The Militant article reported the signs of a new dip in the Japanese capitalist economy, coming on top of a decade where recessions have alternated with sluggish growth. While this fits into the long-term crisis of the international capitalist economy, many problems facing the Japanese ruling class have unique historical roots. The article pointed to the massive level of bad loans carried by the major banks as symptomatic of the fact that unlike its counterparts in the United States in the 1930s, the superwealthy rulers of Japan never carried out sweeping reforms in the banking system. Agriculture survives in its present form only by virtue of a host of protectionist barriers maintained by the capitalist government.

Japanese industrial prowess, while real, is narrow and lopsided, stated the article. While giant companies like Sony and Toyota represent the now-tarnished "Japanese miracle," the bulk of the economy is still comprised of small-scale businesses using relatively primitive technology.  
 
Lack of a bourgeois revolution
The article pointed briefly to the deep roots of these problems in the country's history. The Japanese superwealthy ruling class "never carried out a thoroughgoing revolution to overturn the feudal aristocracy," it stated. "Feudal families dominated politics, the military, and the economy before and during World War II." Without explanation this formulation is too truncated and open to misinterpretation.

The character of Japanese imperialism, which Dees requests more discussion on, is taken up in the writings of communists on the conditions of war and crisis of the 1930s and '40s. The myth of a strong Japanese imperialist power that threatened to defeat the United States in war--a myth that lingers to this day--was manufactured by the capitalist rulers of the United States and Britain as part of their preparations to mount a long and costly assault against Japan in World War II. Communist leaders of the day assessed that Japan was weaker than either Russia or the United States, and was doomed to defeat in the war. Despite its invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and occupation of Formosa (now called Taiwan) and Korea, given its economic backwardness and overwhelmingly peasant population, the country could never supply an army in a war against an imperialist power for even a handful of years.

For the international communist movement, Tokyo's 1931 invasion of Manchuria was one sign of the desperate and reactionary nature of Japan's ruling classes. "Belated Japanese capitalism, feeding on the juices of backwardness, poverty, and barbarism, is being driven by unbearable internal ulcers and abscesses on the road of unceasing piratical plunder," stated a 1934 resolution adopted by supporters of the Fourth International, founded to rebuild the revolutionary communist movement in the wake of the consolidation of the political counterrevolution in the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin. "From semi-feudal Japan, torn by all the contradictions that beset Czarist Russia, sooner than from other countries, the call to revolution may sound," continued the document. Until 1917 Russia was ruled by an autocratic monarchy. Although Russia was an imperialist power, its capitalist class had failed to lead a bourgeois revolution to stamp out feudal remains and establish fundamental rights. That task fell to the working class, led by the Bolshevik party.

"Japan is today the weakest link in the imperialist chain," wrote Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian Revolution and the Fourth International, in 1940. "Her financial and military superstructure rests on a foundation of semi-feudal agrarian barbarism.... The regime as a whole maintains itself only through the dynamics of military seizures."

Writing seven years earlier, Trotsky had contrasted the 1868 Meiji Restoration, which laid the basis for the modern Japanese capitalist state, with the bourgeois revolutions of Europe and America. "It was not a middle-class revolution," he wrote. "It was a bureaucratic attempt to buy off such a revolution.... Today the mighty remains of Japanese feudalism have become a terrible brake on the development of the country.... As a result of historical conditions and forces, the Japanese middle classes have adopted aggressive foreign policies before cutting the knot of medieval serfdom. In this lies Japan's greatest danger: her structure of military power is erected over a social volcano. Furthermore her empire has been erected over a political volcano."

Noting the Japanese military's dependence on Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria, Trotsky said, "Today [there are] almost 50 million oppressed Koreans and Chinese to the 65 million Japanese. This mighty reservoir of political revolution will become especially dangerous to Japan in time of war." He pointed out that in the "collapse of [Russian] Czardom--and the Mikado's counselors had better study how this happened--the oppressed nationalities, which composed 53 percent of the population of pre-war Russia, play an enormous part."

