BETWEEN
FOUR WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA;
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS: DIPLOMAT, ECONOMIST, JOURNALIST AND
JAPANOLOGIST;
BETWEEN FOUR LANGUAGES: ENGLISH, CHINESE, RUSSIAN AND
JAPANESE
Chapter
21
Re-involved
with Japan
1.
Flirting with the Media
2. My
Nikkei Disaster
3.
Stumbling with Education Reform
4. Breaking
with the Sophia Alma Mata
5. A Day
(or more) in Court
6. The Tama
Connection
Meanwhile back in Japan
things were happening which every day made me realize I did
not need to be chasing after vague Australian
possibilities.
....
1.
Flirting with the Media
I had become a regular voice on the late night NHK
(national television) education channel program, shiten
ronten. The program gave you 15 minutes (now reduced
to 10) to voice your ideas about any topic of choice.
And since I had a lot of topics I ended up with a lot of
voice.
Trade and economic frictions were one favorite topic.
Another was urging the Japanese to get out and discover
their beautiful countryside.
Program ratings were low (around two percent), but the
audience was quality. And even two percent in a nation of
120 million is a lot.
The main NHK channel also had me on some of their round
table ‘think talks.’ Japanese-style
management was a popular topic.
There the ratings were much higher.
....
In Japan’s dominant rightwing, conservative and
business circles I gained traction by appearing often on
the rightwing Fuji TV’s Channel Eight regular Sunday
AM discussion program.
Host for the program was the conservative commentator,
Takemura Kenichi, with whom I had done that very
successful taidan book – Yuunikuu na Nihonjin back in
1970.
In the early eighties he had also used me a lot on his
Channel Four current affairs morning program – Seso
Kodan.
(As mentioned earlier, the MC for the program was
demure young lady called Koike Yuriko.
(She lived near our Sugamachi apartment in the Yotsuya area
and we would meet occasionally for meals or drinks.
(At the time she showed little interest in politics. I for
one would never have predicted she would end up as a hard,
infighting, hawkish politician who would eventually become
Japan’s Minister of Defense, and even possible
candidate for the prime ministership.)
Other TV Channels would also use me from time to time.
One way or another I was getting a lot of exposure.
....
The print media were also looking after me, Nikkei
especially, mainly because of my long-standing relationship
with them going back to the late 1960’s.
They had me as a regular columnist in their newly-launched
Nikkei Business magazine.
There I could sound off regularly on the weakness of
Japan’s service sector, and the emotionalism of its
share and land booms.
Nikkei would also use me often for interview comments on
budgets and other economic developments.
For one year in the early eighties they gave me a
free-wheeling weekly column for the front page of their
evening edition.
Surprisingly I got more reaction from that rather casual
effort than I did from many other more serious media
activities.
Even the evening editions of Japan’s main newspapers
are quality enough to attract serious readers. Besides,
even educated Japanese prefer light but insightful material
to serious head-on discussions.
(Years later I was to get a similar response from a rather
light-hearted series of articles I did for the JAL Agora
magazine.)
....
On the other side of the media spectrum, Tokyo Shimbun gave
me a regular 600 word column for a while. I ran
alternatively with Ronald Dore, the progressive UK
economist.
But that ended when I upset them with my views about the
killing of the MRTA hostage takers at Japan’s embassy
in Peru1.
Dore, incidentally, continues to this day.
Bungei Shunju, the journal of archly conservative opinion
in Japan, ran me at length on the Northern Territories
question, which surprised me greatly.
Shokun, Bungei’s belligerently rightwing offshoot,
followed up with a taidan interview.
I discovered that the Right in Japan are secretly delighted
if you place much of the blame for the dispute on the US,
for having forced Japan to renounce the islands at San
Francisco in 1951, even if in public they liked to denounce
Moscow for ‘illegally’ taking the islands.
Even the ultra-right were happy to run me. Sankei
Shimbun’s Seiron magazine had me for interviews on
education problems.
The only print medium I had problems with, ironically, was
the progressive Asahi stable. For most of my Japan
existence they had ignored or avoided me.
Then as the debate over organ transplants heated up in the
late nineties, I felt they would be the ideal outlet for a
piece pointing out how Tokyo’s refusal to allow
transplants was forcing young Japanese children to go to
Australia to receive organs that young Australian children
needed.
In other words as a result of Japan’s inward-looking
conservatism, Australian children might die in order
to save Japanese children who should have been treated at
home. What kind of ‘internationalism’ was
this?
Asahi rejected the piece outright.
