Nihonism (Japanese Tribalism) & Asian Civilization Index - Peter Myers, Canberra, Australia, ph. +61 2 62475187, February 6, 2002; update September 2, 2008.
Write to me at contact.html.
You are at http://mailstar.net/asia.html.
The Confucian state: not legalist but civilizational. Chinese Concept of Nature: not a wilderness; man holds an integral place. Enlightenment Europe's fascination with Confucian China: chinese-civilization.html.
Richard A. Werner is Professor and Chair of International Banking at the University of Southampton. His book Princes of the Yen is about the role of Japan's central bank in the "miracle" years and the recent "crisis" years. It is also about banking, and central banking, in all countries: werner-princes-yen.html.
(1) The Japanese Miracle (2) Jewish-Asian engagements (3) Where did the "APEC" idea come from? (4) Australian-Asian Engagements (5) Philosophies Underlying Asian Culture (6) Ancient Interconnections Between Asian Culture & Western Culture (7) China & the One-World Movement (8) Reg Little and Warren Reed, The Confucian Renaissance (9) Eamonn Fingleton, Is Japan Faking It? (10) Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations (11) Edith Terry, How Asia Got Rich: Japan, China, and the Asian Miracle (12) The Capitalists' use of Taoism to undermine China's Independence; Lee Kwan Yew's Complicity in the "Asia Crisis" (13) How To Kill A Tiger: Speculators Tell the Story of their Attack Against the Asian Tigers in 1997 (14) Suharto, too, was a victim of regime change
(1) The Japanese Miracle
Chalmers Johnson documented the role of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI, now MEITI) in orchestrating Japan's economic "miracle", in his book MITI and the Japanese Miracle: johnson.html.
The task of intellectuals is to uncover - draw out, elucidate - things that are hidden - what Kinhide Mushakoji calls "occluded"; or alternatively, to cover up, in the service of vested interests. Mushakoji says that during the 1980s, Japan was building an "occluded" Greater East-Asia Co-prosperity sphere: mushakoji.html.
Mushakoji is a Japanese Professor whose work has been published by the Trilateral Commission and the United Nations. At the same time, he characterises the New World Order, promoted by the Trilateral Commission, as "the New Colonial Order" (see http://www.focusweb.org/programmes/Security/Okinawa%202000/Musakoji.htm). His paper Post-Modern Cultural Development in East Asia was published by Unesco in The Futures of Asian Cultures, Bangkok 1993. The following material, from Mushakoji Newsletter No.8 June 1997, written just before the "Asia Crisis", is very similar, at http://www.hurights.or.jp/asia-pacific/no_8/no8_japan.htm.
'Nowadays, Japan does not officially claim to reproduce the concentric Pax Cinica as it did during the World War II. It is, however, the center with a concentric sub-contracting vertical division of labor. As was the case in the tributary Pax Cinica, Japanese ODA redistributes part of its accumulated "tribute" and covers part of the club goods of the region. Whereas the "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere" (GEACS) was an official "project" of imperial/imperialist Japan, the present concentric vertical division created around Japan is, in a sense, the occluded GEACS. On the official discourse level, the Confucian concentric order idea is not professed as before, yet in the mind of the Japanese and of some of the East Asian NIE leaders such a model is kept secretly. The "gees flight" myth according to which Japan flies as the leading goose followed by the East Asian NIEs and their imitators is isomorphic with the concentric model with Japan as the center of the regional division of labor.'
Chalmers Johnson asked, where are the geese flying? To Los Angeles, he said, where America's imports were undoing its victory in WWII. But now, after the "Asia Crisis", it seems that Japan may be forced to exchange its trade surplus for monopoly money, which the Federal Reserve can print at will because the US Dollar is the world trading currency.
Mushakoji continues,
'This Japanese version of the concentric Pax Cinica, in both its overt and occluded versions, has a basic difference however with its Chinese model. Whereas in the latter case the tributary states on the periphery were able to keep their own cultures, in the Japanese concentric order this freedom is not tolerated. The occupied territories during the World War II were forced to adopt all the Japanese values including the cult of the Emperor. In the present concentric division of labor, the sub-contracting firms in the semi-periphery and the periphery are now "more politely" invited to learn Japanese management and quality control. The sub-contractors do not have to adopt the cult of the Japanese Emperor, but they are encouraged to develop the cult of the father company, some even singing the company anthem every morning! This highly hierarchical concept of social order, presented as a universal base of all virtues (faithfulness, dedication, self-abnegation, hard work), has been praised by the researchers looking for the causes of the East Asian "miracle" as more useful than the Western individualistic moral principles. It must be noted that these hierarchical values are hardly able to provide the ground to accept egalitarian values such as human rights.'
Mushakoji's concept of "occlusion" is related to Karl Marx's expression "false consciousness", but one can see it much earlier, in St Paul's exhortations to reveal the secret demonic powers at work in the world; and many centuries before Paul, Zarathustra (Zoroaster) was urging his followers to do the same. In all aboriginal religions, medicine men exorcise or cast out the malevolent forces in the same way. University academics in the humanities today see their role as "deconstructing" the hidden power structures, but in the process they seemed to have dissolved the social glue which kept us all together; unfortunately these same academics have erected their own power structures, whose "deconstruction" they resolutely resist.
In short, acknowledging the power structures seems to destroy them; that is why, in whatever social system one is in, those who attempt this revealing are resisted and persecuted. It follows that there can never be a utopia; yet we keep on trying to reveal what is hidden, and in this way, old structures are transcended and new ones created.
