The Penguin History of the World

The rapidity with which Japan, like China, recovered its former status as a power (and surpassed it) had obvious implications for its place both in the Asian and the world balance. In 1959, Japanese exports again reached pre-war levels. By 1970 the Japanese had the second highest GDP in the non-Communist world. They had renewed their industrial base and had moved with great success into new areas of manufacture. Only in 1951 did a Japanese yard launch the country’s first ship built for export; twenty years later, Japan had the largest shipbuilding industry in the world. At the same time it took a commanding position in consumer industries such as electronics and motorcars, of which Japan made more than any country except the United States. This caused resentment among American manufacturers – the supreme compliment. In 1979 it was agreed that Japanese cars should be made in England, the beginning of their entry to the EC market. The debit side of this account was provided by a fast-growing population and by the ample evidence of the cost of economic growth in the destruction of the Japanese environment and the wear and tear of urban life.

Japan was, nevertheless, long favoured by circumstance. The Vietnam War, like the Korean, was a help; so was American enforcement of a bias towards investment rather than consumption during the occupation years. Yet human beings must act to take advantage of favourable circumstances and Japanese attitudes were crucial. Post-war Japan could deploy intense pride and an unrivalled willingness for collective effort among its people; both sprang from the deep cohesiveness and capacity for subordinating the individual to collective purposes which had always marked Japanese society. Strangely, such attitudes seemed to survive the coming of democracy. It may be too early to judge how deeply democratic institutions are rooted in Japanese society; after 1951 there soon appeared something like a consensus for one-party rule (though irritation with this quickly showed itself in the emergence of alternative groupings, both on the Right and the Left). Mounting unease was shown, too, over what was happening to traditional values and institutions. The costs of economic growth loomed up not only in huge conurbations and pollution, but also in social problems that strained even Japanese custom. Great firms still operated with success on the basis of group loyalties buttressed by traditional attitudes and institutions. None the less, at a different level, even the Japanese family seemed to be under strain.

Economic progress also helped to change the context of foreign policy, which moved away in the 1960s from the simplicities of the preceding decade. Economic strength made the yen internationally important and drew Japan into western monetary diplomacy. Prosperity involved it in many other parts of the world, too. In the Pacific basin, it was a major consumer of other countries’ primary produce; in the Middle East it became a large buyer of oil. In Europe, Japan’s investment was thought alarming by some (even though its aggregate share was not large), while imports of its manufactured goods threatened European producers. Even food supply raised international questions; in the 1960s, 90 per cent of Japan’s requirements for protein came from fishing and this led to alarm that the Japanese might be over-fishing important grounds.

As these and other matters changed the atmosphere and content of foreign relations, so did the behaviour of other powers, especially in the Pacific area. Japan increasingly assumed in the 1960s an economic predominance in relation to other Pacific countries not unlike that of Germany towards central and eastern Europe before 1914. As it evolved into the world’s largest importer of raw materials, New Zealand and Australia found their economies increasingly and profitably tied into the Japanese market. Both of them supplied meat, and Australia minerals, notably coal and iron ore. On the Asian mainland the Soviets and the South Koreans complained about the Japanese fishing. This added a new complication to an old story. Korea was also Japan’s second biggest market (the United States was the biggest) and the Japanese started to invest there again after 1951. This revived a traditional distrust; it was ominous to find that South Korean nationalism had so anti-Japanese a tone that in 1959 the president of South Korea could urge his countrymen to unite ‘as one man’ against not their northern neighbour, but Japan. Within twenty years, too, Japanese car manufacturers were looking askance at the vigorous rival they had helped create. As in Taiwan, so in South Korea industrial growth had been built on technology diffused, at least in part, by Japan.