Japan as no 1.

 

The fear of the Seventies is that America will lose its place as the world's biggest economy to Japan. This fear is well grounded, the first of the Asian tigers, Japan experiences extraordinary growth rates throughout the Fifties and Sixties up to the magical year of 1973 ( where it is hit by the double whammy of the Nixon and Oil shock) after which its economy continues to grow at a significant though less extravagant pace as America appears to have reached a terminal point.

Japan becomes identified with three things the mass of superhumanly disciplined, interchangeable workers (“little yellow ants”,as Zizek refers to them in a lecture in 2010 “ironically” accessing the racist Western imaginary ) the gigantic corporation as a “total Institution” and high technology lights ahead of anything America can produce. It is also constantly attacked for it refusal to open its economy to investment and imports while it goes about buying up companies all over the globe.

There are many reasons for Japan’s extraordinary growth rates up to 1973 and its continuing economic strength afterwards, some of them are attributable to Japanese innovation in the fields of production “Toyotism”, others to massive influxes of American money for post war reconstruction, heavily funded by and necessitated by America's continuing military incursions in Korea and Vietnam, lax rules and regulation on pollution and other “externalities”, the subordination of organized labour throughout the Sixties and an informal sector of poorly paid home based piece-work that was the only means by which many inadequately remunerated Japanese workers could keep their heads above water, and, of course by the simple hyper-exploitation of workers. Japan famously has a word, “karoshi” to describe death-from-overwork.

There is a strong argument to suggest that Post-Fordism is in effect the westernisation of Japanese lean production techniques and Toyotism.The irony here of course being that the term Post-Fordism implies not just a shift to a new set of production methods but also a breaking of the Fordist contract between bosses and workers, rising wages, lifetime employment, labour unions and so on while in Japan they maintain both a Fordist social compact and a form of hyper efficient rationalization of production. On one level the west turns Japanese in the Seventies, on another, in order to compete, it has to abandon many of the guarantees to workers that Japan can still offer.

There are also two mechanisms that are deployed to explain Japanese high productivity and innovation, "kaizen", continuous improvement, and the notion of indebtedness, that one is born with debt to the emperor that can never be repaid. These two impossible demands, the absolute nature of the super ego demand, one can always do better, one can never repay one's debt channel into Toyota's in/famous "management through stress" method in which the production line is continually sped-up to identify and remedy weaknesses and in which workers who are absent will not be replaced but will instead throw a burden onto their fellow colleagues, meaning that even greater social pressure is exerted on the worker never to miss a day. In a sense you can think of Toyotism as Taylorism on steroids, Post Fordism as Toyotism with western characteristics.

In Ron Howard’s Gung Ho, in which a small American town has, in the deeply unappetizing person of Michael Keaton, to appeal directly to the Japanese for help. the problem for American workers is that they have lost their desire for work, unlike the Japanese, they have grown spoiled, soft , complacent, pampered, need to regain their hunger and stay hungry. The rigours of Toyotism is finally too much for them and a compromise is reached with the new Japanese owners of the plant, who agree to keep it open despite the workers having failed to meet the required target, and along the way the inflexible Japanese have learned to become that little bit more “human” through contact with the glories of the American spirit.

There are arguments as to how much the Oil Shock contributed to inflation in the Seventies, arguments that suggest that the UK and The USA were especially susceptible to wage-price spirals due to the more rigid belief that the state should not interfere in the “market” directly by negotiating wage restraint. Japan, as a country highly dependent on external sources for energy, is also hit by the oil shock and responds (rather as it has post Fukushima) by desperately trying to reduce its energy consumption. To this end it begins the microchipization of everything; chips go into every form of domestic appliance, “smart” consumer products are born. In effect Japan decides to shift up the value chain to higher tech. The focus on low fuel and energy consumption on the part of Japanese car makers, who prior to the Seventies have not been a major force, means that in a more fuel-conscious age suddenly the efficient Japanese cars waiting in Japan to be dispatched around the world become all the more attractive and find huge new markets waiting for them.

The traditional American car, built around conspicuous consumption and predicated on dirt cheap oil is now an industrial albatross.

Here is a further irony, the oil crisis is, in many respects the making of modern Japan.