(Later I was told that Asahi, like many on the left,
opposed transplant legalization for fear it would lead to a
revival of Unit 731 and other wartime vivisection horrors
– a strange way of thinking.)
I then gave the piece to the conservative Yomiuri, who ran
it in full, and happily. It produced a strongly approving
reaction from a progressive doctors’ group which even
asked me to give a speech (I declined, citing clinical
ignorance.)
2. My
Nikkei Disaster
Despite these occasional setbacks, my love affair with the
media seemed to be going well.
Whenever I had some idea I wanted to get out I seemed to be
able to find a slot somewhere.
But as they say, confidence can only take you so far.
Eventually you hit a roadblock and mine was to be a bad
one.
....
For reasons I outline in the next chapter I was becoming
agitated about Japan’s mistaken economic
policies.
In a situation where it was clear that the government
should be spending, even if only to overcome the
post-Bubble fall in domestic demand, it had become dogma
that the government should cut spending.
The media – Nikkei especially – were heavily
influenced by the supply-side economic theories coming out
of the US that said cuts in government spending combined
with reforms (privatization, liberalization etc) would
rescue economies in trouble.
But supply side theories only made sense in economies
suffering excessive demand and inadequate supply.
Japan’s problem was precisely the opposite –
excessive supply and inadequate demand.
The highly predictable result was a strong downward shock
to an economy still recovering from Bubble excesses, with
many fine people and companies dragged down with it.
In my Boso countryside I could see well and close-up the
damage being caused. Company A would collapse with
debts, causing its partner company B to collapse which
would then imperil C, D and E – a typical chain
reaction.
My instincts from Vietnam and East Timor days said that you
do not wait till disaster hits before voicing criticism.
You try to get in early and ward off the disaster.
....
Nikkei ran a regular daily page called keizai kyoshitsu
(economic classroom) where economists and commentators had
free voice to sound off their ideas and theories.
I had run one or two articles there before. Why not
again?
As well, I had some good economic data to back me up in
explaining Japan’s problems – something the
keizai kyoshitsu page liked.
In particular I had discovered the close reverse connection
between household savings rates and economic progress in
the main advanced economies, with the still iconoclastic
implication that high savings levels were harmful to
progress.
They were harmful because they reflected low consumption
desires – a dangerous situation in advanced
economies.
Cuts in government consumption would do even more harm.
The conclusions: that the Japanese government had an
obligation to get hold of some of those excessive savings
and spend them, or at least find ways to push them back
into the economy.
Combined with my sociological explanation for why savings
were so high (or rather consumption was so low) in
Japan – an explanation flattering to Japan and
critical of us Westerners - it made for a neat and powerful
piece of argumentation.
(For details, see following chapter on the state of the
Japanese economy.)
Or so I thought.
But Nikkei rejected the piece outright, and rudely.
When I pressed for an explanation I was given some
mealy-mouthed talk about how it conflicted with a series it
was running on the same page (which only lasted a week and
had zero impact).
The far more likely explanation was much more distressing
– Nikkei’s strong move to the Right, and not
just in politics.
Its editorials were demanding stringent fiscal
policies. They were showing open contempt for
Keynesian approaches, saying they were outdated.
Even the supposedly neutral pages of keizai kyoshitsu had
been contaminated, it seemed, by the new ideology.
And this was the newspaper that when I first knew it had
been the voice of both political and economic
moderation.2
I was both disappointed, and angry.
.....
What to do?
The fairly rightwing magazine ‘Voice’ had
asked me to write for them at various times.
I approached them and they agreed readily to run the gist
of my original Nikkei piece.
But I also decided, perhaps foolishly, to include in
the article a strong criticism of the Nikkei ideological
bias that I saw as having led to rejection of the original
article.
I felt it was important for readers to realize the biases
that were doing such harm to the economy.
The Nikkei people exploded in anger, particularly after my
Voice article was picked up favorably by other media.
They sent one of their top editorial people to
complain. They also sent me an official protest in
writing – something unusual for any newspaper to do.
I was put firmly on Nikkei blacklist. Invitations for
interviews and comments ceased abruptly.
Even the regular annual invitation to their year-end
economists’ reception was stopped.
When a Japanese organization sees itself under direct
attack it will pull out all stops to defend itself. I
should have realized that.
My only excuse is that I was very angry. I had taken
on the self-appointed task of trying to rescue the Japanese
economy from itself.
But I was fighting the impossible. Once Japan decides
on a course objections are not just over-ruled.
