[Pen-l] Japan on the brink

LP posted an article by Andrew DeWit, in which DeWit concludes:

...many of the newly anti-market crowd are trumpeting "Edo" (old Tokyo)

society and even the Jomon Era (14,000-400 BC) as models for the

present, lauding their closeness to nature, stability, and community values.

One Jomon booster is a former free-market cheerleader who got his

economics PhD from Harvard and has been big in government deliberation

councils. Japan's public debate still hasn't cut through the nonsense of

idealizing the "free market" or the "unique Japanese" and come to focus

on what the public sector of this advanced, industrialized country needs

to be doing in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

JG sez:

I really can't say just how correct this socio-political diagnosis is,

but it does resonate with some other stuff I've read (from non-

Japanese authors like McCormack and Murphy). The Japanese

population at large is somewhat suspicious of the corrosive effects

of Koizumi's quasi-liberalization of the economy, but as a whole is

politically deactivated. The main rival to the LDP is no less neo-

liberal than the Koizumi-Aso faction of the LDP (although I'm not up

to speed on their latest ideological twists and turns in the face of

the crisis). The left has been shrinking for years and is now moribund.

Hence fanciful neo-traditional motifs ("beautiful country" idolatry, e.g.)

with ominous overtones (rising rancor against Chinese and Koreans for

raising what many regard as dead historical beefs, e.g.) appear to have

at least some cachet with a sizable segment of the population, and

their appeal is likely to sharpen as the crisis worsens. Or at the very

least I would be on the lookout for this.

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