In just 160 pages of their new book The Fables of the Keiretsu, Tokyo University economics professor Yoshiro Miwa and Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer manage to raise doubts about almost all conventional wisdom regarding the structure of the Japanese economy.

A summary of their arguments in Q&A form:

Are Japanese firms organized into informal industrial groups called keiretsu?

Keirestu have never existed, and the concept was invented by Marxists at the Economic Research Institute who wanted to identify a source of “monopoly capital” for the Japanese market.

Do firms in keiretsu arrangements cross-hold other firms stocks, therefore allowing them to pressure each other towards beneficial relationships?

Not really.

Was the pre-war economy controlled by zaibatsu financial cliques?

These firms were only deemed “zaibatsu” because they were successful in the market when other companies were struggling through the Depression.

Do Japanese firms have a “main bank” which will rescue struggling companies even without the explicit contracts to do so?

There is no such thing as a “main bank,” and banks do not automatically bail out their clients.

Is the Japanese economy directed by the soft authoritarian guidance of the central bureaucracy (especially MITI)?

Japanese firms ignore MITI’s direction, and the courts back these firms up when the bureaucracy gets decides to press them.

For the most part, Miwa and Ramseyer supply an abundance of data and objective measures to show that the Japanese economy has never really operated in the “unique” way depicted by fifty years of mainstream scholarship in both Japan and abroad. In the case of keiretsu, they make a very strong case that the characteristic cross-shareholding is actually very rare, the so-called “lunch clubs” are rarely used for group decision-making, and most parts suppliers working under automobile companies make products for a large number of different rivals — not just their supposed keiretsu “parent.” The authors re-analyze the Sumitomo Metals case study, which is supposed to show that MITI punished Sumitomo for refusing to enter into a production cartel. Instead they find that not only did Sumitomo freely challenge MITI’s guidance but got away with it scotch-free.

I find Miwa and Ramseyer’s arguments convincing for the most part, but as someone previously partial to the idea of the Japanese economy being a “developmental state” model rather than a complete “free market,” I would like to see a heavyweight on the other side of the fence argue the opposing view. They are most certainly right about the narrow topics they picked up, but perhaps end up overselling their bigger conclusions. Instead of just correcting the record, they are obsessed with aggressively belittling a certain kind of cultural relativistic economic view where Japanese firms “sacrifice profits for the sake of cultural norms” etc. Chalmers Johnson’s theories on MITI guiding the Japanese economy could maybe benefit from more attention to hard data, but Miwa and Ramseyer seem less interested in dealing with scholars like Johnson and instead channel their wrath towards a more extreme and less existent animal:

“East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet, till earth and sky stand presently at God’s great judgement seat.” As politically incorrect as Sylvester “Rambo” Stallone and Mae “Peal-Me-a-Grape” West, Kipling nonetheless remained a cultural relativist to the end. Dumb down his verse six levels and it captures most of what passes for “theory” among modern cultural relativists and much of what passes for analaysis about Japan. And stripped of their political baggage, the modern cultural relativist and the old-school colonialists like Kipling fascinate for the same reason: they indulge our lust for the exotic and free us from the rules of social science (156).

The authors’ main methodological advice is praiseworthy: Economic theories about certain institutional systems need to incorporate inductive data and match behavior to pre-existing universal understanding before assigning behavioral choices to the black box of “culture.”

That being said, Miwa and Ramseyer show little interest in acknowledging the much bigger question that emerges in light of their refreshed view: Aren’t there many places in the Japanese economic and consumer structures that are drastically different than what is seen in the other mature capitalist economies? Maybe MITI does not completely control industrial policy in Japan, but did the American government ever proclaim that there should be only two car companies and that they would not assist new entrants? Honda, of course, ended up ignoring MITI’s warnings about manufacturing cars and still went on to unbridled success. But I think it still says something about the nature of the Japanese government that it believes it has the power to shape the industrial marketplace, to allow cartels, to essentially not ever prosecute monopolies and oligopolies. This could be a product of historical circumstances (rebuilding after a war, late development, etc.), idiosyncratic decision-making, or ingrained cultural traditions, but Miwa and Ramseyer leave themselves open for attack by failing to mention that there are, at the end of the day, still differences and points of divergence.