Consider Chalmers Johnson's analysis of the 1997 "Asia Crisis", at johnson.html; is it not conspiratorial? This great illuminator of the Japanese miracle also revealed that the West has its own forms of occluded power structures even more sophisticated than those of Japan Incorporated. Taken together, Mushakoji and Johnson, these greatest of social scientists, agree that the power structures of both East Asia and the West are occluded. As disclosers of occluded structures, they are forced to work somewhat in the dark.
Japan's blueprint for conquest in WW2, released by the Chinese government, proclaimed a forgery by the Japanese government (full text of this document): the Tanaka Memorial: tanaka.html. I include this for its historic value, not out of any anti-Japanese sentiment. Japanese tribalism was no worse than Aryan ("white") tribalism, ever-present within the West transciv.html. Each side ignores its own sins, commemorates only its own dead.
(2) Jewish-Asian engagements
And who was at the head of the Western assault on the Japan model? None other than George Soros, described by Executive Intelligence Review as the visible face of the Rothschild money empire; even Johnson has not dared to shine his torch in that dark corner (EIR's special report on Soros, of April 1997, is called The True Story of Soros the Golem). Of course, Soros did not act alone; attacked by Mahathir, he was defended by Madeline Albright; and Samuel Huntington had led the "Aryan" wing of the assault with his article and book on the Clash of Civilizations. It's interesting to speculate on the links between the two wings.
George Soros earlier wrote, in his 1994 book The Alchemy of Finance, "Japan has been accumulating assets abroard, while the United States has been amassing debts. ... President Reagan ... pursued the illusion of military superiority at the cost of rendering our leading position in the world economy illusory; while Japan wanted to keep growing in the shadow of the United States as long as possible. ... Japan has, in fact, emerged as the banker to the world" (p. 350).
Usurping Soros' own role, perhaps? Soros continues,
" ... the prospect of Japan's emerging as the dominant financial power in the world is very disturbing, not only from the point of view of the United States but also from that of the entire Western civilization" (p. 353).
"The United States and Britain are members of the same culture. This is not true of Japan. ... The Japanese think in terms of subordination. Contrast this with the notion that all men are created equal ... Japan is a nation on the rise; we have become decadent" (p. 354).
More from Soros at soros.html.
Such contrasts resembled Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations article of 1993 and book of 1996, but Huntington was more concerned about China and Islam than Japan. Huntington was arguing against those envisaging a single civilisation for the whole world: his line was that the West is unique, not universal.
Most analysts assume that the bursting of Japan's bubble, from 1989 on, was a natural event, just part of the capitalist cycle. But was it? Patrick S. J. Cormack and Bill Still write, in their book The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America (Royalty Production Company, 1998, pp. 73-4):
{p. 73} Regulations put into effect in 1988 by the BIS {the Bank of International Settlements}, called the Basle Capital Adequacy Accord, required the world's bankers to raise their capital and reserves to 8% of liabilities by 1992. ... those nations with the lowest bank reserves in their systems have already felt the terrible effects of this credit contraction as
{p. 74} their banks scrambled to raise money to increase their reserves to 8%. To raise the money, they had to sell stocks which depressed their stock markets and began the depression first in their countries. Japan, which in 1988 had among the lowest capital and reserve requirements, and thus was the most effected by the regulation - has experienced a financial crash which began almost immediately, in 1989, which has wiped out a staggering 50% of the value of its stock market since 1990, and 60% of the value of its commercial real estate. The Bank of Japan has lowered its interest rates to one-half of a percent - practically giving money away to resurrect the economy, but still the depression worsens.
{end} More at money-masters.html.
Was the Basle Accord aimed at Japan especially? Why did Japan accept it? David Grover wrote,
'Japan's ... ability wield financial influence over the United States was actually quite limited. The U.S. still had the structural power to "set the menu" of international banking. ... pressure to pass the Basle Accord ... came from American and British bankers who claimed 'under-capitalized' Japanese banks were pinching their business unfairly. ...
'The problem facing the U.S. was to devise a strategy for placing the issue high on other states' agendas. A bilateral agreement on capital standards with Britain served this purpose nicely, as Britain shared many of the same concerns about its international bank competitiveness. Now, Japan and other countries were facing the possibility of a "zone of exclusion" disadvantageous to their international banks. Japan was now facing a unified Britain and U.S., and they were forced to come to the negotiating table. ...
'However, Japan's financial power in the late 1980s cannot simply be dismissed. Most strikingly, by 1985, it had emerged as the world's largest creditor. ... However, it is increasingly recognized that Japan's creditor status has not in fact brought an enormous increase in power to the Japanese State. The biggest limitation on translating this creditor status into power is that the majority of funds have been lent to a country ? the United States ? on which Japan is heavily dependent, both militarily and economically ... '
See David Grover's analysis at basle.html.
Huntington's associate Owen Harries applied the Clash theory directly to Australia, in The Australian newspaper of April 3, 1993. Huntington's clash with the Keating Government was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald of June 6, 1995. And in the wake of the "Asia Crisis", the Australian Financial Review of March 6, 1998 carried an article titled "Triumph of the West", by Barry Buzan and Gerald Segal which, after discussing Huntington, said, 'Australia's search for acceptance as an East Asian state is equally fruitless and all the more absurd for a state seeking to "escape" the west. (The recent Asian melt-down may make the Australians think again.)'
Ben-Ami Shillony's book The Jews and the Japanese is intended to explain Judaism to Japanese reader; it's one of several books comparing the Jewish and Japanese cultures. Propagandists vs. Technocrats: Jewish "Software" versus Japanese "Hardware"
An encounter between religious Jews and Tibetan Buddhists reveals much about the inner life of both: The Jew in the Lotus.
