Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Bureaucrat but also political visionary, poet, and amateur historian, Amaya was a senior official in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, one of the most powerful institutions in Japan. MITI helped decide in which industries Japan would concentrate its limited resources, which companies would receive vital government subsidies, and which potential imports Japan would discourage. There was no comparable agency in America, for in America, a rich country well endowed with farmland and minerals, there had never seemed much need to plan and regulate. Because Japan was poorly endowed with such things, Amaya was important in a way few American bureaucrats were. So critical to Japan were the central issues of trade that someone like Amaya, who had risen to a high level at MITI, was comparable to someone at the very highest level of America’s national security complex, like someone at a decision-making level at the State or Defense Department. If Amaya or one of his fellow bureaucrats at MITI decided that a certain policy on a crucial issue contributed to the greater long-range good of Japan, and if that policy went against the wishes of a group of leading industrialists, then in the end, after much subtle negotiation, Amaya and his colleagues would quite possibly win; they spoke for Japan and its future, and the industrialists spoke for a more narrow, parochial interest—the present, at best. Planning was an urgent fact of life in Japan, a country that a generation before had fought a disastrous war in no small part to secure its sources of oil and other essential materials. Because its population was so large, 117 million people in a small and infertile land, and because its desire to be a great industrial power was so strong, Japan had to plan everything. It could not afford to let events take their own course as America had for so much of the postwar era. A rise in commodity prices of the sort that might send a ripple of discomfort through the American economy could devastate the Japanese.

  Amaya was chosen from among the best products of the Japanese system. He was born in Fukui province in 1925 of farmers who managed a simple living on a small plot of land. His family, he later said, resembled the people once called yeomen in America—hardworking, uncomplaining, and proud. The first son of his grandfather was immune from the draft—his duty was to work the land—but Amaya’s father, the second son, went into the army and became a lieutenant general. He was away a great deal, and eventually he and Amaya’s mother divorced. The Amaya family held a council and decided that two-year-old Naohiro should be adopted by his oldest uncle, who had no children of his own. The arrangement was successful until his uncle’s wife died and he remarried and had children of his own. Amaya, then eleven, was returned to his real father. Because his father was away most of the time, Amaya boarded at a dormitory. He had a sense in later years that his independence stemmed from his having always been set apart. His father wanted him to go to a military academy in preparation for a career in the army, but a teacher argued that he would not fit into the mold and was better suited for intellectual pursuits. His father conceded and allowed the boy to go to a good local high school and then to Tokyo University, called Todai, the most prestigious of Japan’s universities.

  In America the ablest students were, as now, often restless and contentious, but this was rarely true of Japan, where the most valuable students proved their worthiness by accepting rigorous discipline without challenge or complaint. Western professors teaching in Japanese colleges for the first time were often worried by the lack of response in the classroom, fearing it meant that the students had not understood or that the language barrier was too great. However, it was simply that the students had been told that questioning authority was wrong. Teaching was more about molding egos than molding minds. But Todai was important as a symbol. Acceptance there almost guaranteed a young man, even one of modest means, like Amaya, a place on the great conveyor belt. The critical part of the delivery system was getting in. From then on a bright and eager young man could hardly fail to get a job in a ministry or large company. He did not even know if he had done well as a student until upon graduation he was accepted at MITI, one of the choice places for an enterprising young man. He enthusiastically accepted the job, because he had graduated right after the war and felt it his duty to help his country extricate itself from economic ruin.

  At MITI he gradually developed a reputation as a kind of one-man think tank. To many of those in authority he was an enfant terrible, an unlikely product of Todai, too sure of his skills and his intellect and short on the selflessness befitting a young man—a kozo, one of them told Chalmers Johnson, the Berkeley political scientist, using the Japanese word for a little squirt (although Johnson noted that it was also the word for a Buddhist monk who tells his superior a truth he does not want to hear in a less than reverential manner). At one point in the early sixties Amaya was exiled to a post in Australia for the dual sins, it appeared, of a lack of deference and an inadequate job of hiding his own intelligence. He was not especially popular among his peers at MITI either. Something of an outsider, he never rose to quite the level he should have within the ministry. It was considered a small payback for his arrogance. This did not bother Amaya. Whenever there were difficult negotiations, particularly with the Americans, his colleagues came to him. He had a good reputation with the Americans—for understanding American political realities and for being able to get Japanese support once a position was staked out. “He is the key man on their SWAT team,” said one American diplomat. “Whenever they’re in trouble, they go to Amaya.”

