(6 of 9)
With its empire gone, Japan is a harsh and meager land. It cannot feed itself. It cannot provide raw materials for its factories. Its population grows by 1,000,000 a year, yet of its land—a total area smaller than California—a mere 17% is arable. Dirt is so precious that graves are limited to two square feet (cremation is almost universal in Japan). Factories, and the machines in them, are in advanced obsolescence. There are not enough jobs, though many tasks are featherbedded to employ two craftsmen, four janitors or two taximen where one would do. Costs and wages have gone up so much that Japan is no longer able to undersell everyone else in the world market. Eager British, German and other traders have invaded old Japanese markets. Some of the old customers—Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines—are still too mindful of Japanese aggression to want to do much business again. "No amount of amnesia on our part," a Japanese newspaper reminded its readers recently, "will erase the impressions made on the minds of the injured parties." World War II wiped out Japan's captive markets in Korea, Formosa and Manchuria, and the cold war has closed the door to trade with mainland China. Yet the old cries of Japanese underselling are still heard) Item: in Dublin last week, the Irish Rosary Council protested that even a 37.5% import duty was insufficient to keep out Japanese rosaries.
"Export or die" has long been Japan's watchword. There is danger that it will turn into an epitaph. While they should have been sacrificing and skimping at home to retool for export, Japan's politicians and businessmen frittered away time and resources in loose planning, uncontrolled lending, lavish government subsidies, politically expedient tax reductions, a splurge of domestic production and a rash of corruption. Under Yoshida the country did not begin until last year the gestures of discipline and austerity that were needed. The gestures helped—only eight months ago economists were predicting total economic collapse. But gestures are far from enough. Japan needs an austerity at least as stringent as Britain and West Germany went through, and it needs a leader whose government will tug at the belt until it bends the very national backbone.
Leader in the Middle. For all his political canniness and his present popularity, it is by no means certain that aged, crippled Ichiro Hatoyama is the one who can do the job. He is essentially a politician, a man who made his way up by nifty deals across the go and mah-jongg tables, by tough brawling in the Diet (once he rushed to the rostrum and tried to punch a fellow Diet member in the nose), and by tacking with the winds of national sentiment. "He is not the kind of leader who stands out and looks down on the people," said a friend, "but more the kind who leads by standing in the middle, of them."