The Moment

“Consider Japan,” murmured the title of a book-length article in the Economist in 1962, a seminal work that introduced much of the outside world to a puzzle. In ruins just a few years before, Japan was by then growing its economy at a sustained annual rate of 9%, and doing so, moreover, by cheerfully throwing conventional wisdom out of the window. You could almost see the writer furrow his brow: How do they do it?

Nearly half a century later, the question still poses itself. Consider: Japan is by any standards that count — public safety, widely shared prosperity, quality of infrastructure, health and education indicators, family stability — a remarkably well-governed society. Its best companies set global standards for innovation and efficiency. Its artists have a style and grace that has won them admirers the world over. And yet when it comes to the headline measure by which a nation is often gauged — the effectiveness of its political system — this whale is reduced to a minnow. Witness the resignation of Yasuo Fukuda after a lackluster year as Prime Minister. In terms of political reform, Fukuda was a failure; so was his predecessor, Shinzo Abe, and if there are any who have high hopes for Fukuda’s likely successors, they are keeping them mightily well hidden.

Is this a problem? At first glance, of course. It is easy to assert that Japan’s politics needs to be modernized. The nation has an aging population; economic competition from South Korea, Taiwan, even China; an education system that undervalues creativity; and a strategic challenge as its great ally, the U.S., ineluctably loses its position as an international hegemon.

Yet on Japan serenely sails. It makes you wonder if most of us have still not figured out the question of 1962, or if the answer to it is so radical that we miss it. Could it be that an old society is leading us into a postmodern age, one where the world of politics, something that we have assumed for 200 years was the wellspring of national success or failure, is somehow just not that important?

Consider that.