The authors maintain that economic actors tend to follow the same logic all over the world, but if we accept this on general terms, it means that differences in output must thus depend on particular market arrangements. On this blog, I have made claims in this vein. For example, Japanese pop music sounds like it does because of the dominance of oligopolistic artist management companies like Johnny’s Jimusho that continually use their market power to crush rivals and keep tastes stable. Johnny’s behavior is no different than what can be expected among firms in the West, but American music companies, for example, never are able to achieve the same kind of economic power over the media to be able to sustain such actions.

What I want to know after reading The Fable of the Keiretsu is, what are the structures of the economy, the government decisions, the particular historical circumstances that are different than what are seen all over the world? Even if keiretsu do not exist, why do you see so much tolerance and/or esteem for monopoly and centralization? This may not be “Confucian” per se, but the sources of these kinds of macro behavior still need to be clarified.

So yes, let us clear the dead weight of myth and the laziness of evoking deep-seeded cultural voodoo. But once we have gone back to the data and put our knees on the ground, we then still have to ask, why and how is a set of universal reactions being shaped and altered to produce a particular result?

“There is a case to be made that the kogal image epitomized Japan’s hazily defined crisis of the 1990s at least as well as did layoffs by top Japanese firms,” writes David Leheny in his book Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, And Anxiety in Contemporary Japan. Although the kogyaru/kogal appeared too late and peaked too early to really sum up the entirety of the Lost Decade, Lehery is right that most would rather visualize the era through wild youth female subculture than gray old men losing jobs in corporate restructuring.

Hell, everyone loves rebellious kids, and the kogals — with their tanned skin, scandalous skirt length, “loose” socks, mysterious argot, and alleged promiscuity — were perhaps the world’s most fascinating youth tribe in the 1990s. For foreigners looking at Japan from abroad, the kogal appeared to be empowered young women forming a revolutionary army against the patriarchal mores of traditional society. Some gawkers came for the the fashion innovation and and some were mystified by the large numbers, but the kogals’ widespread popularity/infamy came mostly from the unbridled teenage sexuality at the heart of the movement. Maybe this is slightly unfair, but Punk:Music::Kogal:Sex. For many Japanese men, the kogal movement legitimized and updated a latent pedophilia. When tales of enjo kosai (compensated dating) appeared in the media, it created a narrative where young women were willing participants in the lolita fantasy as long as prices were high enough.

At this point, so much myth and innuendo surrounds the kogal phenomenon that it is worth going back and looking at their point of origin. According to egg magazine founder Yonehara Yasumasa, the first kogal were delinquent private school students (Aoyama Gakuin and Seikei listed as two main sources by Wikipedia) with rich delinquent boyfriends who cruised in the roving gangs of Shibuya called chiimaa (teamer). Their particular clothing style and gruff speech were intended to scare off the lecherous old men. What is important to remember at this stage is that the kogal were relatively rich and relatively attractive, and they were called “ko-gal (maybe from 子ギャル)” because they were imitating their older “gal” superiors at a precocious age. Their collective reason for rebellion was nothing particularly novel: they were your stereotypically bored (sub)urban rich kids who were ready to be adults but were stuck within the concrete confines of secondary education. So they acted out by having older boyfriends and sexualizing their uniforms.¹ The darker skin may also have been a product of a psychological impulse to appear more sophisticated rather than the misconception that they had any association with or interest in African-American culture. The short skirt is also telling, because the previous style of rebellion had been the yankii practice of lengthening the uniform’s skirt — something much harder to pull off and without immediate sexual message. The kogals wanted to rebel, but they also wanted to show a little skin like their elder peers.

