Over the last 20 years, Japan has passed from wunderkind of global capitalism to problem child, troubled by recession and stagnation. Marie Anchordoguy's Reprogramming Japan joins the growing body of analysis diagnosing this sad falling off, focusing on the crisis of the high-technology sectors where silicon samurai once seemed to reign supreme. In Anchordoguy's view, the cause of the problem is “communitarian capitalism.” This is a capitalism that depends heavily on state direction—governmental support for select large firms, a social contract assuring citizens permanent employment, regular wage increases, and union–management deals for labor peace. This, she suggests, is something verging on socialism. Although it has “all the trappings of private property and profit-making institutions,” the dynamism of the market is constrained by a system that “favor[s] social stability over efficiency” (p. 7). It is, in her view, “quasi-capitalism” (p. 7). Communitarian capitalism, she argues, laid the basis for Japanese success from the 1950s through the 1970s, when global economic conditions were positive, technological trajectories were clear, and foreign products could be reverse-engineered. But in the 1980s and 1990s, intensified competition, transnational outsourcing, and fiercely enforced intellectual property rights made this system a fetter on the very forces of production it had fostered.
Anchordoguy then supports her argument with case studies in Japanese high-technology industries. In telecommunications, the reluctance of NIT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company) to fire workers and abandon longtime suppliers, and the reluctance of the government to abandon NIT in favor of foreign companies, created “obsolete institutions” (p. 65). In computer hardware, attempts to build a domestic industry produced the world's fastest computer, but left Japan still importing more than it exports. In semiconductors, government subsidies for big companies succeeded until the late 1980s, but then failed in a crisis of global supply. In the software industry, Anchordoguy admits, the picture is more mixed. The Japanese videogame industry revived an American industry that had imploded in the early 1980s, and Nintendo and Sony maintain a leading presence even in the face of Microsoft: She says this is because they developed in a freewheeling mode largely outside state corporatism. Elsewhere, she finds a lack of flexibility and innovation. Overall, she faults Japan's system for protectionism, cozy corporate–state relations, accommodation with trade unions, and a reliance on incremental change.
This is a scrupulously researched, readable study, and it provides a wealth of information about the operations of contemporary Japanese capitalism. But there are major questions to be raised about its overall perspective. Anchordoguy's argument is based on an unfavorable comparison of communitarian capitalism with the supposedly free market neoliberalism of the United States. If Japanese capitalism is quasi-capitalism, then American capitalism, supposedly focused on “competition and efficiency, encoded on neoclassical economic and rational choice theory” (p. 7), would be the real thing. The author says that Japan need not become a “clone” of the United States, and carefully notes that the sacrifice of community and worker interests to those of corporate owners and shareholders is “inconsistent with Japan's historical experience and values” (p. 234). Nonetheless, she thinks Japan's deviations from neoliberal doxa calls for “reprogramming” (the term is reminiscent of dubious cures for cult members). And the program it should get with is the Washington consensus model of deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization, moving toward a social order “more flexible, market-driven, and less equalitarian” (p. 65).
This argument, however, is eroded by her avoidance of the “elephant in the room” of supposedly free market U.S. capitalism—military Keynesianism. Far from being a model of laissez-faire dynamism, the U.S. high-technology sector grew out of and has flourished on the massive support of a military–industrial complex. This complex incubated the computer industry and the Internet (see Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, 1997). Today, with the Pentagon budget pushing $500 billion annually, this military matrix lavishly supports corporations involved in surveillance, smart weapons, advanced robotics, and all kinds of more routine computing requirements. The contrast between state-supported communitarian capital and free market capital is largely mythological. The real contrast is between welfare-state and warfare-state capitalism. And, apparently, the warfare state is better for business.
Moreover, while American high-tech capital has recently been more profitable than Japan's, the question of its long-term success, even by market criteria, is uncertain. Huge budget and trade deficits and slowing growth hardly seem a recommendation for the U.S. model as a whole. And if one steps outside the box of homo economicus, the questions become more acute. It is far from clear that the social and environmental costs of stagnation in Japan are any higher than those of fast-growth U.S. capital. Some years ago, Tessa Morris-Suzuki (Beyond Computopia: Information, Automation and Democracy in Japan, 1988) analyzed Japan's unique trajectory within a critical perspective on the overall costs of information capitalism. A similar breadth of perspective would have been welcome in this study. As I write, the news is out that for the first time, Toyota has overtaken General Motors as the world's largest car manufacturer. This is bad news for Anchordoguy's argument on two counts. First, it suggests that the neoliberal model may not be as superior to Japanese communitarian capitalism as she suggests. But, second, since cars are a major contributor to a planetary crisis of climate change, it reminds us that market buoyancy is not the best measure of system success. Neither communitarian nor neoliberal capital has a good answer to the contradictions between profit and socioenvironmental sustainability. Detailed and informative as this study is, evaluation of different forms of capitalism, American or Japanese, calls for a wider and more deeply critical vision.
