11 Private public sphere

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“Privatization as an approach to social conflict would appear to be well suited to a political system and social order characterized by an emphasis on hierarchy and a tradition of benevolent paternalism.”
(Pharr 1990, 211)

At the center of Susan Pharr’s (1990) very valuable work on conflict management in Japan is a notion of “privatization.” Privatization is a strategy that removes discourses of dissent or counter-expressions from the public sphere, inserting them into a realm of private (lifeworld) concerns and interests. The discourse becomes a “conversation” between individuals who are in a hierarchical relationship: which means that the conversation is mostly one way—top down. And resolution of conflicts is made outside of any legitimizing discourse of dissent. As Pharr describes it:

“The Japanese approach thus is aimed fundamentally at privatizing social conflict. When faced with a social protest, authorities tend to respond by ignoring it; if avoidance fails, they work to contain the conflict, to keep it outside existing channels of resolution, and to discourage others from joining in. They strongly prefer to deal with conflicts case by case, and their favored methods are informal rather than formal. Whenever possible, they skirt solutions that might extend legitimacy to the protesters, which would have repercussions in the future on how problems of a similar nature should be resolved. Avoided also are solutions that generate principles having broad applicability across cases. As a result, outsiders remain outsiders and any gains achieved by protesters in a specific conflict episode have only a limited chance of becoming general.” (Pharr 1990, 208-209)

Only persons who have been elected (by vote or by selection to a position of authority, say within a governmental or corporate bureaucracy) can voice an expression that is legitimated as representing a group¹. Selection elevates the chosen to a position of note (they become eraihito, “bigwigs”). Other individuals (such as “citizens” or “residents”) who are not in a position to speaking for an established institution (and the establishing of institutions is itself managed by government agencies) can only speak for themselves. Their ideas, complaints, or advice acquire whatever legitimacy they do through the personal circumstances of the individual’s life.

A paternalist relationship is a type of group determined by this hierarchical role structure. And as this sort of “one-to-several” relationship is maintained in many different settings in Japan: in the home, in the school, at work, in relationships to expert systems, etc., a person is simultaneously involved in many of these. And in each of these relationships, the “inferior” members are bound by an expectation of deference to the person and the decisions of the superior, while the superior member is, in turn, bound by a duty to protect the interests of the inferiors—as this is seen by the superior.

Pharr describes an ideal model of how conflict, such as conflict that might elsewhere become a public issue, is contained within such groups, and “resolved” through the actions of the superior:

“Implicit in these choices [of possible protest] is an ideal model of how conflict is to be avoided or resolved in a hierarchical society, with the following key tenets:

1. Superiors have the initiative in the relationship: ideally they anticipate an inferior's grievances and address them in the interest of preserving harmony.

2. Collective pressures, such as from the community or company, act as a check on unacceptable behavior by superiors toward inferiors.

3. Homogeneity (based on shared experience, attitudes, language, and so forth) operates to insure that superiors understand the vantage point of inferiors and take their position into account.

4. A long-term perspective in social relations means that it is in the superior's interest to make accommodations now in order to insure good relations in the future.

5. An inferior may let the superior know that the latter's behavior toward the inferior is unacceptable so long as the methods of relaying this information are consistent with the goal of maintaining social harmony.

6. When the various correctives on a superior's behavior fail to bring about a desired result, the inferior must adjust to the situation—and there are payoffs for doing so.”
(Pharr 1990, 30-31)

“By the nineteenth century, patterns of social hierarchy coexisted in England with a highly developed moral code based not on rule by status, as in contemporaneous Japan, but on individualism and rule by law. Thus, as groups on the lower rungs of society began to seek redress from the dislocations and inequities of industrialization, both features of the system were before them: on the one hand, they faced authorities who harbored a strong belief, which society widely shared, in their own natural superiority; on the other, they had at their disposal a well-entrenched value system, one fully accepted by those same elites, based on individualism, the rule of law, and the rights of man.”
(Pharr 1990, 212)

The final consequence of this form of “protest” is that the inferior has to live with whatever response the superior agrees to as being adequate to the situation. This consequence is the direct result of the inferior person accepting his inferior status. The more general problem is that, as public discourse becomes channeled into these privatized arenas, deference and duty preclude the articulation of conflict or of even the possibility of a plurality of interests within the group.

Throughout all of Pharr’s work, there is little to suggest that there is a conflict between the widespread “inferiorization” of the great majority of people nearly all of the time in matters of presumably public interest in Japan, and the “ideology of democracy.” She does note that in Britain and Germany—nations with a history of social inequality—at some point a ground of political equality undercut the notion of the population as being “inferior” to those that had acquired (by heredity, wealth, or means of access) positions of authority. But she does not see how Japan, by failing to gain this threshold, has failed to create the basis for public, democratic participation.

inferior is as inferior does

“Ideological shifts occurring over the last century, then, have laid the groundwork for major changes in protest behavior in Japan. Even if democracy and egalitarianism lack full acceptance as principles governing social relations, they have relatively strong support in the culture, and thus have become an important counterideology for status inferiors who wish to improve their position through protest.”
(Pharr 1990, 28)

The failure of democratic reform in modern Japan to create a public sphere where open public debate and the voicing of counter-opinions informs government policy is often linked to pre-existing cultural conditions: to a tradition of paternalist control, or to residual feudalism, or some other local circumstance. Japan lacks the cultural wherewithal for real democracy, this story goes. The lack of open democratic governance is also linked to the strength of bureaucratic agencies, and to the economic emergency of the post-war period, in which the bureaucracy acquired political and popular support for (presumably short-term) programs that put economic growth ahead of democratic practice. Elsewhere I present the notion that Japan shares a mode of modern governmentality with many other nation-states, several of these in the immediate region (see: State-nation modernity).

When Pharr presents the presence of an “ideology of democracy” in modern Japan as making a major—if not yet fully realized—shift in the ability of protest groups to legitimate their counter-public expressions, she is suggesting that Japan may be at a point of abandoning its current governmentality. However, I see little evidence of this, even though the state in Japan faces many challenges in adjusting to changing global circumstances.

Pharr’s work adds to our understanding of how a central state under conditions of state-nation modernity can maintain its control over a population without the legitimation of a public sphere. Japan’s privatized public sphere—channelled through thousands of formal and informal paternalist relationships—multiply intersects the lives of each citizen. Again, the fractal image appears, as membership within the nation is duplicated at each level.

¹Before WWII, the emperor spoke on behalf of the Japanese people, and the position of the emperor as synecdoche for Japan as a nation and a people was far stronger than what survived Japan’s defeat and subsequent occupation. But where the emperor’s discursive position was vacated, a democratic public sphere did not emerge to acquire this position. There is a discursive vacuum today at the top, and even the Prime Minister will refuse to claim to speak for the Japanese public: as Hosokawa after offering apologies for Japanese aggression in WWII on a state visit in Beijing returned to Tokyo and stated that his apologies were his own, and not meant to represent Japan.