Mainstream kogals

By 1997, however, the commercial establishment began to catch up with the kogal movement and spread its gospel of fashion liberation out to the entire nation. Starting around 1995, chapatsu — brown hair — went from an act of juvenile delinquency to a mainstream style. Magazines then created the guidelines for openly constructing the “kogal fashion,” and middle-class girls rushed in to participate. Soon to follow came a less glamorous bunch of young women from the countryside who wanted in on the delinquency angle.

The male-dominated shukanshi did their part to twist the aggressive anti-lolita of the original kogal look into a masochistic neo-lolita fallacy. The “oyaji pranking” of “enjo kosai” — where girls would charge men 10,000 yen for a one minute date — became transformed into something more titillating: a slightly less-stigmatized form of child prostitution. The media attention not only sent middle-aged men out on the prowl to find these girls, but also gave many girls from the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder a convenient way to afford the consumer component of the gal lifestyle. Those who couldn’t cough up the cash just used magic marker for their eyebrows instead of makeup.

Ganguro kogal

Once the look peaked as a mass trend in 1999, the movement became more and more marked by its late-adopters. The extremes of the style — the ganguro and yamamba — took the slightly provocative “delinquent consumer subculture” (a mix between delinquent subcultures and consumer lifestyles) over the edge to aggressive confrontation. When egg became a consumer lifestyle mag for these delinquent girls, the clear difference in “morality” became reflected on the pages: issues featured tales of outrageous and casual sexual play and guides to “how to have sex in car” that would never fit in an issue of an-an (a magazine that still asks girls “which celebrity would you like to be bedded by” instead of “who would you like to bed?”) What had been a slightly new style and beauty aesthetic turned into Frankenstein costumes. The extreme character of the kogal movement post-’99 immediately displaced mainstream society’s original feelings of curiosity and lust with something new: massive antagonism.

In her essay, “Black Faces, Witches, and Racism against Girls” in Bad Girls of Japan (Ed. Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, 2005), Sharon Kinsella identifies and explores this widespread hostility against the late-stage ganguro kogal. Her essay lists quote after quote from the weekly male magazines disapproving of the youth look. Kinsella even finds female writer Nakano Midori (from “Yamamba,” Japan Echo 27, vol 1, Feb 2000) admitting, “In all honesty, I have seen very few girls sporting the style that brings me even close to thinking, ‘Without that makeup, she must be a beauty, what a waste.’” In sum, Kinsella writes that the girls are “an affront to the tastes of male readers.” Indeed.

Her final analysis, however, takes a seriously wrong turn when she begins to blame the roots of the antagonism in profound racial prejudice. She objurgates, and boy does she objurgate:

Furthermore, commentary about the race, tribe, and skin color of girls, was sometimes entwined with a derogatory and pseudo-Darwinian commentary about dark-skinned girls, which implied that they were a kind of species or animal. Classified as dark-skinned primitives and animals, girls daring to wear black face and witch outfits sometimes became subject to a racist assault on their humanity.

Kinsella provides a couple of neat examples of this “racial assault” — Spa calling the kogal’s lack of morals a “Latinization” of Japanese culture, for example. But her analysis fails to recognize all the other reasons to dislike the late-stage kogal that have nothing to do with latent racism.

First, the charge that these girls were “dumb, dirty, and ugly” seems to match certain pre-existing conceptualizations of the girls’ placement within the standard high-school hierarchy. The girls who became the main recruiting base for the extreme kogal were not rich delinquents who dressed in designer bags, snuck out to clubs, and had college boyfriends, but those girls who would be viewed as losers in the prism of their environment — neither smart enough to hold college aspirations nor cute enough to attract boyfriends or popular pals. The ganguro look offered them an escape from the hierarchy, in which they had already realized they were destined to fail, by letting them hide their true identities in costume and bond with girls in similar positions and values from all around the country. Commenting on the late-stage kogal costume, Kinsella guesses that “the main effect… is to frighten” and brings up Dick Hebdige’s theory of subculture as “intelligent style”: girls have invented their own uniforms in order to mark themselves in opposition to the values of mainstream society. But she is angered that, “society just merrily misinterprets [the look] as a form of animal coloring or tribal decoration.”