Is there a struggle between the two great accumulators of Capital? Was this what the "Asia Crisis" was really about?: Between Nippon and Zion.
Did George Soros cause the "Asia Crisis"?
(3) Where did the "APEC" idea come from?
It suggests an amalgamation of George Orwell's Oceania and Eastasia spheres (from his book 1984). Orwell, a Trotskyist of the nicer kind, got the idea of the three world-zones from James Burnham's book The Managerial Revolution (Burnham was also a Trotskyist, who became a leading anti-Communist during the Cold War).
Chalmers Johnson said that APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Community) was "a cover for Australia's joining Asia"; Samuel Huntington said that Australia was trying to defect from Western to Eastasian civilization.
David Ben Gurion articulated his Jewish-centred version of APEC in 1962
(4) Australian-Asian Engagements
The story of the Multi-Function Polis (MFP), a high-tech city of the future, proposed in 1987 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, to be built in Australia ... an extraterritorial city to be jointly controlled by the Australian and Japanese Governments, a headquarters of Japanese companies in Australia.
The project was promoted by Senator Button, as an icon for an Asian Australia, in place of the home-grown Snowy Mountains Scheme; but it also suggested a transfer of colonial allegiance from Washington to Tokyo. Opponents saw it as potentially a new defacto capital.
The MFP propoposal was not merely a Science/Technology one; from the start it was very political, and this is what ruined it.
The politics goes something like this:
After WW2, Australia had a developmental state like Japan. There was large-scale public ownership & public management of the economy, and industrial projects such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Assets were accumulated (which have since been deregulated & sold off, often to anonymous overseas buyers).
But that Australia was racially exclusive. Aborigines consituted an internal colony, and island peoples eg in Papua & New Guinea an external colony.
From 1972 Federal Governments launched a cultural revolution rejecting the old Australia. Tariffs were dropped, colonies were abandoned, Asian and other non-white migration was promoted, the Snowy Mountains Authority and the Hydro Electric Commission (of Tasmania) were demeaned as destroyers of the environment, industrial policy was rejected as unwarranted government interference in the "Free Market", the old nation-building public service was replaced with a welfare-oriented one.
As a result, Australia became consistently poorer, and subject to foreign takeover.
During the 1980s, when the US was preoccupied with fighting the Soviet Union, Japan was building a covert Co-Prosperity Sphere in East Asia. The MFP was part of that: under the cover of being a "science city" for Australia, it would have become a colonial headquarters.
John Button, the Minister in the Federal Government promoting the project, promoted it as a symbol of a new Australia which was part of Asia; a substitute for the home-grown Snowy Mountains Scheme.
His department, the Department of Trade and Industry, was staffed by people with a cargo-cult mentality.
The financiers and economists behind Australia's "joining Asia" were also pressuring the Asian countries to "open up", and via the Basle Accord of 1988 and the Asia Crisis of 1997 brought them down; so, behind the scenes, there was a battle for dominance, between Nippon and Zion.
A popular backlash against Japan-Inc led to the demise of the MFP proposal; in the end it became a housing estate, perhaps a minor Technology Park.
The history of the whole proposal would have been very different if it had not been caught up in politics in this way.
In recent decades, the whole Anglo-American world has gone Thatcherite, i.e. Governments don't manage or plan the economy any more.
The MFP would have had such a planning function, yet the Government itself was (and is) clueless on such matters. The planning was to be handed over to big business (much of it foreign-based), who were assumed to have our best interests at heart.
The promoters of the project indulged in utopian fantasies.
Today, one never hears anyone talk of the MFP; the younger generation has never heard of it.
Singapore is rarely called a "science city", but that's what it is. It worked, without the fanfare, because it was a home-grown project led by realistic people. Even so, it's somewhat overbearing and stifling.
The Multi-Function-Polis Project galvanised the Far Right and the "Old" Left. After a temporary alliance, these two camps split, and the Far Right developed into the One Nation party: the MFP Saga.
After the MFP was rejected, a varition on this proposal was put, for a city to be built in the Great Sandy Desert, near Broome. Despite its unlikely location, its writeup made it sound like the capital of a new Co-Prosperity Sphere ... Pacific City: Lessons From the MFP.
In the wake of the "Asia Crisis", the Australian Financial Review of March 6, 1998, carried an article titled "Triumph of the West", by Barry Buzan and Gerald Segal which, after discussing Huntington, said, 'Australia's search for acceptance as an East Asian state is equally fruitless and all the more absurd for a state seeking to "escape" the west. (The recent Asian melt-down may make the Australians think again.)'
(5) Philosophies Underlying Asian Culture
There are errors in all human thinking. Yet that is not the end of it: we keep trying to find those errors, and use them as the means of leaping to yet further insights: this is the meaning of "dialectic" in the Hegelian sense.
The identification of dialectic as a process in nature is both Daoist and Zoroastrian, the Daoist envisaging it as Complementarity, the Zoroastrian as Antagonistic, the basis of fundamentalist ("Dualist", "Manichaean") thought. Heraclitus probably got his idea of the Antagonistic dialectic from the Zoroastrian tradition, Greece being a little blip on the edge of the First Persian Empire, which ruled from India to furthest Egypt. As usual, the dominant economy exported its ideology.
The Daoist notion of dialectic as a process-in-nature is non-historicist, non-linear: it does not envisage History as Predestined, Progress as a fact, inevitable or even necessarily desirable. The Zoroastrian notion of dialectic-in-nature, on the other hand, enviages history as "Salvation History".