This assessment is important to keep in mind when considering why the U.S. ruling class decided to use two atomic bombs against Japan and sought to move quickly to assert itself as the new lord and master over China and Korea at the end of World War II. In a surprise to Washington, the Chinese and Korean people followed the historical line of march described by Trotsky and waged mighty revolutionary struggles to throw out the foreign conquerors once and for all.

In Japan, the Meiji period established a unified country under the restored rule of the emperor, whose word was final. The landed families were handsomely compensated for their loss of title to their estates. Meanwhile, the great majority of the peasants were forced to sell their land under a growing burden of debt, and then to resume their toil as tenant farmers, paying half their crop to the new usurer-landlords.

The result was a capitalist state deeply deformed by feudal hangovers. Revolutionary journalist C. Frank Glass, writing as Li Fu-Jen, discussed these questions exhaustively in a series of articles titled "Japan Faces the Abyss," published in the monthly Fourth International magazine during 1944.

Glass explained that under Meiji, who ruled until his death in 1912, Japan was gradually transformed from a feudal into a capitalist state and an imperialist power without a bourgeois revolution.

"The bourgeoisie of the West," wrote Glass, "established its power and freed the productive forces from the fetters of feudalism by civil war and violent revolution.... In contrast, Japan's merchant-capitalists, embryo of the modern bourgeoisie, allied and later merged themselves with a section of the old feudal rulers instead of overthrowing them, and preserved all they could of feudal institutions and customs that could in any way be fitted into the new system of capitalist exploitation."

Glass explained that the stimulus for the development of capitalism in Japan arose less from internal factors than from the "fear of foreign conquest and domination." The feudal rulers had been forced to open up to trade with the West only decades before.  
 
Powerful trusts and tiny workshops
Glass stressed the uneven character of the country's economic development. "In the foreground of the picture," he wrote, "are modern, highly organized, powerful trusts and combines controlling whole industries equipped with the most modern machinery, while the background consists of small-scale industry--the tiny workshops of artisans working for a local market, and a widespread domestic industry. The entire structure rests on the narrow foundation of a primitive, small-scale agriculture.

"Nowhere in the world are there greater concentrations of capital than in Japan," he wrote. The Mitsui and Mitsubishi families--the former a noble family, the latter an outgrowth of a feudal clan famous for the sword-fighting skills of its samurai--"dominate the entire economic life of the country. Nevertheless, the characteristic of industry as a whole is not power-driven machinery and corporate finance, but primitive tools, handicraft or semi-handicraft production.... Every nail driven in Japan is still produced by hand," he wrote.

Japan's "unsolved agrarian problem," wrote Glass, "is at the root of both the fearfully low wages paid in industry and the high cost of food." The landlords enjoyed a guaranteed surplus from the tenant-farmers. For the capitalist rulers, the "agrarian distress" provided "a bottomless reservoir of cheap labor," available for exploitation in their industries or for sacrifice in imperialist conquest.

Women's status was "medieval," Glass observed. At the same time, "they are exposed to all the brutality of the earliest forms of capitalist exploitation." Peasants were forced through poverty to sell their daughters into brothels, where they often remained until they died, or into factories, where they were confined to dormitories. Unions were prohibited. Workers, entitled to the barest minimum of rights, chafed under a totalitarian military dictatorship.

A 1938 document adopted by the Founding Conference of the Fourth International stated: "Weakened by what will turn out to be Pyrrhic victories in China, Japanese imperialism will go down to defeat in the coming world war if its career is not brought to a speedier end by the proletarian revolution." Several years earlier Trotsky noted that the "real armament of a nation is determined, not by the weapons on parade, not even by the weapons stored in arsenals, but by the weapons implied by the productive power of the nation's industries...the facts indicate that Japan would be crushingly defeated." He added that the Japanese soldier, a large part of whom were drawn from the peasantry and a backward agrarian environment, would not master "the new technology and the new tactics of modern war."

