Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

American university campuses in the late sixties and early seventies were not ideal places for anyone who doubted that Mao Zedong was a true scourge of bureaucracy or who questioned whether there was any wisdom at all in his “Little Red Book” of sayings. Campus Maoism was everywhere, fueled by the general euphoria over China that Nixon and Kissinger had unleashed. (Let us not forget that even seasoned journalists like James Reston and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times went a little gaga over the China they thought they saw.)

It was clear to me, however, that the Chinese “revolution” had degenerated into a Herodian horror show, destructive to the lives of all honest Chinese—fascinating to monitor, perhaps, but no longer of great significance to the global balance of power. In Japan, on the other hand, something interesting was going on to which no one in America seemed to be paying serious attention. In the summer of 1972, I returned to a Japan well on its way toward becoming the most advanced industrial nation on earth. The contrast with my earliest naval experiences there or with the Japan of 1961, when my wife and I had set up a household in a Tokyo suburb, was stark indeed. Japan’s economic “miracle” (a term used by Westerners to denote something attractive but from their point of view unexpected) was everywhere becoming obvious. Its economy had been growing for fifteen years at an annual rate of around 10 percent, and the results were starting to come in. Japan was producing a line of automobiles that American and East Asian consumers were beginning to buy in large numbers, thanks to their low price, reliability, fuel efficiency, built-in air-conditioning, and compact size. In design, its cameras, consumer electronics, and ships, among many other products, rivaled in simplicity and elegance the traditional designs of its houses and ceramics.

To a China specialist disillusioned by the savageries of the Cultural Revolution, Japan looked like a unique case of successful socialism in one country. A state bureaucracy guided the economy, setting social goals but avoiding the misallocation of resources, loss of incentives, and extreme rigidity that were hallmark features of the Soviet and Chinese economies. How had it done this? Americans were largely uninterested in answering such a question, even though Japan’s trade surpluses were starting to irritate their government. Americans were not even curious about the new institutional structures that Japan had forged to engineer high-speed economic growth, structures that would prevent any quick or easy solution to the trade imbalance. We still saw Japan as a “little brother,” learning from and emulating its postwar mentor. The idea that Japan could be experimenting with a different form of capitalism was, if even imaginable, certainly heresy. That they were beating us in manufacturing and marketing certain major products had to mean they were cheating.

Americans defined Japan as a democracy organized around a free-market economy, just as the United States itself was said to be. In his memoirs, Edwin O. Reischauer—the best-known American specialist on Japanese history and ambassador to Japan during the 1960s, at the height of that country’s “income-doubling plan”—hardly bothered to mention the economy. The truly amazing thing about such American myopia and condescension was that it would last well into the late 1990s, when it would suddenly turn into contempt for Japan precisely because it had a different kind of capitalism.

In the summer of 1972, one of my mentors and a preeminent political scientist, Professor Junnosuke Masumi, urged me to consider the then-emerging economic miracle. American scholars like me, he pointed out, tended to focus on left-wing and protest politics in Japan; virtually none of us had devoted any attention to its ruling elites. There were only a few studies in English of the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been continuously in power since the country had regained its independence in 1952, and nothing at all on the vast bureaucratic state apparatus that supported and guided the economy in much the same way the Department of Defense supported and guided the military-industrial-university complex in the United States.