According to Richard Reitzenstein, in his book Hellenistic Mystery Religions: Their Basic Ideas and Significance, tr. John E. Steely (Pickwick Press, Pittsburgh, 1978), even before the rise of Mazda as the "Good God" of Zoroastrianism, the Iranians had Zurvan (Time, Chronos) as their old supreme deity, Time - Change, History - being seen as sacred in itself; the Zoroastrianian religion originated the idea of the Christ (Messiah) as well as that of the Anti-Christ.
This then is the basis of the notion of history as Salvation History, in Zoroastrianism and in the religions which adopted it under its influence: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Manichaeanism, Marxism. Francis Fukuyama's insight is not so much the end of history, as the end of Historicism: the end of the idea of history as Salvation History.
Reitzenstein identifies myths which show the transfer of the insignia of rule from Zurvan to Mazda, "that is, between the deity introduced by Zarathustra and the old Iranian supreme deity"; he later comments, "I believe ... that Judaism took, along with the idea of the Messiah, the idea also of his adversary directly from Iran" (pp. 269-272).
Radical Feminism is the latest mutation of Antagonistic-Polarity culture. It isolates men and women from each other, pits children against fathers, orients women towards careers rather than nurture, and contributes to male suicide.
The Complementary-Polarity Taoist/Daoist Philosophy.
How Asia's Complementary Polarity culture is surpassing the West's Antagonistic Polarity culture:
(short articles) Living Without Utopia and Between Nippon and Zion;
(longer article) Hiding Behind Auschwitz.
The Capitalists try to use Taoism to undermine China's Independence; Lee Kwan Yew's Complicity in the "Asia Crisis": The "Free Trade" Trojan Horse in Asia
(6) Ancient Interconnections Between Asian Culture & Western Culture
Joseph Needham on Cultural Diffusion between the Mid-East and China from around 1500 BC; David Anthony on the Opening of the Eurasian Steppe at 2000 BC: needham-anthony.html.
The Aryan destruction of the Harappan civilization: The Rig Veda, 6.27.5 (Book 6, Hymn 27, Verse 5) names the city of Harappa (calling it Hariyupiya).
The site of the ruined city was not discovered until the 1920s, near a village bearing that name still. Yet in this 1896 translation of the Rig Veda, a major battle is described there, a devastating Aryan victory: rig-veda6.27.jpg.
This proves that "metaphorical" interpretations of the Rig Veda are false, and that "natural causes" i.e. "ecological change" is not the reason for the fall of the Harappan civilization. The ecological change was in fact caused by the Aryans' destruction of the dams & irrigation system: rig-veda.html.
Influence from Ancient India & Persia, on Ancient Greece & the Hellenistic Roman Empire: india.html.
Is there a connection between Judaism and Shivaism/Tantrism/Taoism? jewish-taoist.html.
Alain Danielou and Camille Paglia on the struggle between the Dionysian (Shivaite, Goddess) and the Patriarchial cultures (Apollonian, Monotheistic) in the last 5 millenia: danielou-paglia.html.
Alain Danielou on the similarities between Shivaism, Taoism, & the Cynic philosophy, and the contest between them and the rationalistic, moralistic religions: danielou2.html.
(7) China & the One-World Movement
During the 1980s, Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke was playing ping-pong with China's leaders, in a very friendly and front-page way, while the new Chinese Embassy in Canberra was being built and bugged. It's right next to the British Embassy; the story went around that the bugging was done care of MI6. At the same time, Paul Keating, then Treasurer, was persuading President Suharto of Indonesia to adopt a Free Trade policy, which later caused the undoing of his regime during the "Asia Crisis".
So, despite the West's leaders claiming the high moral ground, Asian leaders have learned to be wary of them. George Bush's bugging of Jiang Zemin's plane is just one more example. The West's blitzkriegs in the name of "human rights" are politically motivated.
Does the West care about the Tibetans, or is it just looking for a way to break up China? The West preached liberty and human rights to Eastern Europe and the Russians, but after the fall of Communism its economic advisors brought poverty to those peoples, betraying their trust.
For a new perspective on The Tiananmen Uprising, read student leader Chai Ling's interview from Long Bow: http://www.nmis.org/Gate/film/transmay27.html. She says, "what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed".
I sympathise with the students - I met some of them at the English Corner when I was in Kunming in 1987. But, although they were courageous, they were unaware of the New World Order & Trotskyist forces in the West, which would have destroyed China as they destroyed Russia after 1991, if the government had fallen.
{end}
From Henry Liu:
"World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy. The world's interlinked economies no longer trade to capture a comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies. To prevent speculative and manipulative attacks on their currencies, the world's central banks must acquire and hold dollar reserves in corresponding amounts to their currencies in circulation. The higher the market pressure to devalue a particular currency, the more dollar reserves its central bank must hold. This creates a built-in support for a strong dollar that in turn forces the world's central banks to acquire and hold more dollar reserves, making it stronger. This phenomenon is known as dollar hegemony, which is created by the geopolitically constructed peculiarity that critical commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars. Everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil. The recycling of petro-dollars is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel since 1973."
Henry Liu: US Dollar Hegemony Has Got To Go:
http://www.atimes.com/global-econ/DD11Dj01.html
(8) Reg Little and Warren Reed, The Confucian Renaissance
Reg Little and Warren Reed, THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE, The Federation Press, Sydney 1989.
Reg lives in Brisbane. He informed me that a Chinese edition of this book is selling well in China.
Confucius was "purged" during the Cultural Revolution, with its campaign against the "Four Olds", but since then he has been rehabilitated.
Confucianism is thus a rival to the Marxist philosophy and the Jewish religion.
The resurgence of Confucianism, as expressed in the "Japan model", playued a major role in defeating the Soviet Union; after Mao's death, Deng Xiao-ping visited Japan and decided to switch to the Japan economic model.
