Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (41 page)

That’s where China came in. Beijing’s uncompromising stance over the Senkaku had convinced Abe more than ever that Japan needed to huddle closer to the US. That was one of the reasons he had agreed to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He wanted a seat at the table where international rules were being debated. If Japan were to be taken seriously, it would have to arrest its economic decline. The idea of
fukoku kyohei
, ‘rich country, strong army’, went back to the Meiji Restoration, where it became the rallying cry of Japan’s modernization.
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Without a strong economy, how could Japan hope to fulfil Abe’s election pledge of spending more on defence? More fundamentally, how could it expect to be taken seriously in the world, to command the respect and status it had been so desperately seeking for 150 years?

Abe had made the link crystal clear during his 2013 visit to Washington to see Barack Obama when he had declared Japan would never be a ‘second-tier country’. He gave a speech, entitled ‘Japan is Back’, in which he time and again made the connection between economic muscle and national security. ‘Japan must stay strong, strong first in its economy, and strong also in its national defence,’ he declared. ‘I will bring back a strong Japan, strong enough to do even more good for the betterment of the world.’
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Abenomics, then, was made in both Beijing and Tohoku. Yet it was not entirely a product of external or natural shocks. Contrary to common perception, Japan has not stood still in the twenty years since its bubble burst. Successive governments experimented with a multitude of policies, conventional and otherwise, to get the economy moving again. That they didn’t always work attests partly to their own failings and partly to the severity of the shock that the country suffered in 1990 when its property and equity bubbles collapsed. Japan’s labour market has since been turned upside down, not always comfortably so, especially for the young shut out of the job-for-life system. But the changes have allowed companies to adjust their wage bill
downwards without causing mass unemployment. The relationship between men and women has changed too as the certainties of the pre-bubble years have given way to more complex dynamics in more straitened times. So has the relationship between young and old, as traditional ideas are challenged and as economic realities bring the generations into conflict. Even politics have been remade. The rudiments of a two-party system have been set down, though the Liberal Democrats are now decisively back in power. Post-Koizumi, the urban electorate has more sway and political parties, which can no longer count on the loyalty of large blocks of voters, are obliged to spell out their platforms. These days they actually write manifestoes.

For all the talk of isolation, Japan’s companies are now more global than ever. The Toyota you’re driving is as likely to have been built in Tupelo, Mississippi as in Nagoya, Japan. There are some 1.2 million Japanese living abroad – some 140,000 in China alone – altogether twice the number in 1990 when Japan was supposedly at the height of its international influence. Likewise, for all the justified criticism about how closed Japan can be, there are more than 2 million foreign residents living in Japan today, nearly twice the level of twenty years ago.
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As if to underline Japan’s continued relevance, in September 2013 the International Olympic Committee selected Tokyo as the host of the 2020 Summer Olympics ahead of Madrid and Istanbul. Tales of Japan’s never-ending problems and continuing leaks at the Fukushima plant notwithstanding, the committee judged Tokyo the safest bet, rich and stable enough to host the Games with ease. In Japan, the decision was greeted by some as a vote of confidence in the country’s efforts to overcome years of stagnation and revive its fortunes.

Though we have got used to the idea of Japan’s inexorable economic decline, it remains quite comfortably the third-largest economy in the world, the size of the combined economies of Britain and France and three times the size of India’s. It is the richest economy of any size in Asia, its citizens, on average, eight times wealthier than the Chinese.
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For all its many problems, Japan remains the pre-eminent example of a non-western country catching up with advanced living standards.
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It seems a safe assumption that, whether Abenomics works or not, Japan will remain one of the world’s top five economies for several decades to come.

Just as in the 1980s, when Japan was wrongly assumed to be on the verge of economic supremacy, so in 2013 it has been prematurely written off. Two ‘lost decades’ and its manifold problems notwithstanding, reports of Japan’s demise are exaggerated.

Hong Kong, September 2013

1.
One of Commodore Perry’s Black Ships, as seen by a Japanese artist. The menacing boats became a symbol of the west’s powerful technology and its imperialist intent.

2.
Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835–1901), one of the greatest thinkers of the Meiji era. When he was born, Japan was isolated, hierarchical and feudal. By the time of his death, it was a modern state.

3.
Citizens of Edo take their revenge on Onamazu, a giant catfish blamed for the city’s
devastating earthquakes.

4.
The tsunami sweeps into the northeast coast of Japan. Scenes like this were repeated along a 250-mile stretch of coastline.

5.
Ofunato after the tsunami. It was not unusual to see boats washed up many hundreds of feet from the shoreline.

6.
Members of the Self Defence Forces were dispatched swiftly to the scene after the 2011 tsunami. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the government had been reluctant to deploy troops still associated with the war.

7.
Hiromi Shimodate and Yasuko Kimura scour the ruined landscape of Ofunato a few days after the tsunami.

8.
Happier times: Hiromi Shimodate and Yasuko Kimura re-establish Hy’s café in Ofunato’s temporary high street.

9.
Seizaburo Sato, 82, works amid the wreckage of his home after the 2011 tsunami. He lost one eye in a previous work-related accident.