Japan — through Marxist eyes

Press, 12 May 1984, Page 20

Japan — through Marxist eyes

Classes in Contemporary Japan. By Rob Steven. Cambridge University Press, 1984. 357 pp. $45.50.

(Reviewed by

Bruce Roscoe

in Tokyo)

Lifetime employment, harmony among workers, company welfare, cooperation rather than confrontation — such is the language Japan Inc. likes to use in explaining why it gets top marks in business. Managers think nothing of eating in the same cafeteria as blue-collar workers, for Japanese do not discriminate, at least among themselves. Eighty per cent or more of the population say they are middle class, so everyone must get a more or less equal piece of the economic pie. And, of course, Japanese are unique. Foreigners should not ever attempt or hope to understand them because it is beyond the scope of their intellect to fathom the Japanese mind. To compensate for this inherent deficiency, many large Japanese companies now see as a corporate role the need to invest huge sums in public relations campaigns that explain why Japan is Japan. Myth-making has become more than a popular pastime in Japan. It is big business. Multi-million dollar contracts are let by the Japanese Government and by corporations to sustain or create sets of national imaes whose only criterion for accuracy is the design specifications of the sponsor. “Classes in Contemporary Japan” by Rob Steven, senior lecturer in political science at Canterbury University, probably does more to correct government and corporate-inspired mythology on economic conditions in Japan today than any other recent serious work on Japan. It punctures accounts by even academically inclined authors — Ezra Vogel (Japan as No. 1) comes to mind — who have been hypnotised by the public relations pendulum. Steven dissects Japan, examines each component, and concludes that a rebellion is brewing against exploitative class forces. This is a thoroughly Marxist analysis, but more than that, it is a convincing sociological expose of hardships endured by Japan’s working class, specifically women. No apologies are needed for the approach: if it takes the requirements of Marxist study to assemble an array of information (over 172 tables) that offers this degree of insight into the workings of Japan, then more such studies are needed. Steven divides Japan into an economically active set of five classes: bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, middle, and working

classes, comprising, respectively, 21.7, 14.1, 7.5, 7.4, and 49.3 per cent of the population over the age of 15. He assesses the changing relationships among these distinctive groupings and discovers a state of crisis: monopoly capital, the tool of the bourgeoisie that harnesses the working class and extracts from their labour a “social surplus,” is beset by a “malfunctioning of the capitalist mode of production” that, in Japan’s case, has been spurred on by rising oil costs and recession. This does not mean that revolution is at Japan’s doorstep. “A capitalist crisis,” Steven says, “is no more than a breakdown of certain functional requirements of a capitalist system, and they could just as easily be replaced by new ways of achieving thesame end as by a transition to a new systsem of social relations.” Steven further admits that Japan’s working class has a long way to go before it can be unified to the extent necessary to outweigh the forces of the bourgeoisie that continually set out to fragment it. A revolutionary movement is building up, but it needs a solid base of mass organisation to sustain itself. Neither the Japan Communist Party nor the Japan Socialist Party, according to Steven, are likely to be at the centre of revolutionary change because of their patriarchal and bureaucratic forms of organisation. Patriarchy is of particular concern to Steven. Conceding that “modes of production tell us little about the roots of women’s oppression,” he ventures beyond strictly Marxist boundaries and offers an original analysis of the place of women in Japan’s class system. Women have moved into the bottom layers of Japan’s class structure, replacing the men who move upward. Even though “advanced production forces” allow workers more freedom to move into less exploitative class positions, patriarchy assures that the majority of these workers are men. To cement women in their low status, the Socialist movement itself continues to exclude female participation. On the periphery of Steven’s analysis are acute observations of living and working conditions; these of course are marshalled to support his argument of crisis, but they are valuable as a social record in their own right and will make the book worth reading, even for those who regard Marxist scholarship as outmoded or unpersuasive. Many whole families still work long hours for incomes lower than most wage labourers get (notice the suburban Tokyo fruit and vegetable store that is

still open at 11.30 p.m.). Land prices have rocketed to the extent that children inherit their parents’ house mortgages. In the chapter on what Steven calls the peasantry, there is a superb description of the real function of Nokyo, Japan’s agricultural cooperatives union, a business empire that has created 300 companies and, Steven argues, neatly ties farmers in with the ruling Liberal-Democratic Party. The section on functions of social control contains a frightening appraisal of Japan’s police force which has “reached a level of repressive capability that is equal to what existed in the prewar period.” Some of Steven’s interpretations are equally revealing. He implies that State welfare is backward because big companies pressure the Government to keep it backward. That way, they can provide their own welfare services such as housing and medical care, thus bind workers to the company and nurture a sense of loyalty. Employees of small firms, which cannot afford to do the same, miss out, and the majority of Japanese workers are employed by small-scale enterprises. Though the book contains a wealth of statistical information, some of the figures are inaccurate. In the table “Home ownership and money value of homes, by type of household, 1970,” for example, the unit for the average value of homes is given as one million yen whereas it should be 10 million. A corporate executive’s home in 1970 would have cost around 30 million yen, not three million yen. At the risk of niggling, transliterations of Japanese words need checking, too. “Tokkaido,” for instance, should be Tokaido for the main trunk railway. Also, it should be pointed out that the Ohira Cabinet did not fall because of the Prime Minister’s death, but because of the passage of a non-confidence motion in the lower house. Mr Ohira died during the re-election campaign. But such mistakes are few and do not detract from the merits of this work. The book’s most unfortunate drawback, however, is the code in which it is written. For readers unschooled in the theories of Hegel and Marx, it needs deciphering, for the language of such theorists is a language unto itself. Most social phenomena to which Steven alludes are blanketed in terminology such as “antagonism, contradiction, struggle, hegemony.” These terms connote meanings readily apparent only to students of dialectical materialism. This is not a fault of the book; one cannot criticise a Marxist critique for being Marxist. But it is unfortunate, because Steven’s unrelenting adherence to a language that is tedious, clinical, and complicated is likely to deprive this remarkable work of the large audience that it deserves.