Objectors are seen as beyond the pale of the comfortable
consensus. They are irritants, to be ignored, or even
better, suppressed.
We saw this well in the prewar militarism era.
We saw it during the worst years of the Koizumi deflation
where economic reflation advice from some top US
economists, including two Nobel Prize winners –
Lawrence Klein and Joseph Stiglitz – who came to
Japan to give the advice, was completely ignored, even by
Nikkei.
The conventional wisdom takes control.
I am certain I lost a good relation with Asahi Television
as a result. On both their Sunday AM and Friday all-night
programs I had tried hard to argue for the very unpopular
view that government spending on public works could
actually be good for the economy.
(With typical baby and the bathwater logic, they and many
others saw severe cuts to public woks as the only way to
answer the problem of public works corruption.
(So if you said the economy needed public works you were
seen as favoring public works corruption.)
Nikkei’s Channel 12 dropped me with even greater
speed. Its late-night business program had become
completely infatuated with ‘structural
reform’ slogans.
My long-standing relation with NHK began to fade.
And sure enough, the ‘structural reforms’ of
subsequent years were to see Japan locked into a perpetual
cycle of weak demand, inadequate tax revenues, increased
debt encouraging further cuts in government spending, more
weak demand….
Eventually a few people were to begin to say that maybe
more government spending on things like public works was a
good idea.
But by that time the damage had been done.
....
Western media were equally blind-folded. Worse, their
mistaken views did much to reinforce the mistaken views in
Japan.
The Economist had become boringly insistent in its demands
that Japan continue to follow supply-side, structural
reform policies.
Its persistent praise for the wretched Koizumi was
sickening.
(Here was a man who at the insistence of his elder sister
had walked away from his wife when she was six months
pregnant and has refused to see the son she produced. His
populist claims that only he and his ‘structural
reforms’ could rescue Japan from its economic and
public debt problems had led to dangerous deflation and a
200 trillion yen increase in public debt.
(And yet the world, including the Economist, saw him as the
great reformer.
(Koizumi knew little about economics. He handed
everything over to the immature and heavily US-influenced
Keio University economist, Heizo Takenaka.
(At the height of the Dotcom boom I had shared a platform
with Takenaka in Nagoya where he waxed exultant about how
that obviously-soon-to-burst boom would push the Japanese
economy to even greater heights.)
The Financial Times, equally attentive to the Japanese
economy and equally rightwing, rejected without even
the courtesy of a reply a careful piece I gave them at the
suggestion of their Tokyo office, in which I concentrated
on the cultural reasons for lack of domestic demand.
Meanwhile the Nikkei editorials were to continue even more
stridently to demand fiscal stringency and anti-Keynesian
policies, even when it was clear that the Koizumi/Takenaka
policies were getting nowhere.
It reminded me of the hardline communists I knew in Moscow.
If communism was failing to deliver the goods that was not
because of failings in the doctrine.
Rather it was because the doctrine was not being
implemented fully enough.
Economic science is not a Japanese strong point.
3.
Stumbling with Education Reform
Nor, I was to discover, was education reform.
In the late nineties reform of the education system
suddenly emerged as a popular national issue.
Global comparisons showed standards were slipping. Firms
were unhappy with the quality of new entrants.
Not just the Education Ministry but the entire business
world seemed also anxious to claim education reform as
their own.
And for some reason I had come to be seen as an expert on
the topic.
At one stage or another I was to find myself involved
simultaneously with committees set up by Keidanren, Doyukai
and Nikkeiren (Keidanren was by far the most detailed).
The Education Ministry had me on several of its reform
committees, including one Shingikai (i.e. a policy
recommendation committee).
Even MITI, determined to be part of the action, set up a
committee, with me as the titular chairman.
But none of them could come up with anything useful
(Keidanren had the bright idea of asking companies to let
employees go home early at least once or twice a week so
fathers could have dinner with their children).
None seemed to realize the key issue – the need to
provide clear study motives and challenges for students,
university students especially.
I had always been impressed by the zeal young educated
Japanese could show when facing a challenge –
mountain climbing, devising better machines, organizing
annual school festivals.
It was the group ethic at its best. If only it could be
transferred to the classroom….
But there the group ethic worked in reverse.
Those who tried to excel found themselves pushed outside
the egalitarian group.
The aim for most –for the male students at least;
female students were less groupist and therefore less
de-motivated - was to do the minimum needed to graduate.
And many of the teachers were willing to cooperate with
this fraud. The alternative – to fail the entire
group of slackers – was impossible.
In communist societies it was joked that the workers
pretended to work and the system pretended to pay them.
