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Japan's Howard Zinn

Life in Japan

Like the author of the immensely popular A People's History of the United States, Japanese political commentator Minoru Morita weaves a deep sense of history into all his writing. He is just 10 years younger than the 85-year-old Zinn, and he is just as productive, having published close to 40 books in Japanese. There are differences, of course, but Morita's writing has that sharp insight and knack for showing history in a different light that Zinn has also made a career on.

I've had the pleasure of translating Mr. Morita's weekly column since the first of the year. I've done a lot of translation through the years, but I've almost never come across a job where I'm nodding my head in agreement and chuckling as I write. Translating can be a frustrating job, but translating Mr. Morita's writings made me realize what a fruitful career it could be — as long as you're translating those writers that speak to you.

The following examples of Morita's analysis of the Japanese political scene may seem overly brazen when taken out of context, but believe me, he does build a credible, solid case for calling Junichiro Koizumi the worst prime minister ever. It's been an eye-opener working with him. Here are a few samples from recent weeks:

Since World War II, but especially since the rapid economic growth of the 1960s, Japan has been unusually egalitarian among capitalist states. The basic mentality was that all Japanese were middle class. The gap between the haves and have-nots has been so small that it was pointless to compare it with the gaps of other capitalist states. But this trend came to a halt in 1982 with the emergence of the Yasuhiro Nakasone Cabinet. Prime Minister Nakasone subordinated Japan to the American Republican Party led by then President Ronald Reagan, as reflected in their chummy "Ron-Yasu" relationship.

The current Bush administration's stance toward Japan has been to Anglicize its security and diplomatic policies while Americanizing its economy. The Koizumi administration bought into this approach completely and pushed Japan hard in those directions. Koizumi Anglicized Japan's security and diplomacy and brought about American-style structural reform to create a more versatile market system in line with Republican thinking. The logic Koizumi used to push this program was "free competition and individual responsibility."

Free competition brings about winners and losers. Competition means that the strong win and the weak lose. Japanese society is split into a very small band of winners and a whole lot of losers. In today's Japan, that small band of winners has a monopoly on happiness, while the masses of losers have to shoulder the burden of unhappiness and poverty.

The Koizumi administration obeyed the Bush administration, and as a result it destroyed in five years and five months what Japan had built up for 55 years since World War II — namely a society of mostly middle class people. What is left is a country with extreme wealth gaps.

America is such a country. Koizumi's structural reforms — the Americanized Revolution, if you will — changed Japan into a country with the same sort of drastic wealth gaps. The absurdly supportive mass media bears a lot of the responsibility for this. Japan has to stop this Americanization and return to an egalitarian society.

If I still have your attention, here's some more:

The stance of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe looks like that of Soviet Union Premier Georgy Malenkov after the death of Stalin in the 1950s or Chairman Hua Guofeng, who took over as premier in China after Mao Zedong in the second half of the 1970s. Koizumi's successor, the Abe Cabinet, is quite likely to share the fate of these other two administrations and end up being a weak, short-term power.

Prime Minister Abe has come to a fork in the road: He can continue on as Koizumi's successor or he can choose the path that extricates him from Koizumi's legacy. For Abe to set off on this path, he will have to achieve something akin to Khruschev's criticism of Stalin or Deng Xiaoping's rebirth of post-Mao China.

Koizumi politics were fixated on following American politics. Because of this fixation, many good traditions of Japan were destroyed and the nation was transformed into a society characterized by an ugly wealth gap. The Abe Cabinet should work on correcting the pervasive and serious mistakes of the former Koizumi Cabinet.

And finally:

Prime Minister Abe must liberate himself from Koizumi politics, Bush politics, New Komeito and Soka Gakkai. The nation is waking up to the fact that the increase in the working poor, the worsening wealth gap and various other evils lay at the feet of Koizumi politics. For Prime Minister Abe, an anti-Koizumi approach is the path to political survival.

Bruce Rutledge >> March 02, 2007

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