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Letter from Japan: The Big Five-Oh
Right celebration, wrong country
By PETER McKILLOP
September 22, 1999
Web posted at 9 a.m. Hong Kong time, 9 p.m. EDT
Over the next month, there will be a lot of hoopla surrounding the celebration of 50 years of communism in China. Right celebration, wrong country-because if we are giving out prizes for the most successful socialist state of this century, the award must go to Japan, not China.
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If we forget, for a moment, the geopolitical rhetoric and focus just on economics, the choice is obvious. Just look behind China's colorful pageantry and Mao coffee cups, and all you have is a legacy of failed economic dreams, famine and a nation lobotomized by a brutal so-called Cultural Revolution. Japan, on the other hand, quietly developed the world's most advanced socialist state under the protection of the world's greatest capitalist state: the United States.
While Japan embraced "the free market" in ways that would have appalled Mao and Stalin, it did so to maintain a structure at home that would have made both green with envy. Led by highly educated bureaucrats, Japan created a social, political and economic utopia that fulfilled the ideal of any socialist leader: the betterment of the state at the sacrifice of personal freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
In Japan, everything from how your child was educated to how you were allowed to save your money was controlled from the top. National sacrifice was the highest form of achievement. How else can you explain families packed like rats in 20-sq-m rooms, two-hour commuter rides in cattle cars called subways and the near-total sacrifice required to work for a Japanese company?
What made Japan so successful was how it implemented its socialist state. Rather than lashing out at "imperialist" materialism, it deftly tapped into a nascent postwar consumer boom, and carefully calibrated its means of production to meet those needs. So while Mao was encouraging 100 useless pig-iron factories to bloom, the Japanese were building transistor radios, Nikon cameras and Sony Walkmans. Of course, all these were for export, not for the Japanese. Japanese consumers were asked to make the ultimate consumer sacrifice. Interest rates on savings were kept absurdly low in order to provide cheap money to finance export industry. High gasoline prices subsidized cheap diesel and heavy oil that fueled these ventures. Prices for consumer goods were double world rates in order to encourage saving-again, to create easy money for industry to use.
But like all good socialist states, this mercantile utopia came to an abrupt halt in the late 1980s with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of socialism as we know it. The system crashed, and Japan is still sifting through the rubble.
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