The Enigma of Japanese Power

"When I was writing my book , about the Chinese Communist Party, I used to read this. It’s a classic book from someone who has an uncompromising point to make, and Van Wolferen backs himself with the most prodigious research. He goes right back into the pre-Meiji period in Japan, and looks at how Japanese power structures were developed. The detail is stupefying in its thoroughness. It’s a great example of somebody refusing to be befuddled, as a lot of people in Asia are, by this idea that, ‘We’re like this because our culture is like this.’ In other words, we can’t vote because our culture doesn’t stand for democracy. He has this great phrase in the book, ‘politics in the guise of culture’, which he uses to describe how a lot of practices can be justified. Supposedly it’s about culture, but actually they’re the product of long-standing political arrangements and an attempt by power holders to hang on to those arrangements because they suit them. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I spent many years in Japan and Japan is very, very different from China. But this book I thought was a classic at describing the power structure as it really is, and not how the power holders would like you to think it is. And that’s a very good lesson for writing about China. The great example is rice. The Japanese used to say, ‘We can’t have foreign rice because Japanese people don’t like foreign rice. It’s not in our culture to eat foreign rice; it’s not what our society is based on.’ In fact one of the most powerful organisations in Japan is the agricultural cooperative organisation, which is a massive, wealthy political lobby. It wasn’t necessarily anything to do with the taste of foreign rice. It was about the power of the farm lobby. Japan is a sitting target, whereas China is a moving one. But I thought it was a good lesson in not compromising in what you set out to write; not to be taken in by, to use that terrible word, spin."