If the look is Hebdigian in form, however, the goal is precisely anti-social, and the kogals ended up winning the desired effect — total enmity from the mainstream.² Why Kinsella thinks society should respect the “intelligence” of the uniform, however, is unclear. More importantly, the early, mass-friendly kogal had provided older men a three-dimensional sexualized spectacle upon the streets of the city and tantalizing myths of easily acquiring their flesh for a small lump sum (where the girls themselves were understood to graciously remove moral boundaries and replaced them with market prices). The ganguro girls took the rebellious-yet-sexy movement of the original kogal and robbed it of its mass aesthetic pleasure. Kogals now looked scary, and to a certain degree, were less likely to be the “normal” daughters from private schools and more likely to be those “unwanted” in the standardized high school hierarchy. The kogals stole back the style from the fantasies of fathers and made it once more about themselves. To see where the conflict lay, Kinsella quotes a men’s magazine headline complaining about the infiltration of the ganguro look into their precious porn videos — ugh!

Knowing the intentional struggle manufactured by the fashion look, why would men’s magazines be supportive of the ganguro kogal? Adding in the obvious socioeconomic and regional bias — the new girls were neither urban nor urbane — these girls had absolutely nothing going for them outside of their subcultural participation. Kinsella oddly projects the responsibilities of academic anthropologists upon the Japanese media — organizations that clearly see themselves as arbiters of “conventional” values rather than sympathetic social analysts. While men may have felt robbed of convenient sexual fantasy, women on the other hand remained unimpressed with the girls they always saw beneath them in the classroom. Even now, I ask a Japanese female about the types who became late-stage kogals, and she answers, “The dumbest (一番バカ) and ugliest (一番ブス) girls in the class.” The word “dirty” (汚い) also comes up. Kinsella finds the same sentiment — “The allegation that witches and black faces were ugly and stupid, circulated widely and formed a base stereotype” — but then crams it into her shaky narrative — “underlying more intricate considerations of their hygiene and racial origins.” Do we dislike them because their skin color goes against traditional ideas of Japanese beauty and colonialist concerns? Or is it that many have misanthropic feelings that they are merely ugly, dirty, and dumb girls in outdated and unflattering makeup?

The ganguro today still exist, of course, although relatively marginal and have not been “cool” for a decade now (at least, as dictated by the domestic fashion authorities.) They have boiled down to their most hardcore delinquent/leftover element. The dark-skinned and often-tacky “gal” style still lives on in mainstream magazines like JJ, although the code word is now “o-nee-kei (Big Sister).” I am sure they even hate the ganguro girls.

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One of the enduring mysteries of Japan is the origin of the language. Besides the clearly-related Ryukyuan languages (not dialects) spoken in Okinawa and the other islands stretching from south of Kyushu to Taiwan, no other contemporary language resembles Japanese enough to easily claim a genetic relationship or common origin. Some familiar with both Japanese and Korean may balk at this, since the contemporary forms of the two languages share much vocabulary and a similar grammar, but the lexical resemblance is due to an enormous number of Chinese loan words, and the grammatically similarities are typological attributes, which alone cannot be used to prove a common origin. Also oddly, when you compare Old Japanese and Old Korean, there is almost nothing in common.

Many have been eager to call the quest off and cast Japanese as a language isolate — a classification that syncs well with larger ideas of the “uniqueness” of the people and nation.¹ The Japanese, however, must have come from somewhere on the Asian continent, seeing that scientists and archaeologists now agree that the “Japanese” culture is more related to the Yayoi race who came to Japan in 400 B.C. rather than the Jomon culture existent in Japan from 10,000 B.C. (The aboriginal Ainu, on the other hand, are probably related to the Jomon, at least its northern expansion.)