Following their barbaric defeat of Japan, Washington established a military occupation. Vincent Copeland, in an article in the May–June, 1952 Fourth International titled "Wall Street's Dilemma in Japan," explains that the U.S. rulers were intent on both nullifying the Japanese threat to U.S. preeminence and in cultivating Tokyo as a stable capitalist ally in the face of advances by anti-imperialist and socialist revolutions in China and Korea. Washington was concerned, too, with the relative strengthening of the Soviet Union coming out of its victories in World War II.  
 
MacArthur implements reforms
These were among the factors behind the reforms introduced by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, head of the occupying force. They included: a purge of the officer corps of the military, and the official removal of the armed forces from political life; the extension of the suffrage to women and to younger men, who had previously been denied this right; the reconstruction and partial empowerment of the Diet, or parliament; the legalization of unions and left-wing parties, leading to a mushrooming of membership and activity; and the beginning of a land reform aimed at breaking up the large estates accumulated by the landlords.

At the same time, MacArthur shored up the domination of the old ruling families. He reinstalled the emperor on his Chrysanthemum Throne, albeit stripped of his official "divinity." Other reforms had a double-edged character. The land reform, for example, "was designed from the outset to serve the interests not of working farmers, but the restoration of a stable bourgeois state," wrote Jack Barnes in the 1999 Pathfinder book Capitalism's World Disorder.

The U.S. general broke a planned strike by hundreds of thousands of government and railroad workers in the spring of 1947 by threatening to mobilize his troops against them.

As social temperatures rose and working people took advantage of their newly won democratic space to oppose the hated government, the occupation government banned strikes and demonstrations.

In the decades since the occupation, some sectors of Japanese industry have competed successfully with their European and North American rivals. Economically, politically, and militarily, Japan is today a modern imperialist power with the second largest economy in the world. But many of the particular economic and social problems in Japan today--from the status of women and immigrant workers to the crisis in agriculture and the banking system--have their roots in the lack of a thoroughgoing bourgeois revolution to sweep away all remnants of the feudal past.
 

Then the next paragraph seems to contradict this view. "After Japan's defeat in World War II...the U.S. rulers...were concerned only with restoring a stable capitalist state in Japan." If Japan still had feudal property relations, how could a stable capitalist state be restored?

I am anything but an expert on the history of Japan. According to my limited reading, however, a layer of rural capitalists, growing out of an increasingly restive and well-organized peasantry, did develop during the Tokugawa period (1603-1867). Peasant revolts rose from an average of five per year in the late 1700s to more than 100 in the 1830s, and most were successful. In the Tempo crisis of the 1830s, some 100,000 peasants rose up and won their demands, deepening the crisis of the feudal state.

A new rise in peasant revolts in the 1860s led to the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime and installation of the so-called Meiji Restoration, led by an alliance of wealthy peasants, village merchants, and samurai. The samurai were comparable to the lower nobility in Europe, likewise reduced to poverty by the central regime. They certainly represented the old order, but they were quickly pushed aside, and their revolt of 1877 was crushed, leaving the rural capitalists in charge.

Peasant revolts again grew in the first years of Meiji rule, and the peasants were mollified only by a decree that granted all land to the peasants. Feudal restraints on agriculture and commerce were abolished and equality before the law and private property were established, leading to the rapid loss of peasant land to landlords.

The fact that there were "noble" families running around doesn't in itself mean much. The aristocracy in England continues to plague the working people of that country. This is anything but a feudal aristocracy, however. It has been based in capitalist property relations since the 1500s. The same is true in Germany--there's still today lots of "vons" in the phone book, but if you trace them back, most of them were rich merchants who bought their titles on the open capitalist market. It may well be that the transformations in Japan, not being based on as deep a revolutionary struggle as was the U.S. Civil War, accomplished less. But the same could be said for Germany and England--that doesn't make them feudal.

The very limited reading I have done on Japan may well be off the mark. But the Militant has in the past made passing references to "feudalism" in Japan. I would appreciate an explanation of what is meant by this.

Robert Dees
Palo Alto, California  
 
 
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