It's hard to fault E. Herbert Norman's analysis of Japan. He refers to "divide-and-rule tactics used to hobble opposition parties, collaboration with big business, politicization of the civil service, and the active creation of hegemonic political ideas designed to cast government practices as in the national interest rather than the public or individual interest." He highlights "the growth and ramifications of the bureaucracy . . . the pusillanimity of parties and Diet; the mushrooming of small-scale industries; the adaptation to Japanese needs of Western technology."
What is disconcerting, however, is that Norman is writing about Meiji Japan. Indeed, he wrote in 1939-40, before the Pacific War, and "Japan's Emergence" was an attempt to explain Japan's difficult transition into modernity some 70 years before. Remarkably, his work is still persuasive six decades later.
But not only has his analysis withstood the test of time, but -- and this is the really scary part -- in many ways it describes contemporary Japan. Scoff if you will, but there is something eerie about his description of the driving forces behind the Meiji Restoration.
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