  In the United States, a land where so much opportunity awaits the graduates of the best schools and where the pressure for individual achievement is immense, the word “bureaucrat” is almost pejorative, implying, first, that someone who works for the government does so because he is unfit for the private sector and, second, that his duties consist largely of impeding the normal free-market efforts of his fellow citizens. But the civil service in Japan is different, more like that of the British tradition, in which distinguished officials put country above all else and are truly servants of her majesty’s realm. Japan’s civil servants are honored as few nations honor their officials. A businessman, no matter how much he accomplishes for the good of Japan, represents finally a selfish interest, but a top man in one of the choice ministries has pledged himself completely to the good of the nation. Nothing reveals this more than the word the Japanese have for the moment when a senior bureaucrat leaves one of the key ministries late in his career to be farmed out to a company—amakudari, which means that the bureaucrat has descended from heaven into the more plebian world of business. Although the top ministerial jobs do not pay particularly well, that in itself is an asset, for it shows that the official has no purpose other than serving the nation. Near the end of Amaya’s career in the ministry, Jim Abegglen, an American consultant in Tokyo, had dinner with him at a restaurant in the Ginza and asked him what his plans were.

  “I don’t have any,” Amaya replied.

  “Why not?” Abegglen, a little worried, asked.

  “Because,” he said simply, “MITI will take care of me.” And of course it was true; he was taken care of.

  The honored place held by a senior bureaucrat in Japan, as opposed to the status of a comparable American official, reflects the tremendous differences between the forms of capitalism in the two societies. In Japan, because there are so few resources, all rewards and profits must be shared. No one may become too rich, since his opulence would come at the expense of too many ordinary citizens. To ensure a fairly equal distribution of wealth, Japan developed not just a communal capitalism but a capitalism in which the arbiter of what is good for the nation is the high-level bureaucrat. In America it is assumed that capitalism is the right system. The immense prosperity of the postwar years made the possibility of a conflict between what was good for the individual capitalist and what was good for the nation seem inconceivable. “What’s good for General Motors,” Engine Charley Wilson more or less said (and was certainly credited with saying and probably meant), “is good for the country.” Therefore, American cap
italism evolved to benefit the individual, while the Japanese variety was tailored to benefit a more complicated assortment of interests.

  Amaya was someone special within the Japanese bureaucracy, a practicing intellectual who on occasion seemed more historian than bureaucrat. He was more willing than many of his colleagues to hold and pursue ideas that differed from current assumptions, and he always seemed to be thinking about either the past or the future. Characteristic of him were his remarks at a meeting of Japanese and American officials in the summer of 1983, a time when both nations were obsessed with the impact of Japan’s exports on America and when protectionist feeling was increasing at an alarming rate. That was not the problem, he said. Both nations were well equipped for the economic competition ahead; the pie was large enough for both to come out with viable industrial and high-technology economies. The real problem was what Japanese-American competition and cooperation might do to Western Europe, which was lagging in the contest for supremacy in high technology. It was, thought one of his American friends, typical of Amaya to be wondering about an issue farther down the road when everyone else was still concerned about a problem he had dealt with twelve years earlier. Most of Amaya’s contemporaries took their definition of Japan from that which was—the existing power structure of the nation. Amaya went beyond that. His loyalty was to a higher definition, Japan as it might be, the loftiest possible vision of the society. A colleague spoke admiringly of him as a man apart in a nation where few men were comfortable in a role that made them different. He seemed to have such faith in his own judgment as to wear his individualism with ease. As such a person, Amaya let criticism from mere politicians glance lightly off his back. When he was criticized in the Tokyo press, and he often was, harshly, he consoled himself that any truly worthy political act offended important people. Only the most conventional of decisions did not offend. The wiser the act, the more likely it was to cause displeasure. He was openly contemptuous of most politicians anyway. The stronger they were, the likelier they were to lust for power, usually, he suspected, at the expense of the national good. When he briefed members of the Diet, he seemed to take a deliberate pleasure in leaving nothing out of his briefing; it was, thought a friend, as if he were lecturing schoolchildren. He was, like all good senior servants of Japan, duly modest in public comportment, but there was about Amaya’s modesty a subtle prickliness. Dealing with him, hearing his cool and unsparing comments about his own society and observing his exceptional courtesy, visitors knew it was well not to ask any foolish questions. Those who opposed him on a given issue did so with a certain trepidation; they might enjoy superior political connections, but they could rarely argue as forcefully.

  Amaya was aware of this and seemed to enjoy his special position. On a flight to Washington for a summit conference, sitting in the front cabin among his minister-peers—who would be busily studying position papers for the coming meeting—Amaya almost surely would be reading instead some esoteric book on twelfth-century China. The implication was clear: The answers were not in those briefing papers, the answers were in the distant past. On the way back from the summit—while the others were preparing their reports—Amaya would sit there writing his haiku, a treasured Japanese form of poetry, each poem exactly seventeen syllables long. His haiku would be at once delicate and by implication political, perhaps describing his sorrow in seeing the decline of some great Western city.

  He loved, while relaxing, to describe the relative merits and perils of ancient Venice and modern Japan, two mercantile shipping societies surviving in a hostile world by their wits. That was Amaya being Amaya, letting the others know he was a little different. When his daughter married, he did not, as was the custom, lay on a huge wedding to which all of his colleagues were invited. Instead only close friends of the two families were asked. Some of his senior colleagues considered it a snub. When he visited MITI bureaus in foreign cities, he did not, as did most Japanese officials, bring some small gift, offered more out of ritual than friendship. If he brought anything it was likely to be an inscribed book of his own poems. Among younger MITI officials, these books were greatly valued, for to them Amaya was almost a cult figure; they appreciated the fact that when they made their presentations he paid less attention to their place in the hierarchy than to the substance of their arguments.