In Japan the students pretended to study. And the teachers
pretended to teach them.
But it was not until I got onto the Education Ministry
committees that I realized fully the impossibility of
serious reform.
....
Even more than other ministries, the Education Ministry
liked to pretend to rely on the advice of
‘experts’ – a motley collection of
academics with the occasional businessmen or commentator
inserted – to tell it what to do.
In fact it had little or no interest whatsoever in what we
were saying about what it should do.
Its bureaucrats would sit, bored and half asleep, at the
end of our discussion tables, knowing that they had already
prepared a final report reflecting the ministry’s
views, not ours.
A favorite theme of our committees was urging stricter
regular testing of students as the solution to all
problems.
But given the lack of rewards for good study (employers
were only interested in seeing what university you
graduated from, not the quality of your degree) and
the virtual impossibility of dismissing bad students,
what, I asked, could the universities do with those
who were happy to simply scrape through tests or repeat
failed years?
Here the only answers I could get were silence, or garbled
remarks about relying on the good conscience of students
and teachers.
I was witness to a curious Japanese phenomenon – the
belief that if you set out beautifully-worded idealistic
goals, that was enough to realize those goals.
....
Eventually I was to get the chance to be involved in at
least the attempt to realize a few reform goals.
I had met him Prime Minister Obuchi once or twice before,
and liked him.
He seemed to remember me, and when he set up his 1999
‘National Peoples Commission on Education
Reform’ I was made one of the 26 members (even though
I was clearly not one of the ‘national
people.’ The fact that by then I had become
president of a small Tokyo university, Tama, may also have
helped.)
We would usually meet in the prime minister’s
residence - me driving up in my battered Boso vehicle while
the others arrived in expensive hirecars or company
cars.
Plenary discussions were fairly platitudinous. 26
people facing the prime minister and a bevy of bureaucrats
and politicians around a very long table and looking out
into the residence gardens is distracting enough.
With each member determined to put forward his or her own
strong ideas about how to reform things, constructive
discussion becomes even more difficult.
I had my day in court with the story of how my son had
spent two years at a top high-school studying chemistry
without any use being made of the school science
laboratory.
But few other than the sensitive and intelligent Obuchi
seemed impressed. They were too full of their own
ideas and complaints.
There were many agitated calls for more volunteer and
outdoor activities by students. But few practical
suggestions.
My own recommendation – much greater support for
Japan’s weak Boy Scout movement – had few
listeners (though it did result in my being made a director
of the Boy Scout national organization, where I found
it was being choked by old-men bureaucracy – the fate
of many similar youth and sports groups in Japan).
....
Fortunately I was also to go into the much smaller and more
compact university education sub-committee, with the
bright, up-and-coming Machimura Nobutaka as our political
minder.
There discussions were much more serious and to the
point. I could put forward several ideas for
university education reform I had long felt were
important.
These included opening up the admissions system with a
category called ‘provisional entry’ (zantei
nyugaku – my one contribution to the Japanese
language incidentally), pre-18 year old entry for bright
students, September entry with encouragement for gap years
and volunteer activity, double major systems to allow for
intensive language study, etc.
A special joy was the fact that since we were a Cabinet
committee we were superior to the bureaucrats.
They had to sit clustered together at the end of the room,
listening to what we had to say, in terror that we would
want to do something to upset their bureaucratic equanimity
or control.
As I pushed hard for a relaxation of the extraordinary rule
preventing any student, no matter how brilliant in math or
science, from entering university before age 18, the
bureaucrats, terrified by the confusion this might cause in
the school convoy system where everyone moved up together
in strict age order, piped up to say that age 18 entry was
dictated by law.
For one glorious moment Machimura leaned across the table,
looking down on them with contempt. ‘Well,
change the law,’ he barked.
And in fact that was done. A year later a law was
passed allowing people to enter university at age 17.
That, and all my other recommendations, got into the final
report – an amazing contrast with the fate of ideas I
put forward in Education Ministry committees.
September university entry was eventually to become
popular, making it easier for international exchanges and
for students to do things between school leaving in March
and university entry.
And one or two universities were to try out my provisional
entry idea (zantei nyugaku) to loosen up the rigid entry
exam system i.e. with students just below the entry exam
pass mark allowed to enter provisionally and stay on if
their first year results were good.
But most of our ideas were to be emasculated by the
bureaucrats, or ignored by the universities.
(The law allowing entry at age 17 was filled with obscure,
hard-to-meet conditions. No one, as far as I know, has
followed up on it.)