Might the same model, now spread to a China-Korea-Japan block, play a similar role in defeating the Capitalism practised in the Anglophone countries?
{p. 4} A number of characteristics which have distinguished Confucian civilisation over several thousand years can be traced to these writings. These include: A reverence for antiquity. ...
{p. 5} A spiritual concern with the forms and functions of the State. ... A respect for education. ... A preference for government by Man, or virtue, rather than by law. ...
{p. 6} An acceptance of the diversity of spiritual and philosophical authority. ... The creation and promotion of unique concepts of humanity (ren) and ceremony (li). ...
The rival Daoist {Taoist} philosophers, Laozi and Zhuangzi, also initiated a major Chinese spiritual tradition which has survived to this day. Whereas Confucianism defines a man's relationship to other men, society, and the State, Daoism {Taoism} defines "the individual's" relationship to the Absolute. While the particular teachings attributed to Laozi and Zhuangzi are noteworthy for their fluidity and wisdom in addressing many of the leading questions which confront Man, they contrast strongly with Confucian teaching in providing a more intuitive, less socially burdensome and more spiritually transcendental philosophy. To wit, paradox and poetry of the Daoist texts has provided a critical balance to the more weighty, grave, and responsible Confucian texts. ...
{p. 48} The stubborn insistence of US commentators in interpreting the Japanese economic performance in orthodox Western economic concepts has of course, been a major part of the West's vulnerability to Japanese strategies. ...
{p. 49} Below, an attempt is made to identify some of the most important of the common characteristics shared by the North Asian Confucian communities.
An emphasis on obligation within society rather than rights ...
An acute awareness of the changing nature of reality and the need for polar opposites to compliment, rather than to conflict with one another, reflected respectively in the Yijing and Yin Yang teachings. ...
{p. 80} The economists are probably the most pervasive and powerful priesthood in the modern Western World. Like the leaders of many such orthodoxies, they have failed the communities they were expected to serve - both intellectually and spiritually. Chalmers Johnson has commented that one of the groups which will be judged most harshly in the near future in the West is that of the economists and social scientists for failing to explain the growth economies of North Asia. ...
{p. 97} ... China will soon be posing a major challenge to Japan and the Four Dragons.
If this dynamic of progress is to be maintained, and history since 1945 suggests nothing short of a World War is likely to disrupt the commitment to competitive economic achievement in the area, then the next several decades will see the shift of world economic leadership to the communities of North Asia.. ...
{p. 99} The fact that critical developments with worldwide implications will frequently be determined in character-based languages against a background of Confucian cultural tradition, will make many global institutions, value attitudes, and conceptual frameworks mainly irrelevant and anachronistic.
{end}
The above, and more of The Confucian Renaissance, are at confucian-renaissance.html
(9) Eamonn Fingleton, Is Japan Faking It?
The Australian Financial Review, Friday 22 November 2002, in the Review section:
For a decade now, the Western consensus has been that Japan is an economic basket case. But this is a dramatic misreading of a perennially secretive society. ...
The truth is that dozens of facts contradict the gloomy consensus. Here are just a few:
* Living standards increased markedly in Japan in the so-called "lost decade" of the 199Os, so much so that the Japanese people are now among the world's richest consumers.
* Japan's trade has continued to expand. Its current account surpluses totalled $US987 billion in the "disastrous" 1990s. This was nearly 2.4 times the total recorded in the 1980s when Japan was already seen as the "unstoppable juggernaut" of world trade.
* Although you would expect the Japanese yen to have declined sharply against, for instance, the US dollar in recent years, the reverse is the case: the yen's dollar value has increased 17 per cent since the beginning of the Tokyo financial crash.
* At last count, the all-important Japanese savings rate, which has been the main driver of the country's success, was 8.7 per cent of GDP. By comparison, the rate for the US was 5.7 per cent and for Britain only 4.5 percent. ...
* Japan has continued to invest heavily in its industries and infrastructure. Investment per job in manufacturing, for instance, has consistently run at about twice the rate of the US over the past decade.
* ... Japan's net foreign assets have continued to mushroom. As measured by the International Monetary Fund, they nearly quadrupled in the 11 years to 2000. ... As long as Japan runs the world's largest current account surpluses, it will remain the world's largest capital exporter. ...
* Japan passed the US in the early 1990s to become the world's largest foreign aid donor and, as of 1999 ,was paying out 67 per cent more in aid than the US. The UN is only the most prominent of many international bodies that depend heavily on Japanese money. (Japan accounted for nearly 20 per cent of the UN's budget in 2001). Tokyo is reaping a rich reward in terms of rising influence in everything from the International Whaling Commission to FIFA.
* Corporate Japan's worldwide spending on sponsorship - from motor racing to universities - has grown by leaps and bounds. In the latter half of the 1990s, its sponsorship budget in the US alone increased by about 80 per cent In Britain, an interesting instance of recent Japanese sponsorship is the Asahi Shimbun newspaper's donation for the British Museum's Great Court. It is hard to imagine, say, the Guardian, which is roughly the Asahi's British counterpart, doing anything similar in Tokyo. In fact, the Guardian can't afford a staff correspondent there.
By contrast, thanks to big increases in advertising in the past decade, not only can Japanese newspapers like the Asahi afford large bureaeus in Britain but they can undertake extensive goodwill programs.
... First, consider the claim that Japan's manufacturing industries are being driven to the wall by China. The mistake analysts make here is to assume that the Japanese economy is still highly labour-intensive. But Japan is probably the world's most capital-intensive economy at present. Capital-intensive Japanese companies supply the sophisticated components, materials and machines without which labour-intensive Chinese factories would have no exports. Japanese exports these days are not television sets and pocket calculators but rather machine tools, electricity-generating plants, railway rolling stock, broadcasting equipment, telephone switching equipment and internet routers.
