No One Decided: Japan's System Where No One Takes Responsibility

Yet their temporal horizons could hardly be more different. Okamoto had directly lived through the Second World War, and the star-studded cast he assembled featured many actors who had also experienced the war firsthand. Most prominent among them was Toshiro Mifune, who took on the grueling role of the War Minister. The majority of the cast had seen combat on the front lines, and the very composition of the film—veterans playing the politicians who had refused to make any decisions—demands attention. The work systematically exposes a characteristically Japanese predicament: an utter inability to decide anything for oneself. In it, Yamamoto’s kuki and Yamanouchi’s "total war system" are laid bare. Crucially, one must ask: did anyone take responsibility? A close reading of the film shows that no one did. Nor was this confined to the political elite; it was the condition of the entire nation. After Emperor Showa’s surrender broadcast on August 15, people everywhere began professing in chorus that they had been deceived. In effect, nobody bore responsibility for the war. Though the War Minister commits seppuku, the fundamental question of why the war began and why such catastrophic destruction had to be endured was left unanswered in the shadows. Once the surrender had been broadcast, everyone immediately took up the soothing rhetoric of "democracy."

In my view, the greatest malaise of modern Japan lies in the bureaucratic machinery erected by the Choshu faction during the Meiji period, which endures to this day. It was this carefully preserved apparatus that Anno laid bare from an entirely new angle in Shin Godzilla. While masquerading as popular entertainment, the film mirrors Japan’s Longest Day in its meticulous portrayal of a Japanese system in which no one decides and no one assumes responsibility. Framed by the memory of the March 11, 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, it brilliantly captures politicians and bureaucrats who, even as citizens died and suffered, cared only for subservience to a meaningless bureaucratic order. When bureaucratization had infected the entire nation, the impulse to preserve the system ahead of responding to the tsunami and nuclear meltdown cost countless lives. It proved that nothing had changed since the war.

The day after tomorrow, Japan will mark eighty years since the end of the Second World War. Can we truly say that anything essential has changed over those eight decades? Certainly, there was the great postwar reconstruction: the population reached a hundred million, and by the 1980s Japan had achieved the dream of lifting virtually its entire citizenry into the middle class, functioning in practice as a socialist state. Yet can we simply attribute this to a total transformation of the system triggered by military defeat? I have always been skeptical of such facile, one-sided narratives. I suspect rather that this historical "miracle" occurred precisely because the wartime apparatus was so skillfully preserved. Having realized the ideal of a de facto socialist society even before the Soviet Union, Japan proved incapable of changing that system—or ideology—after the collapse of the bubble economy in the 1990s and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Over the course of three decades, the entire populace slid from the middle class into poverty, arriving at today’s exhausted state where decline proceeds unchecked. The greatest driving force behind Japan’s postwar resurgence was nothing other than the total war mobilization forged in wartime; and in the years ahead, that total war system will surely stage a comeback in unexpected guise.

The sociologist Yasushi Yamanouchi termed this the "total war system," pointing out that the mobilization structure created by the Imperial military during the Second World War remained deeply entrenched within the Japanese psyche long after 1945, serving as the prime engine of swift economic recovery. The critic Shichihei Yamamoto, in his landmark study Kuki no Kenkyu (The Study of "Air"), explained how the military leadership—ignoring figures and scientific data to plunge headlong into sheer spiritualism—operated under the sway of kuki (空気), the unspoken "air" or atmosphere peculiar to Japanese village communities. That kuki, he noted, was passed down with even greater force after the war.

These are symbolic events; in reality, it is not the events themselves that are the problem, I think, but the posture taken at each moment—which is to say, the decisions themselves. Put plainly, for instance, the Meiji Restoration was a military coup d'état that incited lower-ranking samurai, doing no more than shifting political power from the Tokugawa shogunate to the forces of Choshu and Satsuma. Because the rulers of the day could not afford to let the people know this fact, they held up the name of the "New Meiji Government" and actively promoted the idea that it was a regime wholly different from that of the Edo period. Seen in its essence, however, the bureaucratic system created at that time by the Choshu retainer Aritomo Yamagata is the very root cause exhausting the Japan that continues down to the present day. Unless this is removed, the problem that nothing changes from the Meiji regime always lurks beneath the surface.

Japan's bureaucracy from Meiji onward was formed on the premise of Neo-Confucianism (Zhu Xi learning), a Confucian philosophy of rule inherited from the Edo period, and this has served in every age as the cause that gives rise to problems and the driving force that sends the system careening out of control. Its greatest runaway plunge was the entry into the Second World War, ending in a wretched defeat. Even then, however, just as at the Meiji Restoration, the rulers exercised a cunning sleight of hand as an expedient to evade their own responsibility. Because letting the public know the truth would have led directly to questions of their own accountability, they piled fabrication upon fabrication. At that moment, the principle of the Meiji regime had its life extended intact.

No one wants to face the fact that within the span of a single century, the country has been caught on the back foot three times at decisive junctures—and so the custom of everyone agreeing not to look, treating it as something that never existed and never happened, continues entrenched within the mechanisms of society to this day. I cannot help feeling that this is the true cause of the decline.

This time I have seen the outline, but this alone should show that the basic reason the move to the modern bureaucracy went smoothly is deeply tied to the samurai of the Edo period having already fallen into a bureaucratic state. So, referring to the bureaucracy of the modern West, Japan formed a bureaucratic state of its own, but this firm form of bureaucratic control would later be the source of many problems and, though it may seem unexpected, is deeply tied to the rise of the yakuza after the Second World War.