Samizdata

I have been a long time Japan watcher. From a big distance, you understand. Unconfused by too much detailed knowledge. I’ve never been there. But Japan is a big noise in the world, and if you keep your ears open …

Japan, it seems to me, does things unanimously. It moves unanimously, from one unanimous policy to another. It takes an age to change its mind, but once it does, the impact is, for good or for bad, electrifying.

Consider that late nineteenth century moment when, virtually overnight, they suddenly started wearing western suits and top hats. They went from a nation of Kurosawa extras to a nation of Oddjobs, just like that. And with that sartorial switch went a basic switch of worldview, from isolation to looking outwards, from ignoring the West to competing fiercely with it by copying everything it did that seemed to work. One moment, an American admiral is humiliating them by driving a modern warship into one of their ancient harbours. In a blink, the Japanese have their own warships and are knocking seven bells out of the Russians. Japan does all it can to try to catch up with and overtake America peacefully, but America isn’t having it, or so it seems to them. So kaboom!!! Pearl Harbour. Instant conquest of the Pacific. After humiliation in war and further humiliation in the peace that followed, the Japanese mutate from a people who despise modern consumer comforts to people who make the best consumer goods on earth. One moment Japan is making “notoriously shoddy goods”. A blink of an eye later (kaboom!!!), Scottish electronics companies have to call themselves things like “Hinari” in order to do any business.

But now the elite-guided-crony-capitalist status quo which presided over the creation of the Sony Walkman is running seriously out of steam, seemingly with Japan’s entire elite unanimously powerless to reverse the steady drift towards catastrophe. To solve their Keynesian mess, all they now seem capable of is more Keynesianism.

The Economist of February 16th 2002 (print edition) expressed the kind of pessimism about Japan that is now the orthodoxy. The cover shows a Japanese face with a tear falling from its eye. On the contents page (p. 5) the picture is elaborated upon with the following caption:

Japan is sliding slowly downhill. The sad thing is that the Japanese don’t seem to mind. Or if they do, they certainly aren’t doing anything about it.

In the leader article on page 11, The Economist ruminates on all the things that the Japanese should do, but reckons they won’t do it:

How much easier it is simply to muddle through, slipping downhill more or less gracefully…Japan now looks to be an irrelevance…

Now, I agree that things in Japan will have to get worse before they get better But then, get better they surely will. Japan will be back.

When Britain gets into trouble, or faces a big decision, we have a huge and very public row, like the row we’re now having, still, about the EU, and we go out of our way to embroil foreigners in our rowing. (Look at the way British anti-EU’ers are now using the Internet to badmouth the EU in America.) And we never completely settle the matter. In Britain, when you say “we”, you are always leaving lots of people – who continue stubbornly to say “I” – out of your generalisation. Same in the USA, yes?

In Japan that’s not how they do things. They do not wash their dirty linen in public. When crisis strikes, they don’t all ring The Economist and argue their particular corners against each other. No, the Japanese elite goes into an endless succession of secret huddles where it sits cross-legged on the floor in big circles, drinks about a trillion gallons of tea and has untranslatable conversations about how worrying it all is. Slowly a New Approach emerges. Slowly. Very slowly. It is reflected upon from all angles, it strengths pondered, its drawbacks thought through. It is tweaked. Then the underlings are drawn into the New Approach, in their own tea circles, lead by those who have participated in the higher tea circles. They contribute their own untranslatable murmurings. More tweaking. More tea circles. And then, just when the outside world has completely given up on Japan, that’s right: kaboom!!!

Do you really believe that the Japanese are content to sink slowly into the ranks of the “irrelevant” nations, and then stay there for ever? I say: Just because we can’t see anything happening just now, that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. I assume that another Japanese kaboom!!! is even now being got ready, very slowly.

Japan will, as always, do whatever its rivals are now doing that seems to be working best. The Japanese are even now roaming the earth, mentally speaking and probably literally too, searching out “best practice”. They’ll then knit together all the bits of best practice that they can find into a new combined national entity so well-crafted as almost to amount to a new invention. That’s what they did with photocopiers, motorbikes, luxury cars, cameras. That’s what they’ll eventually do with Japan itself.

“Best practice” now consists of, among other things, free market economics as “extreme” as can be contrived. This is the economic policy lesson now being absorbed with such bad grace by the European elites. This is what the Japanese are also learning, but unlike the Europeans they are learning it in secret. Once the lesson is learned, they will apply it with extreme thoroughness.

Japan can’t copy the USA exactly, because they’re too different. Too small, too resource poor. And in any case it wouldn’t want to, because the USA isn’t actually all that “extreme”, only relatively so. My guess is they’ll look at Hong Kong in its glory days, and turn Japan into a cluster of Hong Kongs. They will surely deregulate their banking system, and free up their domestic markets. But whatever they do, it will, I believe, be massively good news for free market supporters everywhere.

Imagine the impact on the world of Japan embracing free market economics with its own unique brand of unanimous enthusiasm, and imagine the further impact when that policy is a triumphant success, as it surely will be.