Capital goods industries are invisible to the consumer and thus Japan's dominance in many of them is easy to overlook. But capital goods are the ultimate fount of the world's wealth and historically the nation that dominates their manufacture - Britain in the 19th century, America in the first 75 years of the 20th century - has been ipso facto the world's leading economy. ... in many of the capital goods industries in which they are strong, Japanese companies face no significant competition from anywhere, let alone from Third World nations like China.
Second, what about the claim that the Japanese economy is in the grip of a deflationary spiral? Actually, what Japan has been experiencing is similar to the persistent deflation the US experienced in the late 19th century. This was when the US went from rural backwater to the world's most powerful economy. ...
Third, it is claimed that Japan has been eclipsed in high technology by a resurgent US. ... All the evidence is that Japan has greatly lengthened its lead in the past decade. ... . At last count, the title of the world's fastest computer was held by a weather-forecasting computer made by Tokyo-based NEC. By contrast, the fastest American supercomputer, an IBM-built machine used for designing nuclear weapons, is little more than one third as fast. ...
The world now depends on Japan for virtually all of the many highly purified materials needed to make computer chips. To make today's ultra-powerful chips, you need ultra-pure silicon, for instance. US companies led the industry into the 1980s but they have long since fallen by the wayside. ...
Japan leads the world also in the production of countless high-tech components such as laser diodes (the enabling components in the CD family of digital devices) as well as in the optical fibre networks that have transformed the communications industry. Meanwhile, Japan dominates in the supply of all nine major enabling components in mobile phones. A Deutsche Bank Securities study found that 29 out of 36 suppliers of these components were Japanese.
The story is similar in the advanced machinery used to make electronic components. Take so-called steppers - the minutely precise optical devices that print circuit lines on computer chips. Broadly speaking, a chip's power is a function of how much circuitry can be packed onto it. So the technological imperative is to develop ever more precise steppers that print ever finer lines. US companies once dominated the stepper industry but Japanese companies like Nikon and Canon have now taken their place. The only other significant producer is ASM, a Netherlands-based company which sources its optical technology from Zeiss of Germany.
Japan's high-technology dominance has been sealed by several key high-technology acquisitions in the US in recent years ... Take Furukawa Electric's purchase last year of an advanced optical fibre business from financially distressed Lucent Technologies. At a stroke, this gave Japan clear control of a crucial industry formerly dominated by the US. ... Another example is Hitachi's announcement earlier this year that it was buying IBM's path-breaking disk drive business. ...
Fourth, even the West's understanding of Japan's financial trauma has been wrong-headed. If the Western press is to be believed, bad loan problems have threatened an uncontrollable wave of banking collapses. ... the banks' problems peaked as far back as 1997 - reflecting the fact that virtually all the problems are ultimately traceable to Japanese real estate and shares, whose prices have fallen little from their mid-1990s lows. Since then, the banks have been progressively restoring their balance sheet strength thanks to the generous "spreads" between lending and deposit rates.
Moreover, the financial malaise has not starved Japanese industry of investment capital. Far from it; faithful Japanese savers have continued to save, thereby producing the wherewithal for the financial system as a whole to maintain and indeed expand its financing of Japanese industry.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the basket-case story is how it keeps mutating. ... The latest "disaster" is Japan's allegedly out-of-control government spending. But Japan's budget problems are grossly exaggerated. OECD figures show that in the first eight years of the 1990s, Japan ran large surpluses. Since then the government's position has deteriorated somewhat but is still no worse than many other nations.
It is often pointed out that Japanese government debt supposedly represented 120 per cent of GNP in 2000. This does seem shockingly high - but, unbeknown to most Western observers, it is a gross figure that should properly be netted for the Japanese government's huge and continually increasing financial assets. These include not only the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, but extensive holdings of its own bonds. On a net basis, Japan's national debt represents just 51 per cent of annual GDP - higher than the US's 43 per cent but lower than that of most other developed countries. ...
Press suggestions that Japanese public spending is inordinately wasteful are equally unfounded.
... much of the responsibility for the West's misunderstandings must be put down to the Western press. Relatively few correspondents speak or read Japanese. Moreover, they are blinded by Western ideas that do not apply in Japan. They assume, for instance, that the stockmarket plays as prominent a role in Japanese finance as it does in British or American finance. When the Tokyo stockmarket crashed, this was seen as comparable to the Wall Street crash. In reality the stockmarket is regarded by the Japanese establishment as a rather dirty sideshow that can be neglected for years on end with impunity.
Similarly, Westerners assume that Japan, in common with nations like Britain and the US, is avidly competing in some sort of financial beauty contest for the favours of the world's investors. That this is nonsense should be apparent from the fact that for decades Tokyo fiercely resisted American requests for even a token opening of Japanese financial markets. In the end, whether foreign investors consider Japan an attractive place to invest is irrelevant because, in contrast with Britain and the US, Japan is a capital exporter, not a capital importer.
Whatever the Western media's responsibility, the lion's share of the blame for the misunderstandings rests with the Japanese establishment. The impression of dysfunctional economic management in Tokyo is no more than grand kabuki - a thespian exercise in mock distress acted out by a Japanese elite that has always believed in cloaking its true agenda. ...
Business leaders play the same game. When I arrived in Tokyo in 1985, the car industry conceded it was good at making small cars but it was somehow incapable of making anything the size of a Mercedes-Benz or a Cadillac. In the late 1980s, however, Japanese car-makers launched the Lexus, the Infiniti and other superbly built top-of-the-line limousines. Why would the world's most proficient car-makers affect such humility? In retrospect their motive is obvious: they were concerned to calm the fears of Western competitors (who in the event proved all too willing to take Japanese false modesty at face value).