Over the last century, linguists have set out expeditions in many areas of our rich global linguistic diversity to find Japan a a proper brother or cousin. The most accepted theory of recent years points towards a connection to Korean and the inclusion of both languages in the Altaic family of languages: Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic (Manchu). For a while, Japanese theoreticians preferred the “Southern Theory” which posits Japan as a Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) language (due to some simple sound similarity and a love of word-duplication), but this has fallen out of favor due to an almost complete lack of hard evidence. Some believe in a “mixed language” between the Altaic and Austronesian strains, but very few types of these languages are accounted for on the globe. And out on the extremes of possibility, the venerable Ono Susumu of Tokyo University started seriously pursuing a connection between Japanese and the Dravidian languages in India. Right.

Although a general lack of hard evidence makes all speculation equally suspect, the current theories have enormous problems or place the genetic relationship between the two languages so far back as not to really matter much. For example, scholar Hattori Shiro puts the Japanese-Korean split back at least 4,700 years. The Altaic theory sounds plausible in principle, but there is very little connecting Japanese to Korean, let alone Korean to Tungusic or Turkish to Mongolian. Besides the much-vaunted “vowel harmony” and “agglutinative grammar,” there are only a few known lexical similarities, and these may be from borrowing rather than genetic divergence.

Indiana University-Bloomington linguistics professor Christopher Beckwith’s relatively new tome Koguryo: The Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives offers a fascinating and plausible solution to the enduring origin puzzle. From around 100 B.C. to the 7th century A.D., modern day Korea was divided into three kingdoms: Koguryo, Shilla, and Paekche. The three states were eventually unified under Shilla in 668, and the modern Korean language originates from the language spoken in Shilla. Koguryo and Paekche, however, had different languages which are posited to be related to each other. Scholars thus make two groupings of Korean peninsula languages: the Han² languages — spoken in Shilla and among the subjugated class in Paekche — and the Puyo-Koguryoic languages of Koguryo, Puyo (another Northern Korea state), and Paekche’s ruling class. The latter family is now totally extinct and probably made a minor impact on modern Korean. The lack of written records and remaining vocabulary items from these languages make it difficult to learn much about the nature of the “Koguryoic” family.

There are, however, two sets of Chinese records that list words from the Koguryo language. Beckwith identifies thirteen words (”Archaic Koguryo”) contained in a 3rd century Chinese record about the language of the Koguryo people. The second record is the Samsuk Sagi, the “Three Kingdoms of Korea” work that includes a record of a king in 755 changing all the place names in Korea into Chinese. The older toponyms in the Koguryoic areas do not resemble modern day Korean, and despite some controversy of whether the names were given by the Koguryo people or by other peoples populating the area before their arrival, Beckwith shows that a match between these and the Archaic Koguryo lexical items strongly suggest that the toponyms are from the “Old Koguryo” language. For many of these Koguryo place names, the record shows a Chinese transcription of the word’s pronunciation as well as a meaning for the word. Beckwith identifies around 130 distinct Old Koguryo words from this document.

Scholars have known about these Koguryo lexical items for almost a century now, but the main problem has been reconstructing the proper Chinese pronunciation of the era in which the words were transcribed. There have been many improvements upon this knowledge in recent years, and Beckwith employs this new understanding of old Chinese to reconstructing many of these Koguryo words with more accuracy than before.

For examples of the close relation of some Koguryo words and Old Japanese, download this 2-page PDF. Almost all scholars agree that the language contained in this “Koguryo” set looks much like Old Japanese. Roy Andrew Miller — who is famously convinced that Japanese is an Altaic language — believed these words to be Proto-Japanese from Wa people who were living on the peninsula. There, however, is no evidence of a Proto-Japanese/Wa conquest in Korea that could have caused a change in place names. An important side note, which Beckwith emphasizes in the paper, Korean words look absolutely nothing like the Koguryo vocabulary, and the weakness of this connection puts the Japanese-Korean relation theory in doubt.

