic about the model. Mahathir was quoted as saying that Malaysia will still follow the Japanese model if only to see where it has gone wrong! It is not sure whether this statement by Mahathir suggests he believes that the Japanese model is a total failure. Some Malaysians however do. And in this respect, they are not quite correct. For while the Japanese model can no longer dazzle the world in its economic performance it can still serve to maintain social stability and national identity.

Japanese Soft Power

Some presenters have spoken of the popularity of Japanese pop culture in their home countries. Professor Laurence writes of the popularity of the anime phenomenon where Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh have become staples for American kids. And Dr. Lam writes of Japan as a cultural and pop phenomenon becoming quite popular in Singapore in the post -bubble economy. What does this say about the soft power of Japan? I agree with the two presenters that there is a limit to the appeal of this kind of softpower. For one,as Professor Laurence suggests, the provenance of many of thehippiest and widely watched Japanese made shows in America is not entirely clear to American viewers. Many of such viewers do not instantly associate them with Japan. Also, Dr. Lam believes that the soft power appeal of Japan to Singapore is mainly confined to Japanese food and fashion, hardly the kind of appeal that can be translated into political leadership and influence in Singapore or for that matter, in the rest of Southeast Asia.

Yet as Joseph Nye, he who is most associated with the concept of soft power, points out, Japanese soft power consists of more than pop culture.¹ Japanese high culture is another soft power resource. He points to the Tokyo String Quartet as one of the world’s finest ensembles and the attractiveness of its traditional spiritual disciplines such as Zen Buddhism and Japanesemartial arts. He also points to other measures of soft power that Japan scores well such as ranking first in the world in the number of patents; taking second place globally in life expectancy, the number of internet hosts and international aid; fourth world wide in expenditure and development (as a percent of GDP);and being home to three of the top 25 multinational brands(Toyota, Honda and Sony).

Nye points out however that sometimes“the greatest source of soft power comes simply from the powerful attractiveness of an open and affluent society”, and such a society should, in the words of John Winthrop, an early English settler in Massachusetts, serve as “‘a city upon a hill’ that would shine like a beacon for the rest of the world to emulate.”² And in this respect I will argue that the softpower of Japan could have been at its height in the pre- bubble period, especially in the late 1970s and the 1980s when Japan was that ‘city on the hill’ when its model was widely emulated in Asia and was even pushed as a model for the US by professors like Ezra Vogel. The essence of this appeal, as suggested earlier, was the model’s ability to combine strong economic growth with the maintenance of social stability and national identity. That model is now no longer an object of emulation, no longer deemed to be that successful in an age of globalisation. Hence the softpower of Japan is considerably reduced, at least as far as Asia is concerned.

In this connection, it maybe pertinent to consider the China comparison. One thing that strikes me that despite the growing influence of China and particularly its tremendous socioeconomic achievements like impressive economic growth for more than 20 years, the removal of 400 million Chinese from abject poverty since the 1980s, the tremendous increase in personal incomes and so on,(every bit as impressive, if not more, as the Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s), China as a model never really caught on in Asia in the way the Japanese model did. To be sure,China as a model during the Maoist era caught on in many developing countries but few are pushing the present Chinese political and economic system as a model for Asia. There maybe many reasons for this. One may include the fact that China is still a developing country and still poor as compared to many Asian countries. It has not been able yet to show a way to the developed status that many Asian countries crave. Compare this to Japan which was already very well developed when its model was being emulated. It may also be that China is not democratic while Japan was in the Post war period. But I suspect the deeper reason is the fact that the present Chinese model is not original; that it is a variant of the Japanese model of using the state to ensure economic growth and social stability and national identity. After all, China since 1978 has made no secret that it is trying to learn from the Asian tigers which themselves learned from the Japanese model.

In short, Japan can claim a copyright to its model which as stated earlier issomething different from the laissez faire approach and the command economy approach, a third way if you like. It had been successful in guidingJapan and many Asian countries to industrialization.If Japan can use this model to succeed in the age of globalisation, it can once again be a model for emulation, and thus achieving the height of soft power again.

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1. “The Soft Power of Japan” by Joseph S. Nye. Jr. in Gaiko Forum, Japanese Perspectives on Foreign Affairs, Summer 2004 Volume 4, Number 2(Toshi Shuppan, Tokyo) pg.4
2. Ibid, Pg.6

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Profile

Lee Poh Ping
B. A. First Class, University of Malaya,1967; Phd in Government, Cornell University, 1974
Professor Lee Poh Ping is Principal Fellow of the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, National University of Malaysia. He had previously been Professor and Head of the Department of Political and Administrative Studies, University of Malaya. He has been the President of the Malaysian Association of Japanese Studies since 2000 andwas also Chairman of the Malaysian American Commission of Educational Exchange in the years 2001 and 2003 His research interests are wide. Presently, he is researching on Malaysian relations with the countries of Northeast Asia, in particular Japan. He has recently co-authored a book on the Japanese model in Malaysia with Dr. Khadijah Khalid Whither the Look East Policy(National University of Malaysia Press, 2003)

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