The Incredible Puzzle of Slowly-Fading Japan
An In-Depth Conversation with One of America’s Most Experienced Diplomats from Asia
ASIA COMMENT 2001 (March)
© Asia Pacific Media NetworkAmbassador John R. Malott recently retired from the U.S. government after a distinguished 31-year career, focused on Asia and economic affairs. Malott, currently president of the World Affairs Council of Orange County, California, has been US Ambassador to Malaysia and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia. He has also held top diplomatic positions for America in Japan, India and China.
He was recently interviewed at UCLA by the Asia Pacific Media Network. Here are excerpts:
Ambassador Malott:
I was one of the very first State Department officers trained to be a Japan Economic Specialist back in 1971. As my career in the State Department went along through all the years, the Japanese economy kept getting bigger and bigger. So, as 20 years of my career went along, I sort of watched the Japanese economy grow. So even for me personally, it is very difficult for me to understand how this Japan, this country, can be stuck in the mud for 10 years. I don't understand how a country or people who are that talented can basically put up with that situation for the last 10 years; it’s sort of mind boggling to me. You know, in the figurative sense, what I would like to be able to do is to put Japan up against the wall and slap them in both their cheeks, and say ‘Would you please start acting like a Japanese again’ because these are not the Japanese that I know. These are not the people I know.
When I first got involved with Japan, most of the people who were running the companies were people who invented the companies or invented the products. They WERE their companies; these were the people who worked hard to rebuild these companies after World War II. But as the time went along, and especially as they thought they were taking over the world and buying up skyscrapers in Los Angeles and New York, basically you got to the head of the Japanese company not by being the smartest guy, not by being the best engineer, not by being the most innovative or creative guy. You got there by sucking up, you got there by corporate politics, you got there through your connections. So people got to the head of these companies in the 1990s, when everything was going smoothly but once things started going very badly, obviously a lot of these people just didn't know what to do with it. That wasn't why they had the job; they had the job for other reasons.
Japan probably, I will make the argument, is the only non-Western country that has ever had an impact on modern Western civilization, whether it’s on art or whether it’s on literature, whether it’s on architecture, whether it’s on management techniques. Tell me any other non-Western country that has had as much of an impact on the way that we do things in the modern world as Japan. So in some ways, this is not a fluke; this is a very, very great nation and a very, very talented people, and that, again, is another reason why I have such a hard time understanding what is going on there.
To me, it’s very sad that people there just seem sort of resigned to the whole situation. There are no external shocks; there is no one, as I said, slapping them on both cheeks and telling them to wake up and start acting like the Samurai again. I wish they would. It’s kind of lonely, I think, for American companies not to have any competition. I think the real challenge for Japan these days is whether or not they are going to be able to keep up with the Europeans. There used to be the book "Japan as Number One". I wouldn't even write a book today, "Japan as Number Two". I would write a book, "Japan as Number Three", because I think that Europeans and especially European companies have done a much, much better job in terms of learning the modern management, in the sort of management lessons that we have developed. And European companies are much further along in terms of using the Internet and information technology. So the question is, can the Japanese even keep up with the Europeans?
In Japan, politics has always been a side show. It’s never really mattered. I mean, it’s always impressive to me when I am back in the States during the Presidential campaign to see how excited and how it enthused everybody here gets, like it really matters to the people who the President is, or who gets elected to Congress, but in Japan, they never have that sense of participation, and historically as long as economy was doing well, the country was growing, they really didn't care. It didn't matter to them who the Prime Minister was. It could be Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee, Mr. A or Mr. B, but as long as the country was going along well, it really didn't matter to them who the Prime Minister was.
But these days it does, because the economy is not doing very well, so you would hope that you could get a little more leadership and a little bit more action out of people, and I think that that’s the great tragedy of Japanese politics over the last decade. Bill Clinton, as President for eight years, sat across the table from seven Japanese Prime Ministers. So by the time the guy learns the job, he is out of the job in Japan. This is not the way to run a country.
I said to someone the other day -- it was not very nice but -- you know, at a time like this, you are looking for the leadership. It’s interesting to me that with crises like this, in American history, somehow the leadership comes up and people deal with situations and tragedy. In Japan, when they are facing the biggest economic crisis and in some sense a crisis in confidence, they’re not producing the leaders to step forward. It’s almost like the political equivalent of the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber’. Nobody wants to be a Prime Minister in Japan anymore because they feel like they’re up against a challenge they’re not going to be able to meet.
But … I think that, in some ways, what is important is that the politicians also are becoming more individualistic. In some ways, they’re not quite fully Americanized yet, but again, when I look at Japanese television today versus, let’s say, twenty years ago I see the change.
Twenty years ago a politician would come on one of those roundtable discussions on Sunday mornings, sort of their equivalent to "Meet the Press," and they would just spew out mush, I mean they wouldn't say anything, just platitudes. But now the individual politicians are expected to know the issues. They are expected to have more of a personal appeal. People see and understand their personality differences a lot more. Even in the Diet, it used to be common in the old days that if a Minister was called during the question hour and asked a tough question about some government issue, he would say, "Let me ask my assistant to answer that," and they would pull up a bureaucrat who actually knew the answer and he would make the answer. Starting about a year ago, they forced the politicians and ministers on the floor of the Parliament to answer their own questions. So now they have to have a much better command of the issues.© 2001 John Malott and the Asia Pacific Media Network