The basket-case myth serves many propaganda purposes, of which trade diplomacy is merely the most obvious.
{end}
America's Postindustrial Nightmare? Amazon.com inverviews Eamonn Fingleton: http://www.gwb.com.au/2000/myers/170300.htm.
The mood on globalism: is the ground shifting?
by Eamonn Fingleton Friday, July 18, 2003
Some critics of America's naïve brand of "one-way free trade" sense that the political pendulum may at last be swinging their way. This is the view in particular of Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., an Ohio-based historian who in the early 1980s served President Reagan as chairman of the U.S. International Trade Commission. He believes that the recent trend for key American service industries to emulate manufacturing industries by outsourcing work overseas could prove to be the last straw for hard-pressed American voters. This trend, whose rapid rise I predicted in In Praise of Hard Industries in 1999, began creating increasing serious joblessness in American suburbia in the last three years. And this, Eckes reasons, might finally foster the rise of a grassroots coalition with enough clout to make a real impact on the presidential election of November 2004. ... {end}
More at http://www.unsustainable.org/view_art_un.php?AID=284.
Ivan Hall, "Bamboozled," and the State of Japanese Banking
by Eamonn Fingleton Saturday, October 12, 2002
The Japan scholar and former U.S. diplomat Ivan P. Hall has just published a new book entitled Bamboozled: How America Loses the Intellectual Game with Japan and Its Implications for Our Future in Asia. Instead of accepting the prevailing orthodoxy that Japan is suffering from a prolonged recession, Hall argues that the Japanese economy is as buoyant as ever. He goes on to show how Japan has been running intellectual rings round the West in the last decade -- not least in the matter of trade. It is a theme I strongly endorse and, as I have said in a comment for the book's cover, the book is an intellectual box of chocolates for serious Japan watchers. In advance of a talk he gave in New York on September 25 before the Overseas Press Club of America, he asked me for help in rebutting the American media myth that banking problems threaten the collapse of the Japanese economy. ... {end}
More at http://www.unsustainable.org/view_art_un.php?AID=277.
Eamonn Fingleton's websites are http://www.unsustainable.org and http://www.fingleton.net.
Some of his articles are at
James Fallows' article How the World Works, on how Asia's economies are based on the philosophy of Friedrich List: soros2.html.
Eamonn Fingleton refutes Racism charge
http://www.unsustainable.org/view_art_un.php?AID=290
Writers who write the truth about East Asian economics get used to being falsely accused of racism. But even by the normal standards of East Asian studies, the outright mendacity displayed in the review I attach below is a classic. The review -- of my new book, Unsustainable: How Economic Dogma Is Destroying American Prosperity -- has been posted in the customer review section of Amazon.com. The reviewer, someone called Sally Mowbray, denounces the book as racist and purports to back up the charge with some persuasive quotes. ...
My issue is with the governments of the East Asian region ... In a free world I am surely entitled to criticize East Asian trade policies without facing charges of racism ...
That my work passes the highest tests of decency is surely objectively obvious in the fact that it has been endorsed by such conscientious opinion leaders as J.K. Galbraith, James Fallows, Ralph Nader, Chalmers Johnson, and Pat Choate. ...
{endquote}
In his defence, Fingleton places himself in the same category as Chalmers Johnson, author of MITI and the Japanese Miracle. However, there is an important difference between the two.
Fingleton depicts the Japan model as a conspiracy against the West, but Johnson has depicted the West as run by an equally conspiratorial group. Thus Johnson claimed that the Asia Crisis was deliberately orchestrated by the West: johnson.html.
This element is lacking in Fingleton's anaysis.
Fingleton is an anti-anti-Zionist.
(10) Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996, p. 207.
{p. 108} In the early 1990s Asian triumphalism was articulated anew in what can only be described as the "Singaporean cultural offensive." From Lee Kuan Yew on down, Singaporean leaders trumpeted the rise of Asia in relation to the West and contrasted the virtues of Asian, basically Confucian, culture responsible for this success - order, discipline, family responsibility, hard work, collectivism, abstemiousness - to the self-indulgence, sloth, individualism, crime, inferior education, disrespect for authority, and "mental ossification" responsible for the decline of the West. ...
For East Asians, East Asian success is particularly the result of the East Asian cultural stress on the collectivity rather than the individual. "[T]he more communitarian values and practices of the East Asians - the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, and the Singaporeans - have proved to be clear assets in the catching up process," argued Lee Kuan Yew. "The values that East Asian culture upholds, such as the primacy of group interests over individual interests, support the total group effort necessary to develop rapidly."
{Yet the West only became individualist recently; the emphasis on the individual was trumpeted by British Imperialists in the late 19th century, perhaps to justify private power over state power, and by the 1960s "New Left" Cultural Revolution in the West.}
{Huntington says that the U.S. must play Japan against China:}
{p. 236} The core of any meaningful effort to balance and contain
China would have to be the American-Japanese military alliance. Conceivably
Japan might slowly acquiesce in redirecting the alliance to this purpose.
{endquote}
huntington.html
(11) Edith Terry, How Asia Got Rich: Japan, China, and the Asian Miracle, M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY 2002.
{p. xiv} The proof of the Asian model lay in the Asian economic miracle. Until Japan made the link, it was largely an issue for academic economists, not policy makers. In Japanese hands, the Asian model gained strategic and diplomatic traction that ultimately fed into the antiglobalization protests of the late 1990s. ...
