might well be no. For instance, in early 2015, the Institute of International Education found that the trend toward fewer and fewer Japanese going abroad to study was continuing. In 2008, the number of Japanese studying in America (30,000) was only about 60 percent of the number that had been there ten years previously. In 2015, this number fell by 50 percent. In other words, compared to the 50,000 Japanese students who had been studying in America in 1998, there were now only 15,000. This was not because more Japanese students were going to places like Australia or China; those countries also reported declining numbers of Japanese exchange students. The fact was that in an age of increasing internationalization and globalization, the young generation had less and less interest in learning about the outside world, and was not as well-equipped to deal with it.
Research between 2000 and 2010 by university analysts for publishers like Benesse indicated that Japan’s young people were now less adventurous and less willing to take risks than their elders. There seemed to be fear that with widening gaps in society between rich and poor, making a mistake at a young age could prevent one from moving up or could even push one disastrously down. Thus ambition was muted.
Furthermore, as media strategist Mariko Sanchanta wrote in 2013, quoting a top executive of a Japanese bank, “It is impossible to persuade young bank executives to study abroad even if they are fully funded by the bank. They’re concerned about falling behind their peers if they go overseas.” Young people also seemed to think of Japan as safe and of other countries as dangerous. Books like Mitsuko Takahashi’s Don’t Let Your Daughter Study Abroad, published in 2007, fanned this fear. In a survey completed in 2012, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology had found that fully 60 percent of Japanese students were not interested in studying abroad. The main reason, cited by 52 percent of the students surveyed, was insufficient foreign language capability. This was closely related to the second reason, cited by 31 percent of students—inability to make friends and concern for the safety of the environment in which they might have to live. Thus, despite their high PISA scores, it seemed that a generation of Japanese students was being educated in such a way as to make them less capable of dealing with the outside world on which Japan’s future depended.
This contrasted dramatically to the trends in most other countries, where the number of students studying abroad was multiplying rapidly. Thus, in 2011, even as the number of Japanese students in America was declining, the number of Chinese students there rose by more than 40 percent to 156,000. The total number of international students in the United States in that year was 723,000, an increase of about 5 percent from the previous year. Japan seemed to be going against the flow. Significantly, the decline was more pronounced among male than female students, reflecting the fact that corporate sponsorship of overseas study had declined sharply. Men were led to view overseas study as a greater risk to their careers than did women, perhaps because the women knew that the big corporations were not going to hire them in any case.
SONY MERGES WITH SAMSUNG
Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the once-fabled companies of Japan, Inc. had steadily lost ground to competitors in Asia, the United States, and Europe. Number two Japanese automaker Nissan had to be rescued by bringing in a foreign CEO and forging a close joint venture and partnership with France’s Renault. In 2012, once-mighty Panasonic recorded the biggest losses of all time for any Japanese company. Sharp and Toshiba also recorded record losses; while Hitachi managed to revitalize itself, it did so only by dramatically downsizing. Former semiconductor stalwarts Elpida and Renesas came close to bankruptcy, and had to be rescued by some of their US competitors, along with the Japanese government.
Most significant, both symbolically and substantively, was the merger of Japan’s fabled Sony with Korea’s Samsung Electronics late in 2016. This was a huge shock for the Japanese public. Sony had for years epitomized Japanese industrial and technological leadership. While many old-guard Japanese companies had grown by establishing dominant positions in the relatively protected Japanese market and then branching out overseas, Sony had been global from the beginning. Its CEO and chairman, Akio Morita, had become fluent in English and prominent as an international statesman-CEO. While he had not always been in Japan’s inner circle, he had always been in the world’s inner circle; Sony, like Apple in its heyday, became synonymous with bold innovation, style, and quality.
By 2013, however, Sony had been looking and acting a lot like previously failing American companies such as Kodak and Motorola. It sold its headquarters building and began investing in new fields such as medical technology. It lost money in its traditional digital electronics, game, video, and mobile phone businesses, while making money on financial services and music. Traditionally regarded in the same way as a company like Apple, priding itself on the regular introduction of new hit products that created whole new industries, Sony hadn’t had a hit in eighteen years, and seemed to be moving in a less global, more parochial, and less innovative direction.
A few hundred miles across the Sea of Japan in Korea, the situation was just the opposite. Whether it was smartphones, television sets, components, or flat-panel displays, Sony simply couldn’t compete with the super-aggressive Korean giants. Rather than continuing to try to fight them, Sony decided to join them. In September of 2016, the company announced it was being taken over by Samsung and would henceforth be known as Samsung-Sony, or S&S for short.
INERTIA INTO ACTION
Since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when Japan opened up to the West for the first time, the Japanese political system had evolved to resemble that of France. In both countries, a powerful central bureaucracy had come to monopolize taxation, spending, and regulatory powers at the expense of the regional prefectures over which it ruled. Indeed, the centralization in Tokyo was such that, in addition to central government and political parties, virtually all major business, labor, academic, and media organizations maintained their headquarters in the city.
While Japan’s economy was collapsing, its energy supply disappearing, and its security becoming increasingly uncertain, life at the local level was also ever more difficult and unbearable. Changing the location of a stop sign in Osaka, for example, could require obtaining permission from several Tokyo-based agencies. Parents spent half the day getting their young children to and from the very limited number of government-approved child-care facilities available. Older children in elementary, middle, and high schools were not being well prepared for the modern world because centrally regulated curriculums were outdated. On top of all this, the fear of nuclear accidents in vulnerable local areas sparked a grassroots political reaction that quickly evolved into a broader movement opposing the central government.
Clearly Japan needed a fundamental revitalization program. Could it develop such a program in the face of deeply rooted inertial forces? No one really knew the answer to that question, but history suggested that it was possible. Twice in the past century and a half, Japan had reinvented itself: once in the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s, when Japan had been forced to open up by Commodore Matthew Perry and his Black Ships; and again in the wake of World War II and the US occupation of Japan.
The crises now facing Japan were every bit as existentially threatening as those of the Meiji and post–World War II periods. Thus any renaissance program would have to be as revolutionary as the two forerunners, if not more so. It had become clear that half measures and delay were only exacerbating the problems. In light of this consciousness, after the national elections of 2016, the Diet legislated the creation of a kind of new Iwakura Mission, the Meiji-era task force that traveled abroad to find ideas for reinventing Japan. To this body, called the Extraordinary National Revitalization Commission, were appointed representatives from all elements of Japanese society—political, business, academic, regional, media, social, agricultural—and even some foreigners familiar with Japan. Their task, like that of the Iwakura Mission, was to develop a program for revitalizing the country.
CHAPTER 3
Pax Pacifica