It won’t be completely libertarian, no way. Too much “we” for that. If you are a foreigner and not part of the Japanese “we”, your participation rights may still be limited, even if not so much as now. Our own Admiral Perry won’t be satisfied. But even so …

Well, we’ll see. I wonder if any real Japan experts will find time to comment on this. It would be great if someone like that did give us a reaction. But don’t expect any Japanese to join in.

[ Sabina Kupershmidt points out that behind the gloss of smiling athletes, China remains under the control of a brutal and totalitarian communist regime which forbids even non-political free association that does not have the state as the core of its focus]

The Chinese government has been persecuting the spiritual group Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa) since July 22,1999. So far, the ban has resulted in the arrest of 100,000 peaceful Chinese citizens. Tens of thousands are languishing in labor camps having received long sentences (6-10 years) without trial. 1,000 have been put into mental hospitals. 360 are confirmed dead as a result of torture by Chinese police and/or prison camp personnel, although the true number may be much higher (probably more than 1,600). The deaths are often dismissed by the same officials as ‘suicides’ and the bodies are quickly burned, presumably to hide evidence of torture.

Why is China afraid of Falun Gong, a group which has never made any political statements? An official government report in early 1999 showed that 70 million Chinese citizens, including members of the Communist Party and government officials participated in the movement. The true number of practitioners is probably closer to 100 million. The Chinese government, like any other totalitarian government does not like grass-roots movements and could not tolerate so many adherents to a system of belief not centred on the state. Persecution and harassment of practitioners ensued which in turn resulted in a spontaneous gathering of 10,000 practitioners who quietly protested outside the central government compound, Zhongnanhai, in Beijing (April 1999). This led to a complete ban on Falun Gong in July of 1999 and since then practitioners have been arrested and brutally tortured. I don’t want to relate the many horror stories of their mistreatment but you can check on-line for more information.

I will try to explain what Falun Gong is all about, since I myself practice it. It is basically a method to improve body, mind and spirit through meditative exercises and through a lifestyle attuned to the three principles of “Truth, Compassion and Forbearance”. Everything is voluntary and free, including all reading materials and all teachings (which can be downloaded from the web). Every practitioner to whom I’ve ever spoken reports great improvements in health, which is also my experience. There are no politics involved anywhere.

From February 7^th-9^th, I attended a protest organized by the “Western US Falun Gong” group at the Winter Olympics intended to draw attention to the Chinese mistreatment of Falun Gong. According to my own estimates, about 1,500 people showed up for the march through downtown Salt Lake City on Thursday (the best-attended event). Most of the participants were Chinese, although some Western practitioners were also there. We first had group practice in a downtown SLC park, then the march and a press conference. In the afternoon we passed out informational brochures downtown, seeking to engage people in discussions about the situation in China. In the evening we held a candle-light vigil in the park until 10 pm. On Friday, the day of the opening ceremonies, we again spent the whole day outdoors, mostly on a hillside close to the Olympic Stadium holding banners and sitting in meditation. After nightfall, we again held a candlelight vigil. To my relief, we had indoor activities on Saturday. I found the schedule physically demanding. After all, we spent 12 hours a day for two days in cold weather and in the snow. We didn’t even take lunch or dinner indoors which might have warmed us up. Also, we did not stay in hotels (there were no hotel rooms available in Salt Lake City) but in a few rented houses; consequently, most of us slept on the floor and were rather sleep-deprived. The age range of participants was 3 years old to mid-80 years old, but the majority of practitioners seemed to be ladies well over 50. A lot were over 60. These folks traveled from all over the US to sit in the snow in Salt Lake City and meditate. Many of them don’t even speak English. I hope there were enough beds for the elderly folks, although where I stayed the first night, there was a man from Durham, NC, who looked close to 70, sleeping on the floor in the kitchen. Many of the same tireless people had participated in a protest against Chinese repression at the World Economic Forum in New York City on the preceding weekend. Quite a lot of them have experienced imprisonment and harassment in China due to their practice of Falun Gong. One of the 80+ year old ladies I saw, once traveled from her present home in California to Beijing in order to appeal to the government about the persecution, knowing full well that she would be arrested. And she did in fact get arrested. Now, she’s back in the US, willing to spend many hours in the cold weather, hoping to attract our attention to the situation in China.

I also saw two Western practitioners, both young men, who had traveled to China last November. They had met up on Tiananmen Square with 36 Western Falun Gong practitioners, unfurled a banner that read “Falun Gong is good. Truth Compassion and Forbearance”, started meditation, and promptly got arrested and some got beaten up badly by police. I was very moved by a college student from San Francisco who explained how worried his parents were when he told them of his plans to make his appeal on Tiananmen Square. He argued with them that if men of principle had not stood up for their beliefs throughout history, the world would be an awful place (I’m paraphrasing; he said it better than that). Fortunately, his parents supported him afterwards.

Please take time to tell your Senators, Congressman and Congresswoman not to neglect the human rights situation in China. President Bush is going to China this week; please write him an e-mail to direct his attention to this situation (president@whitehouse.gov). We have granted China many economic privileges during the last year. We feel that we need China in our corner, especially when our own country is under attack. Do you remember that our own country supported the Taliban 15 years ago? We understand that the situation is very complex and needs to be considered from many angles, however, it never pays to support evil. You can also sign a petition in favor of Falun Gong.

Sabina Kupershmidt