Session 147: Capitalisms, Modernities, and the Japanese State

Organizer and Discussant: Mark Metzler, University of Texas, Austin

Chair: Bai Gao, Duke University

Keywords: Japan, political economy, developmentalism, planning, modernity.

Developmentalism—consciously planned, nationally competitive modernization—has been a striking feature of state policy in Japan since the Meiji Restoration, and Japan’s experience is a case in a worldwide process. Often implicitly, analysts have tended to conceptualize the policy process one-dimensionally, with self-organizing American marketism at one pole, centrally planned Soviet bureaucratism at the other, and a debate about Japan (with Germany) in the middle. Actual experience in Japan and in these archetypal models and rivals is missed in such idealized either-or formulations. Especially missed is the salience of state planning for building markets and of markets for building state power.

Participants in this panel examine several critical moments when the dominant policy regime was in flux and new models of capitalism and modernity were under construction: the foundation of a modern industrial economy in the 1880s, when struggles within the Meiji state’s "economic planning" apparatus defined the goals and limits of a state-supported private-enterprise system; the international capitalist crisis of the 1930s and early 1940s, when both German and Soviet practice provided operational models in the drive to build a planned, technocrat-led "new order" and Japan’s postwar reconstruction, when planners discovered and sold to the public a new science of economic growth.

By keeping paper presentations brief, we plan to bring the audience into the discussion from early in the session. We also invite interested scholars to contact us in advance concerning what we conceive as an ongoing project.

Bridling Capitalism: Private Enterprise and State Activism in Early Meiji Japan

John Sagers, Linfield College

In 1881, the Meiji state sold to private entrepreneurs the model factories and other enterprises it had developed in the previous decade. This was a pivotal decision in the evolution of the government’s economic ideology and it generated considerable debate. In memoranda on financial policy, Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi articulated a vision of Japanese capitalism with the government’s role reduced to providing stable currency and banking systems, commercial financing for exporters, and guidance in improving quality of exports. Okuma Shigenobu and Ito Hirobumi proposed to create the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce to make the government’s industrial promotion efforts more efficient. Maeda Masana, an official in this new ministry, completed his multivolume "Opinion on the Encouragement of Industry" in 1884. Maeda feared small rural industries that produced most of Japan’s exports could not survive cutbacks in government assistance. An analysis of these policy documents illuminates a key shift in the Meiji government’s approach to economic development. The government withdrew from managing industries not related to defense or infrastructure. Private enterprise was firmly established as the ordering principle of the Japanese economy. Yet, officials remained committed to providing capital and technical assistance to private entrepreneurs in export industries. The policy debates surrounding the sale of government industries contributed to a synthesis of free-market capitalism and government activism that would characterize Japanese economic ideology for decades to come.

Coming to Terms: Economic Planning in the USSR and Japan in the 1930s

Katalin Ferber, Waseda University

With the disappearance of the Berlin Wall and the recent joining of the European Union by most of the ex-socialist countries in Europe, there has been a revival of academic interest in the anatomy of the socialist planned economies. Among the results is the concept of comparing the capitalist and socialist economies instead of contrasting them. On the basis of this new approach, I analyze a critical transformation period in Japan and the USSR when systematic economic planning was a special answer to the serious crisis of the classic (liberal) economic world order. Japan early recognized the potential of systematic economic planning (discovered in German strategic military planning and Soviet command economic planning) and soon utilized a new, third type of economic plan. Colonized Manchuria became the first "testing" territory where systemic economic planning was the most important economic and financial means to achieve rapid, heavy-industrial economic growth.

Whilst the USSR achieved one of the most rapid and highest rates of economic growth at the time of the First Five Year Plan, Japan took a gradual approach and invented economic and financial planning based on private-public ownership. I also offer some theoretical comparisons between the two systems and their institutional settings.

Overcoming the Modern: German Economics and Japanese Bureaucrats in Wartime Japan

Janis Mimura, State University of New York, Stony Brook

By the 1930s Japan had transformed itself into a formidable industrial and military power, commanding an expanding empire in East Asia. For Japanese bureaucrats, the temporal gap between the advanced countries and Japan had been narrowed. Their perception of the opportunities and advantages of "followership" was being replaced by an urgent desire to move beyond the existing capitalist order and chart a new course that could ensure Japan’s autonomy and influence in the future world system. While Japan’s social bureaucrats of the Meiji had looked to the social policy thought of Weimar Germany to address the ills of capitalism, their technocratic-oriented successors turned to more reactionary, national socialistic interpretations advocated by German and Austrian economists such as Werner Sombart, Othmar Spann, and Gottl-Ottlilienfeld to devise a new form of capitalism.

As technocrats, the reform bureaucrats represented the cutting edge of the modern in interwar and wartime Japan. They were administrative experts who sought to effect greater rationalization of Japanese society and the economy, architects of a total war system, and the most outspoken advocates of scientific and technological advance. The reform bureaucrats were also the leading proponents of fascism in Japan. They viewed fascism as a more attractive model of modernity than those of liberalism and socialism and a means to "overcome the modern." The ideologues of the group, Môri Hideoto and Okumura Kiwao, were strongly influenced by the fascist economic vision of German National Socialism. Through their writings, intellectual debate, and plans for a domestic "New Order," these bureaucrats sought to create a new type of capitalism that would be organized by function rather than class, and driven by ethnic national goals and the logic of technology, rather than profits. In this vision, technology would play a pivotal role in enabling Japan to transcend the modern.

Science and the Visual Imagination of Post-World War II Developmentalism

Scott O’Bryan, Indiana University

While wartime bureaucrats may, in John Dower’s words, have "stepped lightly across the surrender and continued to administer the postwar state," they could only do so by articulating a revised technocracy appropriate to a "new," open Japan. Revisiting the historical record of state intervention, planners laid the groundwork for a reinvigorated vision of economic management that continued earlier modernist ideals and extended them based on an enlarged palette of technical knowledge and practices. Addressing the postwar apotheosis of economics within the social sciences, this paper examines a specifically postwar faith in the ability of the state and private enterprise to shape national economies and ensure material "progress."

This faith was supported by two intersecting developments. The first was a postwar preoccupation with producing applied social knowledge that would now be truly scientific for the first time. In regard to the science of economic statecraft, technocrats looked not only to the USSR but also to the United States as a postwar metropole of planning. Planning as science, they argued, moreover, required a fortified state system of statistical production that would rely on adding machines and, later, computers. Such new statistics as GNP became part of a national post-imperial vocabulary and were packaged to visually represent the progress of the postwar nation—and eventually, by the late 1960s and 1970s, to model and predict dystopias of progress.