Japan, unsurprisingly, saw the world in essentially similar terms to the deeply hierarchical nature of its own society. [180] While looking up to the West, it looked down on Asia as backward and inferior, seeking to subjugate its own continent for the purpose of its enrichment and aggrandizement. Where once it had seen Chinese civilization as its superior, it now regarded the Chinese as an inferior race. [181] The idea of a racial hierarchy has been intrinsic to the Japanese view of the world. Even today it continues to persist, as its relations with its East Asian neighbours demonstrate. Whites are still held in the highest esteem while fellow Asians are regarded as of lesser stock. [182] Racialized ways of thinking are intrinsic to mainstream Japanese culture, [183] in particular the insistence on the ‘homogeneity of the Japanese people’ (even though there are significant ethnic minorities), the idea of a ‘Japanese race’ (even though the Japanese were the product of diverse migratory movements), and the widely held belief that the Japanese ‘blood type’ is associated with specific patterns of cultural behaviour. [184] Racial, ethnic and national categories overlap in Japanese conceptions of both themselves and, by implication, others also. [185] This is illustrated by former prime minister Nakasone’s infamous remark in 1986 that the mental level in the United States was lower than in Japan because of the presence of racial minorities – specifically, ‘blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans’. [186] Even today there is no law against racial discrimination. [187]
Over the course of the last half-century, however, East Asia has been transformed from a state of backwardness into the most dynamic region in the world: Japan is no longer alone. [188] And yet its attitudes towards East Asia remain, in large part, fixed in a Meiji time-warp. Japan would still prefer to see itself as Western rather than Asian: I vividly recall a conference on Europe and Japan in Tokyo in 1999 at which it was seriously suggested that Japan might consider applying to join the European Union. Japan’s failure to rethink its relationship with East Asia in the context of the latter’s transformation adds another important dimension to the crisis that Japan faces today, an issue that I explore more fully in Chapter 9.
Japanese modernity is an extraordinary achievement: the only non-Western country to industrialize in the nineteenth century, by far the most advanced country in East Asia, the world’s second largest economy (measured by GDP according to market exchange rates), an enviably high standard of living, arguably the best public transport system in the world; but at the same time it has succeeded in remaining highly distinctive, both culturally and socially. [189] Yet for three reasons the novelty and scale of its achievement have never received the recognition either in the West or in Asia that they deserve. First, ever since 1945 Japan has been at pains to stress its similarity with the West rather than its difference from it. Following its defeat, Japan entered the American sphere of influence, lost any independent foreign-policy voice, and became to all intents and purposes an American protectorate: under such circumstances, its approach was
The fact remains that Japan was the first East Asian country to modernize, and much of the region has now followed in its wake. Without Japan, it is doubtful whether the Asian tigers would have begun to roar; and without the Asian tigers, China ’s modernization would certainly have been even further delayed. Japan might have been, in a host of ways, an exception, but it has been the exception that has eventually proved the rule: it is now surrounded by countries that are, in various different ways, following its example, at times to its acute discomfort. If Britain was Europe’s pioneer in modernity, so Japan has been Asia ’s.
