Commentary No. 94, August 1, 2002
"Japan and the Modern World-System"
If one looks at the trajectory of Japan in the modern world-system, it has followed an unusual path. The first thing to notice is that it was one of the last zones on the earth to be incorporated into the capitalist world-economy. I would date this as of the middle of the nineteenth century. One might attribute this late incorporation to several factors: the geographical remoteness of East Asia generally (and Japan in particular) from the centers of accumulation of the capitalist world-economy; the strength of the local political structures which made it a poor target for imposition of colonial rule; to some extent, relative lack of obvious kinds of riches to plunder.
But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the combination of the expansionist necessities of the capitalist world-economy and the internal corrosions of the Tokugawa shogunate allowed the West to "open up" Japan and led to the Meiji Restoration. What happened then is that the Japanese elites seemed to make a rather rapid and quite lucid decision about how Japan collectively could best defend itself and obtain advantage in the modern world-system. The actions they took are well-known: selective import of "modern" technologies, economic and political, to create a regime that would not be entirely submerged by outside pressures; and the creation of a modern military structure.
Instead of allowing themselves to be an additional acquisition in the attempts of the Western powers to "carve up" China, they entered into the game as one of the "carvers." Ten years after defeating China in a war in 1895, they won a war with Russia and conquered Korea. In 1914, they declared war on Germany, joining in the First World War, essentially a European war, in order to carve more out of China. They continued this China policy for the next 30 years. By the time of the Second World War, they were a major world military power, and this time they joined the side of Germany and attacked the U.S., which gave them the excuse to conquer all of Southeast Asia.
From Japan's point of view, the Second World War was a terrible defeat, leading to much loss of Japanese life, disastrous atomic bombing, and destruction of a good part of their industrial infrastructure. Yet, in many ways, the defeat was a blessing in disguise. The defeat and U.S. occupation led to the dismantling of the militarist complex and the installation of a liberal parliamentary regime. It was no paradise, but it was far better than the political structures under which the Japanese previously lived.
The needs of the U.S. in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, especially during and after the Korean War, was an economic opportunity for Japan of which it took full advantage. The fact that Japan was forcibly deprived of its war machine meant that it could devote its energies to the economic arena. And in 25 years Japan climbed from being a somewhat average semiperipheral state to being one of the economic giants of the world-economy, one pillar of what we have come to call the Triad. The transformation of economic role was extremely rapid, quite extraordinary, and today impossible to reverse. The fact is that all the economic difficulties of the 1990s have not basically changed Japan's position as one of the principal loci of capital accumulation in the capitalist world-economy.
It is interesting to compare what happened to Germany and what happened to Japan in the period since 1945. Both lost the war. Both were denied the right to rebuild militarily. Both had immense internal social-psychological problems of how to deal with the realities of defeat and the guilt about past behavior. Both became extremely strong economically. But Germany has come to recreate for itself a political role in the world-system, and Japan thus far has been unable to do that.
Why not? The essential difference between the German situation and the Japanese situation was that Germany had France and Japan had China as next-door neighbor and, in the previous century, archenemy. Western Europe needed to restore itself collectively - economically, politically, and militarily. Germany and France were roughly equal in size and strength. They decided essentially to create "Europe" around a Franco-German alliance. This permitted Germany to rearm within the framework of "Western Europe" and NATO. The psychological scars left by German conquests in Europe were slowly healed, or at least partially muted, by the active cooperative alliance. The hegemonic power, the United States, blessed these efforts, at least for a long time.
In East Asia, the situation was quite different. China became a Communist regime. It had no interest in closer ties with Japan, nor had the U.S. any interest in seeing such ties develop. There was no "France" which could offer political shelter for a renewed Japanese military. There was no wide cooperative framework in which the countries that were psychologically scarred by Japan's past behavior - China, Korea, Southeast Asia - could find healing or at least muting of their pain. Compared to Germany, now a central locus of European integration, Japan remains relatively isolated politically on the East and Southeast Asian scene.
There is one last thing to note in the Germany-Japan comparison. Both countries had a long history of ethnicized nationalism, in which "purity" of blood and descent was a major theme, and consequently the idea of "immigration" of others into their countries anathema. Germany has been largely jolted out of this heritage, partly out of shame because of the Holocaust under Hitler, partly out of the necessity of conforming to Europe's new collective cultural norms. Hence, Germany absorbed a very large Turkish immigration. And if they grumble about this today, they do so no more than other Western European countries, or indeed the United States, grumble about immigrants.
Japan was not similarly jolted out of its cultural prejudices, in part because their wartime sins were not quite as egregious as those of the Germans, and in part because they were under no collective pressure from their neighbors to revise their norms. So Japan remains today the one major economic power that is officially hostile to immigration. Not that there aren't any immigrants. There are not only the Koreans (still second-class citizens after four to five generations) but there are, as everyone knows, Filipinos, Thais, Iranians, and all sorts of others. But they are outside the polity completely; indeed they are illegals.
What are the questions facing Japan in the next 30 years? I anticipate that Japan will become still stronger in the accumulation process of the world-economy. But, if it is to bloom, it will have to resolve the political, the military, and the cultural dilemmas it faces. The political issue can be very simply put. Japan needs to work out some serious political arrangement with China, and with Korea (which will be reunified in the next 10-20 years). Unless this happens, Japan can play no serious political role in the world-system. What Japan has to offer at the moment is its economic expertise and its accumulated capital. But creating an egalitarian relationship among the three East Asian powers will not be easy by any means. And the rest of the world will not be helpful in this regard.
Secondly, Japan has to become a relatively "normal" military power. If it works out a relationship with China, this may be doable. If not, Japan is reduced to unpleasant choices - a revival of right-wing militarist nationalism; or dependency on the United States (healthy for neither power).
And finally, Japan will have to adjust to the fundamental cultural reality of the modern world - all countries are destined to be admixtures culturally. And immigration is an economic necessity for any serious center of capital accumulation. The cultural wrench may be the biggest of them all. On the other hand, there have been instances elsewhere of spectacular cultural rearrangements under the pressures of logic and necessity. It may well happen in Japan.
The Japan of 2025 will be quite different from the Japan of today. But, we must remember, so will the whole world-system. We are living in an era of chaotic bifurcation in the world-system. Things will change at a pace and in a manner far more turbulent than anything we have known for 500 years. Japan, like all the rest of us, will be in the vortex of this hurricane, and the Japanese, like the rest of us, will have to figure out how to deal with it.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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