(I should add that a few years earlier the president of
Chiba University had put me on a committee handling his
demand that bright math or science 17 year olds be allowed
early entry.
(The bureaucrats had reluctantly approved the demand, but
only as a short-term experiment, with strict conditions
calling for close screening and special care for those
allegedly weak, immature 17 year olds.
(Dozens of us worked almost a year on various committees,
finally to get only 11 applicants nation-wide, of which
only three were selected.
(A year later the university dropped the experiment. But
five years later I was to come across a Nikkei article
about a 23 year old genius taking a MIT doctorate course in
physics.
(He was one of the three we had selected.
(He said that but for the early entry it was very likely he
would have ended up as a Tokyo University graduate aiming
for a bureaucratic career.)
.....
Soon after I was to be put on another Education Ministry
committee, this time to consider high-school English
language teaching.
I and some others argued that the three years of compulsory
study and bad teaching in the high schools did more harm
than good.
I argued that the three years of basic study in middle
schools was sufficient for most.
Those who wanted could continue at special high school
classes with qualified teachers.
The rest could spend more time studying math and science,
areas where Japan was admittedly weak and declining.
And universities would cooperate by making English
elective, not compulsory, in their entrance exams.
But I went out of my way to say I was not arguing
that study of English was not important. On the
contrary.
English and other language teaching should be concentrated
at the universities, I said, using the double major or
major-minor system that worked so well at US and Australian
universities.
Students choosing business and Japanese, or Chinese and
law, for example, could easily end up with excellent
careers.
And four years of concentrated study beginning age 18 with
good teachers and equipment could work wonders.
(My own education in Chinese did not begin till age 22 and
it worked fine. The idea that only small children can
learn languages properly is exaggerated.)
More importantly students would have motivation, having
voluntarily selected English or some other language for
their future careers.
But none of this wisdom made it into the final
report.
Indeed, the final report said we agreed that language study
at high school should be compulsory (previously it had
nominally been elective).
When I challenged the ministry officials in charge they
admitted that since the final report had been prepared in
advance it could not be changed to reflect mine or any
other contrary opinions.
So why had we been asked to waste a year of committee
attendances?
No reply.
Finally I began to realize the impossibility of serious
reform in Japan. Language study was an area where I had
some expertise, but my views counted for nothing.
And this really was an education area where Japan was
lagging, losing out internationally as a result, and badly
needing some fresh ideas.
....
Eventually I was to write a book about my various education
reform experiences – Naze Nihon no Kyoiku Kawarani no
desuka? - Why Japan’s Education will not
Change.
But I chose a bad publisher – Toyo Keizai. The book
too had little impact.
Meanwhile, trouble was developing on my home front, Sophia
University.
4.
Breaking with the Sophia Alma Mater
By 1996 my relationship with the International Department
(later Faculty of Comparative Culture) at Sophia University
was becoming strained.
True, it had given me a visa, an income and a nameplate for
almost twenty years. But I could not feel it had given me
much academic stimulus.
Some of the classes came close to Mickey Mouse standards.
Lecturers sometimes seemed chosen for political or church
connections.
My plans for have a separate Japanese studies
unit, with teaching in the language for foreigners
coming to Japan and wanting not just to learn Japanese but
also to learn in Japanese, had largely failed.
I had tried to set up ‘work-in-progress’
seminars for the teaching staff – something that any
self-respecting university takes for granted since it
allows teachers not just to get to know what each is doing
but also to bounce ideas of each other.
But that project did not get very far either. At the first
seminar I tried to float my idea that Japan’s growth,
and its management systems, owed much to the feudal
heritage.
I had thought that if people were genuine academics they
would welcome some new and provocative idea to get their
teeth into.
But all I managed to do was provoke a contemptuous outburst
one of our faculty, the long-standing Japanese management
guru, James Abbeglen. (His ‘Japan As a Model for All
of Us’ theories were to go into some decline later,
but only after the Bubble economy collapse.)
No one else showed any interest in debating the point. The
seminar project was never revived
....
Nor was the teaching side of things very exciting.
Students varied from the very weak to the very good, with
standards seeking mainly to please the very weak.
I was regarded as strict and unbending, I am told, simply
because I had demanded the amount of study and attention
that any normal Western university would want.
But I did have one very successful course, and I pass
on the technique now to help other teachers working in the
same area.
.....
The course was called readings in Japanese economics. The
aim was to bring students with some Japanese language
ability to the point where they could read Japanese
economic texts with some fluency.
Anyone who has studied Japanese will realize that this is
not easy.
