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15 Cybernetic governmentalities
- “The persistence of status inequalities as a major characteristic of the Japanese social system has been recognized in virtually all studies of the society, from Ruth Benedict's early analysis of 1946, to popular accounts today directed at American managers hopeful of doing business in Japan, to works by contemporary social scientists. Generally, these analyses all discuss status in equality in terms of the importance that inferior-superior (or junior-senior) relationships and other rank and status considerations are accorded in the ordering of social relationships in Japan. ...”
(Pharr 1990, 8)Giddens (1994, 58) develops a notion of a “cybernetic” governmental model, in which a central economic (mechanical) brain controls a dispersed organic body-politic. This model has some value describing the instrumentality that creates the otherwise oxymoronic situation we find in Japan: namely homogeneous inequality1. The underlying inferior-superior relationship that holds between the general public—the body politic,—and those of the governing oligarchy that manage the affairs of commerce and the state at the center (in Tokyo) is be legitimated for the polity as an outcome of a natural process whereby the most talented individuals automatically rise to the top (and, in Japan, migrate toward Tokyo). This idealized “meritocracy” also hides a persistent, class-based system of privileges.
social hierarchy
The presence of social hierarchy within a “democratic society” is again not unique to Japan. This is, for example, one of the features of capitalism, i.e., the de-equalizing effect of unequal personal wealth2 . And it applies as well to the formation of elite bureaucracies in other, e.g., socialist nations.
One senses in Japan that the internal discourse of democracy (minshushugi) is more centrally connected to notions of social equalization and equal rights (byoudouken) within the society, than it is with human rights (jinken). The Meiji period can be seen as a time of equalization, where the nobility and the samurai lost their hereditary advantages. And subsequent efforts to eliminate inequality at the other end of the old social scale by remedying the situation of those who dwell in buraku areas, is also seen in terms of social levelling (douwa). What is perhaps problematic for democracy in Japan, articulated through the idea of an “equal society,” is the lack of counter-features to the underlying social hierarchy: the absence of a history of taking away the privilege of the elite3, the lack of memorialized sites where the public once-and-for-all asserted its right to govern, the lack of celebrations of this right.
A history of centralized, national control over social and economic features of life in Japan intensifies the vertical hierarchy within government bureaucracies to the point where its apex again resembles a form of nobility, a family within the family, or a brain within the body. The institutional outcomes of a governmentality that nation-states—most commonly, but not exclusively, in state-socialist governments—devise in order to maintain conscious, centralized economic control at the national level are liable to acquire a self-electing authority in the process of guiding national interests.
1Although reports of the actual salaries of executives of top Japanese corporations show that their monetary income is not so much greater than that of the skilled factory workers, the executive’s access to non-salary, monetizeable and non-monetizeable resources (houses, transportation, golf-course memberships, entertainment, etc.) push this inequality into a range that is difficult to figure, but certainly comparable to that of top executives in American corporations. And it includes an addition feature: the non-monetizeable resources (including personal connections) are non-taxable and also heritable.
2The fact that capital makes some people “more equal than others” in the marketplace still does not legitimate the influence of wealth in the political process and the public sphere, as President Clinton has discovered in his campaign finance debacle.
3Meiji was an elite-led reform in which status was “shared” with other classes with the stated end of ending class distinctions, but without an effective public oversight of this process.