  The Japanese economy, Amaya recognized in the late sixties, was perched on something terribly volatile, the world price of oil. What was worse, its oil came from sources that were totally alien to Japan. Only Arab sheiks, Texas oilmen, and acts of God could determine the price of oil, Amaya liked to say, and they were all beyond Japanese control. As MITI’s director of planning, he was asked in the late sixties by one of his superiors to study the energy situation, and the more he studied it, the more pessimistic he became. More and more countries, he decided, were coming into what he had called “the oil culture”; that is, they were making their economies, indeed their very way of life, dependent upon oil. He believed that sooner or later the price would explode, perhaps doubling or even quadrupling, and if that happened, it would devastate the Japanese economy, virtually unique in the developed world in that it resembled a colonial economy without colonies. The Japanese imported raw materials, negotiating masterfully to minimize the price, used a skilled but (by the standards of Western and developed nations) modestly paid work force to produce at home, and then exported finished goods with a fury at cut-rate prices. Thus any significant changes in the price of oil could throw a finely tuned system completely out of kilter. What was worrisome to Amaya was that in the late sixties and early seventies Japan was taking roughly 10 percent of the free world’s oil; if his country continued at its current rate of growth, Amaya believed, it might soon be taking 20 percent. Thus in order to justify its rate of growth and pay for the immense amounts of energy it was now consuming, it would have to export more and more goods. To Amaya, there was the danger that this would make the Japanese economy, already close to being overheated, genuinely frenzied.

  What was more, there was political hazard in all this. Amaya realized, though most of his countrymen did not, that Japan’s success with its exports did not endear it to its Western trading partners, all of which seemed to be undergoing considerable stress in their industrial sectors and most of which were frustrated by their own inability to penetrate the Japanese market. If Japan pushed even harder with exports, then it was likely to cross the line between what was healthy for Japan economically and what was dangerous for Japan politically.

  In short, Amaya concluded, Japan was becoming a hostage to oil. He believed that this was as perilous as a military miscalculation might have been in another age. Since there was only a limited supply of oil in the world, the price was bound to go up dramatically one day. It might happen overnight, he thought, a kind of oil shock. Amaya himself did not know the form of the shock, or what would trigger it, but he knew where the epicenter would be. The Muslim states of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Libya, in his view, either were hostile in culture and politics or, if friendly, had fragile governments. It was frightening to be dependent for one’s industrial lifeblood on nations such as these. Therefore, in the late sixties, at just about the same time that Japan had arrived as a true member of the oil culture, Amaya resolved that it must start shifting its economy from the traditional heavy industries, which demanded so much oil, into the new high-technology industries, which used far less.

  There was an additional reason for Amaya to propose this shift. The great surge in the Japanese economy had come during the fifties and sixties, when a considerable part of its competitive advantage was due to highly disciplined, inexpensive labor. That era was ending, however, as Japan became middle-class. The same dynamic that had functioned in the West was at work in Japan, no matter how hard the nation’s fathers tried to control the economy and master inflation. The more successful it became, the more the standard of living went up and the more prosperous and better paid its workers became. That meant that there w
as a serious possibility that the very thing the Japanese had done to the West might now in turn be done to them by their neighbors, countries like Korea or Singapore, where the work force was even more disciplined, hungrier, and willing to labor for a good deal less. Much earlier, Amaya had handled the textile negotiations with the Americans. He had done that well, but he had learned a profound lesson by the time the session ended: Not only did America need protection from the Japanese, but the Japanese also needed protection from Taiwan and Singapore. He was a disciple of the English historian Arnold Toynbee, and this experience had strengthened Toynbee’s influence on him. In the world of challenge and response, Japan could easily become vulnerable at the more primitive end of its economy to a nation like Korea.

  By the seventies there were in fact considerable signs that the much-despised Koreans (for the Japanese, having colonized the Koreans, still regarded them as inferior) were about to make a major challenge in steel and shipbuilding. It would not be hard, Amaya thought, for the Koreans to mount a successful assault upon the Japanese in many of these smokestack industries. The true strength of Japan, faced with such a challenge from leaner, poorer neighbors, was in the educational level of its people, which was dramatically higher than that of its rivals’ populations. The only abundant Japanese natural resource, in his own phrase, was the human brain. Japan’s educational level—all the millions of dollars the nation had poured into its universities in order to mount a scientific and technological challenge to the West—translated directly into the difference between the old economy, a smokestack economy, and the new high-technology economy. The Koreans and others might be able to compete quite readily in steel and shipping and perhaps one day even in autos, but they would be far behind in the new world of computers and related industries. They simply lacked sufficient numbers of skilled scientists. Japan with its communal, state-guided capitalism would be able to funnel its most talented people into precisely the kind of education and jobs where they might do the nation the most good. That would be Amaya’s mission.