If the Japanese (Wa/Yayoi) and Koguryo/Paekche peoples are truly related, how in the world did they get all the way through the Korean peninsula and down to Japan which there is no record of happening? They didn’t. Based on the work of Gisaburo N. Kiyose, Beckwith proposes a somewhat radical immigration narrative for the Wa. He puts the original Koguryoic homeland in Liao-Hsi (present day Liaoning) on the coast of Northeast China. Once the Chinese put pressure on this racial group, the more nomadic and warlike Puyo-Koguryo peoples (who had already split from the Wa at this point) made their way up to Korea and Manchuria. The Wa — who were mostly fishermen and farmers — left by boat to Korea, Kyushu, and the Ryukyuan islands at the same time. Archaeologists have artifacts that show a connection between the Yayoi culture and the culture of that period on the peninsula, and Beckwith suggests that this does not necessarily mean a voyage from settlements in Korea to Japan but a simultaneous settlement of both areas. He also re-emphasizes that no traces of this farming culture can be found in Manchuria or North Korea — which would be critical to proving Japanese came from Northeast Asia as the Altaic family theory would suggest.

Is there evidence for the proto-Japanese presence in China? First of all, Beckwith identifies a set of “native” Japanese words clearly derived from Chinese — with ume (plum) and uma (horse) being the most obvious. (Plums and horses are not even native to the Japanese archipelago.) Furthermore, the Mongolic Hsien-pei captured “people from Wa” in 178 A.D. near the present day Lao-ha River in China, meaning the Proto-Japanese still lived in China during the Yayoi period. In the original accepted theory that continental Koreans came to Japan to spread Yayoi culture, they came by boat. Why could the Wa have not originally come to Korea, Japan, and the Ryukyu islands by boat from somewhere other than the Korean peninsula?

Surely trained linguists and archaeologists will be able to find holes in Beckwith’s theory that I do not see (here’s one criticism), but the closer resemblance of Japanese to Koguryo than Shilla-based Korean puts a serious dent into the basic idea that the Japanese and Korean peoples are “related.” For example, in Jared Diamond’s essay on the roots of the Japanese people, he comes to the conclusion that:

As reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.

Beckwith’s theory pretty much puts the Japanese and Koreans as distant relatives — cousins at best and definitely not the “brothers” as Diamond would like them to be. Even if Koguryo and Paekche peoples were subsumed into the “Korean people,” they did not add much to the linguistic tradition. Beckwith talks about the fact that Koguryo may have been going extinct even before the fall of the kingdom since so many of the inhabitants spoke a Han Korean language. Once T’ang China took over Koguryo, they exiled many of the Koguryo people to the middle of China to die off there.³ At best, the modern day Koreans have a minority strain of Koguryo in their DNA and language. The means that the Japanese people’s cousins — Koguryo and Paekche peoples — happened to be the uncle in a big Korean family mostly made up of Han peoples. The Wa, therefore, have no blood relations to the Shilla side of the family and were never themselves “continental Koreans.” Before and after the fall of Paekche in 660, many Paekche elites fled to Japan. In fact, one-third of the nobility in Nara (in the Nara period) was “foreign” — which I assume to mean Paekche Koreans. Although this complicates the “racial purity” of the Japanese today, this still does not make the Japanese people directly related to the majority ancestor of Koreans.

Beckwith’s theory may not be the definitive account, but it gets closer to placing the Japanese people’s origin in the correct zone of the East Asian continent and helps break the age-old myth of the “isolated language.” The theory, however, creates greater historical questions regarding the link between the Japanese and Korean people. The Japanese are only “Korean” in a broad sense (related to peoples of the Korean kingdoms), but almost totally unrelated the primary ancestors of the modern Korean people. Since the “brother” argument may now fail in our attempts to pressure the two countries to take up better relations, I guess we should just ask them to get along for the 1,000 other legitimate reasons.

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