In the early stages of the campaign, Tokyo looked for ways to deepen its imprint on Asia. As it evolved, Japan's focus shifted to the premier global institutions of economic management - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Faced with massive dislocation in global financial markets in 1997 and 1998, these institutions responded by abandoning convergence theory and accepting a more pluralistic approach to economic policy. The World Bank, in particular, swiftly got on board a new intellectual platform at least partly to disassociate itself from its past mistakes. Thus the Asian model, that is the Japanese version of it, was embraced by the largest and most influential of the Bretton Woods institutions.
{p. xxi} Emergency policies taken to prevent the wide-scale collapse of the Asian banking and financial sectors added another wrinkle to the debate. Rather than discrediting the Asian model, the Asian recovery seemed to give it new life. The crisis shrank the boundaries of private ownership in the financial sector and expanded government control. Post-crisis, Asia's governments essentially owned its banks.
{p. 53} the image of flying geese was ... a symbol of the Japanese model ... By far the most important Western influence on the concept came from the writings of Friedrich List, an early nineteenth-century German economist who played a large role in shaping the economic theories of National Socialism. {endquotes} terry.html.
(12) The Capitalists' use of Taoism to undermine China's Independence; Lee Kwan Yew's Complicity in the "Asia Crisis": tao-cap.html.
(13) How To Kill a Tiger: By Eugene Linden
TIME magazine
Asia November 3, 1997 Vol. 150 No. 18
An image of the article, with graphs showing the collapse of the currencies of Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia is at wolves.jpg.
Notice, in those graphs, that whereas all four currencies plummeted, only the Baht went up in the weeks before ... that's because Soros & co were buying baht to pay for forward contracts, as described above.
The graphs show that plunge began in mid June 1997; the ASEAN Foreign Ministers agreed to admit Burma two weeks earlier - in defiance of Soros, Al Gore, and Madeline Albright - at their meeting in Kuala Lumpur on May 31, 1997.
How Speculators Caused the Asia Crisis of 1997: asia-crisis.html.
(14) Suharto, too, was a victim of regime change
Long before Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz's neo-conservative idea was successfully applied in the Philippines and Indonesia, claims Steve Hanke
The Australian
April 29, 2003
MOST people think the overthrow of Saddam Hussein resulted from the US Government's embrace of a new policy. This particular policy may be new, but the regime change idea and its use are not.
US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and a small group of likeminded neo-conservatives developed the regime change idea some time ago and have been promoting it since. The Iraqi dictator was not the first to fall in the crosshairs of that policy. When the US government concluded that Philippines president Fernand Marcos was illegitimate, he had to go. Consequently, Washington assisted in his removal from power in 1986. The point man who engineered the overthrow of Marcos was Wolfowitz, an assistant secretary of state at the time.
During Wolfowitz's tenure as the US ambassador to Indonesia from 1986 to 1989, he planted the regime change idea once again. This time president Suharto was in the crosshairs. He was deemed to be corrupt and undemocratic, and had to be overthrown. The US, with the help of the International Monetary Fund, eventually accomlished its goal in 1998, when Suharto was toppled in May that year.
As it turns out, I know something about the overthrow of Suharto. In late January 1998, I delivered a series of lectures in Turkey. One evening, I received an urgent message: an invitation from Suharto to visit him in Jakarta.
The Asian crisis of 1997 hit Indonesia hard. The IMF responded by prescribing its standard medicine and Indonesia floated the rupiah on July 2, 1997. The results were castrophic. The value of the rupiah collapsed, inflation soared and economic chaos ensued. Suharto was aware that I had advised Bulgaria and Bosnia to establish currency boards in 1997. And as night follows day, currency chaos was halted in those countries immediately after they adopted fixed exchange rates coupled with the full backing of their domestic currencies with foreign reserves.
Suharto realised that the IMF's medicine was killing the patient and that a currency board might prevent a complete collapse. Following our first meeting in Jakarta, Suharto named me his special counsellor. Shortly thereafter, Suharto endorsed my proposed currency board for Indonesia. This sent the rupiah soaring. It appreciated by 28 per cent against the US dollar on the day the news was released. This did not suit the US government and the IMF.
Even though the currency board proposal gathered support from many Nobel laureates and other distinguished economists, it was subjected to a withering attack. Suharto was told in no uncertain terms by US president Bill Clinton and the IMF's managing director Michel Camdessus that he would have to drop the currency board idea or forgo $US43 billion in foreign assistance. Why did a currency board for Indonesia cause such a violent reaction? Nobel laureate Merton Miller, who understood the great game immediately, said that the US wanted to overthrow Suharto and that a currency board would spoil that plan.
MILLER said the US Treasury knew that a currency board would stabilise the rupiah and the Indonesian economy and, as a result, Suharto would stay in power. Consequently, the US government used all means available - including the IMF - to oppose the idea.
Australia's former prime minister Paul Keating arrived at a similar conclusion: "The [US] Treasury quite deliberately used the economic collapse as a means of bringina the ouster of president Suharto." Former US secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger embraced a similar diagnosis: "We [the US government] were fairly clever in that we supported the IM F as it overthrew [Suharto]. Whether that was a wise way to proceed is another question. I'm not saying Mr Suharto should have stayed but I kind of wish he had left on terms other than because the IMF pushed him out."
Even Camdessus could not find fault with these assessments. On the occasion of his retirement, he proudly proclaimed: "We created the conditions that obliged President Suharto to leave his job."
The neo-conservative regime change idea and its use are not new. The only thing that distinguished its application in Iraq was the use of extensive military force.
Steve Hanke, a senior economics adviser to president Ronald Reagan, is a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
{end}
Write to me at contact.html.