Far more than with other languages, even with Chinese, when
you read Japanese, formal Japanese especially, you
feel you are fighting a fog of long, convoluted,
back-to-front sentences. Making sense can be mind-breaking.
Worse, the sentences are written in a mixture of kana
script and kanji (Chinese ideographs), with no gaps to show
where words begin or end.
As mentioned earlier, the only way to decypher this jumble
is to turn written script into sounds so that the meaning
emerges in the same natural way as it would emerge if you
were hearing the same thing being spoken to you.
Our instinctive ability to unravel the meaning of spoken
sound is far stronger than our conscious ability to unravel
the meaning of written script.
But for that to happen, of course, you need to be familiar
with the spoken language.
Each week I would set for homework several pages of text
from some standard document – a economic magazine
article or a White Paper on the economy.
I would also provide a recording of that text on tape.
At the class the next week the students would have to read
in turn random sentences from the text. We would also
discuss the economics involved in the text.
As anyone who knows Japanese will realize, there was no way
students could fake reading ability. Unlike with
English or any other purely phonetic script, you cannot
just look at the script and hope to be able to read it.
You have to prepare. And by far the easiest way to
prepare is to listen to a tape-recording and check the
meanings of the words you do not understand.
(Using a Japanese dictionary is also much easier if you
know the pronunciation of the word you are seeking.)
If students did not prepare well in advance they
would be left sitting tongue-tied in front of me and
the other students.
To avoid that disgrace some of the weaker students would
spend up to 10 hours a week listening to the tape
repeatedly while checking the meaning of each word.
It was the ideal way to provide students with a study
incentive. Usually that is not easy in Japan.
But I had also found the ideal way to handle students with
different standards of ability.
Those who started out with weak ability could catch up
simply by spending a lot more hours each week in
preparation than the stronger students.
I had one course with a French student who started out with
less even than the very bare minimum of 600 kanji needed to
join the course. She begged admission and we accepted her
as an exception.
(To read Japanese well you need at least 1,500, or
even better, 2,000 kanji – a severe burden for most
foreigners coming to Japan to study.)
To catch up she was spending much more than 10 hours a week
in preparation.
But it worked. On the very last day of the course she was
able finally to stand up in front of the class and read her
sentences well.
We all burst into spontaneous applause.
It was a very satisfying moment in a less than very
satisfying teaching career at Sophia.
Graduates from that course still come back to me saying how
the reading ability breakthrough had been crucial to their
later careers, many in the finance industry.
I did not tell them that it had been easiest of all my
courses to prepare since the students did all the work. All
I had to do was select the text and listen to their reading
efforts in class.
I would have been very happy to expand that kind of reading
course to cover other topics.
But as mentioned earlier the department/faculty was not
very interested in my ideas for expanding Japanese-language
based teaching.
Maybe they thought that windy lectures in English on the
excellence of Japanese management were more important than
giving students the ability actually to read what the
Japanese themselves were saying on the subject.
So I continued to concentrate on the many other
distractions in my life.
....
Gradually I began to sense a certain lack of camaraderie
from my Sophia colleagues.
The faculty was becoming very ideological, with a dominant
rightwing faction very hostile to my criticisms of
Japan’s foreign policy.
And some were just jealous, as only academics can be when
one of their number seems to be getting undue public
attention, and seems able to survive without having to swim
in their tepid intellectual waters.
As well, the Jesuit establishment running the
university had turned very hard-line conservative, away
from the intelligent liberalism of Pittau, the president
who had given me my start back in 1976.
True, I was running around the country saying things that
might not have made them very happy. One of the key
Nihonjin-ron points was that Japan had been fortunate to
avoid getting caught up with dogmatic Western religions.
Some of that must have reached their ears.
Eventually one thing was to lead to another and I was to
find myself embroiled in one of the most squalid and more
debilitating events I have had to suffer in a life that had
never been short of squalor and debilitation.
Briefly, it was like this.
5. A Day
(or more) in Court
I had long felt an obligation to show students more of
Japan than the inside of a classroom.
I would invite them to enjoy my Chiba development, and even
do some work there if they wanted (paid, of course).
But I seems that the idea of a professor having the energy
to develop land and invite students there was alarming to
my conservative, lethargic, stuck-in-the-Tokyo-mud
colleagues.
That I could live with. But I was quite unprepared
for the backlash about to descend.
Among my students was an older graduate student, S.
He was doing courses in business and had a part-time job in
sales of imported building materials.
He came up to me one day saying he wanted to get involved
with the Lockwood franchise for Japan after graduation.
Could I help him in that direction?
I told him that it was my New Zealand based brother, not I,
who sought the Lockwood franchise.
But since he could speak some Japanese, I suggested
as a start that he should offer to look after two New
Zealand carpenters working on two Lockwood houses my
brother had contracted to build near Tokyo.
Teachers and universities do, after all, have some
obligation to help students choose careers after
graduation. Internship or on-the-job experience is very
much approved.
In the event S. did almost nothing, apart from collect a
large advance payment from myself.
With the second project he did worse than nothing. He
set out deliberately to persuade the two carpenters to
sabotage the project in the hope that he could try to get
the Lockwood franchise for himself.
He succeeded very well in the sabotage department; the
project ended up six months overdue, one third incomplete
and many thousands of dollars over budget.
My brother and I decided we did not need his services any
more.
....
But that was not to be the end of things.
As I was to discover later, S. had been confiding with my
various ideological enemies in the department, including
the department head, a Jesuit appointee.
It seems they had urged him to take legal action over the
termination of his services.
What’s more they seemed to have been able to arrange
for him to have gratis the services of a high-profile
lawyer.
(As chance would have it, the lawyer was also active in the
small ultra-rightwing group already making waves by seeking
to have admissions of war guilt deleted from Japan’s
school history textbooks – a crucial fact I only
discovered much later.)
What happened next is long and ugly. Suffice it to
say that the lawyer used his legal tricks to elevate the
initial small claim to a multi-million yen Tokyo district
court claim for the ‘psychological damage’
inflicted by a powerful professor on a young innocent
student.
I could see what he hoped for – that I would cringe
in the face of Tokyo district court exposure and high legal
costs usually involved, and would try to settle for the
original small claim –with an admission of guilt
which could then be used to cripple my reputation in the
university.
Fortunately the Japanese legal system makes it possible to
conduct one’s own legal defense, even in higher
courts. It is also easy to counter-sue, which I did.
I was able eventually to outlast S and his expensive
lawyer. Then ended up having to beg me to settle for mutual
withdrawal of suits, which I did.
(I strongly recommend counter-suing to anyone under similar
false charges. Judges often do not decide on the rights of
a case. They prefer 50-50 settlements, which leave you
disadvantaged. Counter suits mean the 50-50 settlement will
not be to your disadvantage.)
....
But while all was well that ended well, what happened in
between was brutal.
Foolishly I had accepted the expensive lawyer’s false
claim to the court that he was a volunteer lawyer who liked
to act free of charge on behalf of distressed, exploited
foreigners in Japan.
(It was clear later that he had been recruited, and had
accepted, for the chance to do damage to an ideological
enemy of the extreme rightwing.)
So I wasted much time and money having all documents
translated into Japanese in a bid to make him realize that
S. was no distressed, exploited student – that he was
a mature individual involved in various money-making
activities, some illegal . (Later I heard from S. that he
and the lawyer had chuckled greatly as they dumped these
materials in their garbage.)
My next mistake was to appeal to the department head to
intervene and mediate, little realizing he had been in
cahoots with S. from the beginning.
I tried to convince him that it was hardly appropriate for
a university to allow a situation where a student, any
student, could drag a professor he did not like before the
courts on a blatantly trumped up charge.
Nor was it very edifying for the professor to have to
confront a student in a courtroom.
At the very least the university should try to mediate, and
back away only if it was clear that there was a genuine
case to answer.
Worse, S. was threatening to use the case to create a
student campus campaign against me. Was that also something
a student should be doing?
On top of all this were his various off-campus activities -
brokering illegal Iranian workers not to mention the
term-time trips to Germany and Columbia, both well-known
drug centers.
The department head claimed sympathy. But, he said,
he had no choice but to be completely hands off in the
affair.
Soon after I discovered the reason for his feigned
neutrality.
In his voluminous court papers, all translated at great
expense by someone, S. was boasting how not only did he
have the support of department professors but of the
department head also, who, he claimed, had even given
him extra material about Clark’s nefarious land
development activities in Chiba.
I went back to the department head with copies of the
material. Embarrassed, he could only stammer out a
few weak excuses about how he had been misquoted,
misunderstood or what have you.
My attempts to appeal to the top university authorities
were equally useless. Indeed they were later to have the
department head promoted to university president.
....
The whole affair had strung out over more than two years,
with numerous court appearances.
True, towards the end I was beginning to live with it. I
learned a lot about the legal system. And I was able to
move the case to chambers where I discovered we had a judge
who had read and enjoyed my books.
We had some interesting chats during the several sessions
which had to be aborted because S. was busy overseas with
his Germany and Columbia businesses, and his lawyer too was
too busy with his other businesses.
But the shock and psychological damage at the beginning
– having to stand up alone in the very unfamiliar
court atmosphere trying to compete with a lawyer
experienced in the tricks and jargon of the profession
- was great.
The damage to time and commitments was even greater.
On top of this was the ugliness involved in discovering
that the university you were working for had in effect
sided with a derelict student against you.
Needless to say, I was beginning to be keen to cut ties
with Sophia.
Fortunately I had convenient way out.
And the timing was perfect.
6. The
Tama Connection
Many years earlier an activist academic called Noda Kazuo
had befriended me, as he did to several other foreign
academics in Japan.
He liked to have us appear occasionally before one or other
of his clubby groups (Japanese activists, whether in
business, research, academia, or any other profession, all
like to feel they have a group of colleagues, admirers and
hangers-on around them and supporting their activities).
His activism focused on the alleged need for more
internationalism and more venture spirit in Japanese
business. I was able to chime in with my spiel about the
opportunities in Japan’s neglected service sector.
He also liked my talk about Japan having more than enough
unused land to burst any number of speculative bubbles.
....
Noda had managed to find a wealthy backer for a new private
university he want to create out of bare fields at Tama, an
upper middle class suburb on the Tokyo outskirts.
It would develop a new generation of US-style venture
businessmen, he said.
As first president, his gift for publicity helped get
things moving. But soon it was clear that the university he
had taken such pains to establish would end up as yet
another very ordinary private university competing to
attract very ordinary students.
US-style, venture-seeking individualistic students are very
few in Japan.
So Noda decided to move on; he had plenty of other things
he wanted to do. And he had chosen a successor – an
elderly professor of management science called Nakamura.
But the elderly professor collapsed with a stroke
immediately on appointment. Noda and the university owner
had to get a replacement quickly.
How about me (Clark)? seems to have been their reaction.
And ‘why me?’ was my reaction.
I had had no connection with the new university. Besides,
how could a foreigner like myself hope to run an
all-Japanese university, even if it was still quite small,
with some 1400 students.
But they were very insistent, and offered every
incentive.
I would have a nice salary. I would not have to be
actively involved in day-to-day administration. I would not
have to teach students.
If I decided I wanted to do no more than show up for
functions, campus meetings and consultations,
that would be fine.
I had simply to act as a figure-head.
It was an attractive offer, even if I still had my
doubts.
And so, without tears or regrets I said goodbye to the
university where I had worked for almost two decades.
I was happy to try out fresher, even if very different,
pastures.
………
1 (The MRTA were a basically
non-violent revolutionary group deemed illegal by the
Peruvian government because of communist leanings. Their
main demands in the Embassy crisis were the release of
their comrades, including their leader’s wife, from
Peru’s notoriously cruel prison system, and for
improvements in that system.
(My advice in the article, and earlier to a call from the
prime minister’s office seeking advice, was that if
Lima did not want to seem to bow to ‘terrorist’
demands, no matter how reasonable, then Japan could at
least pressure Lima to offer legalization for MRTA in
exchange for freeing the embassy hostages. As a legal
opposition party they could then work to realise their
demands.
(I was to be sickened soon after by the bloodlust with
which Japan welcomed the news that the embassy had been
stormed, with all the hostage takers, including some
young women, killed, many in cold blood – despite the
fact that the MRTA people had treated the hostages well.)
(Even the progressive Tokyo Shimbun seemed to share the
bloodlust. Like the rest of Japan they could not
understand the arguments that compromise deals were the
only just answer to guerrilla situations, though eventually
such deals were to be seen as the only solution in El
Salvador and Guatemala, and Northern Ireland for that
matter.
(The Japanese could only think obsessively about the insult
to their embassy, and the distress imposed on their
precious citizens being held there.
(Later they were to go overboard in their gratitude to
Fujimori, the rather corrupt and at times murderously evil
Peruvian leader at the time.)
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2 (Later I was to discover a
strange anomaly in Japan’s economic politics.
(Postwar academic economists had been heavily Marxist.
Keynesian economics had originally been seen as a rightwing
alternative.
(Only much later, in the eighties and nineties did
Keynesian economics come to be seen as leftwing.
(But even today, it is in the extreme rightwing
publications that one finds the best analyses of the need
for the Keynesian approach – a very curious anomaly
when compared with the West)
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