No Japanese looting? More to that than culture.

Many of us, with admiration, have observed how well Japan has handled its natural disaster, and potential nuclear disaster coming from said natural disaster. You might have seen this passed around the internet:

10 things to learn from Japan
SKYNEWS reported this few days back.
1. THE CALM
Not a single visual of chest-beating or wild grief. Sorrow itself has been elevated.
2. THE DIGNITY
Disciplined queues for water and groceries. Not a rough word or a crude gesture. Their patience is admirable and praiseworthy.
3. THE ABILITY
The incredible architects, for instance. Buildings swayed but didn’t fall.
4. THE GRACE (Selflessness)
People bought only what they needed for the present, so everybody could get something.
5. THE ORDER
No looting in shops. No honking and no overtaking on the roads. Just understanding.
6. THE SACRIFICE
Fifty workers stayed back to pump sea water in the N-reactors. How will they ever be repaid?
7. THE TENDERNESS
Restaurants cut prices. An unguarded ATM is left alone. The strong cared for the weak.
8. THE TRAINING
The old and the children, everyone knew exactly what to do. And they did just that.
9. THE MEDIA
They showed magnificent restraint in the bulletins. No silly reporters. Only calm reportage. Most of all NO POLITICIANS TRYING TO GET CHEAP MILEAGE.
10. THE CONSCIENCE
When the power went off in a store, people put things back on the shelves and left quietly.
With their country in the midst of a colossal disaster - The Japanese citizens can teach plenty of lessons to the world.

But there is also another, much sadder reason for the calm, as Mark Steyn observes:

Looting is a young man’s game, and the Japanese are too old. They’re the oldest society on earth. They have a world-record life expectancy — nearly 87 for women. A quarter of the population is over 65 — and an ever growing chunk is way over. In 1963, Japan had 153 centenarians; by 2010, it had 40,399; by 2020, the figure is projected to be just under 130,000. This isn’t a demographic one would expect to see hurling their walkers through the Radio Shack window and staggering out under a brand new karaoke machine only to keel over from a massive stroke before they’ve made it...
(...)
Age is unjust. You’re in pretty good shape, you’re sharp as a tack, you have a comfortable life in a nice neighborhood — and then you slip on the ice in the last weeks of winter, and you never quite make a full recovery.

That’s Japan after the earthquake, and tsunami, and nuclear accident. A month ago, the land of the rising sun looked to be arranging a more agreeable sunset than the rest of the ever more geriatric West. It would never again be the economic colossus of the Eighties, and its loss of second place in the global economic rankings to China was a symbolic blow. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless, and in a decade the childless percentage of the much smaller number of women born in the Eighties will be even greater. But, unlike Europe, Japan had no restive unassimilated immigrant populations to complicate demographic decline, and it was managing its descent into societal senescence with some inventiveness....Oh, sure, it all sounds a bit creepy, but there are worse ways of ending up than at the tender mercies of a robot nurse whose soft flesh-like hands are less calloused than those of harassed British NHS nurses, and, come to think of it, less prone to infection-spreading. Also, your robot-carer can be programmed to speak the same language as you.


And then the tsunami hit. Old societies are always vulnerable. Old societies running up debt levels of 200 percent of GDP in an attempt to jump-start the economy before the clock runs out are even more vulnerable. AP reporter Jay Alabaster captured the scene at the Senen General Hospital in Takajo: The food and medicine were kept on the ground floor and were lost when the tide rushed in. Five days into the catastrophe, the stench from waterless bathrooms in continuous use by the elderly choked the building. Upstairs, four nonagenarians had died, and 120 of their fellow patients huddled in the dark and cold without their pills, their treatments, their monitors.

When the earthquake strikes, who clears the downed electric lines from the roads, pulls you from the rubble, supervises an orderly evacuation? Young people. Where will they be when the 2025 tsunami washes in? Can you make Yurinas (robot helpers) that swim? Or will the tide disable their circuits? Can they be programmed to move you to higher ground? Or locate the aspirin cabinet the earthquake tossed down the elevator shaft?

The tsunami has accelerated Japan’s date with demographic destiny, as the economic downturn accelerated Europe’s. As for America, the Taliban think that’s all about demography, too: If a 50-year-old American mother has just one son, she doesn’t want him in Afghanistan. If a 50-year-old Pashtun has five sons plus a half dozen grandkids hard on their heels, well, you look on these things a little differently.

Shortly after I came to live in New Hampshire, a local buttonholed me at the general store one morn and asked if I would help out with Old Home Day or some such small-town event. “Yeah, sure,” I replied, and fished out my checkbook. “No, no,” she said. “We need warm bodies.” I don’t think I’d ever heard the phrase in that context before: able-bodied persons who can actually do something. But she’s right. That hospital, like other buildings, withstood the worst earthquake in history. But they’re short of warm bodies, and whether Japan can withstand that remains to be seen.

Japan going Reaganite

Overlooked during the Foley scandal hullabaloo, George Will had a very interesting column about the political and economic shift in Japan.

Back when I was in my formative years in the 1980’s, it seemed that the mighty Japanese could do no wrong economically. Many of us in California thought we would be working for them and they would own the place. Many thinkers on the Left Of Center (and in fairness, there are a few serious thinkers on the Left Of Center) like Lester Thurow of MIT or Chalmers Johnson of the University of California sang the praises of Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, how it benevolently planned out a prosperous economic future for that nation. American industrialists like Lee Iacocca chimed in.

Japan, in these wonky thinkers minds, vindicated their belief that statism, led by academic wonks like themselves, COULD work.

Obviously, state run industry socialism had proven to be an utter failure, as the corpses of the British, French, Swedish and some other Euro economies had proven. But Japan, in the minds of these Left Of Center thinkers, had done it right. Private enterprise remained private, but the benevolent bureaucrats of MITI set up the boundaries in which it could operate, for the good of the country as a whole.

Japanese corporations, it was said, had a much more harmonious work culture. The pay gap between the lowest floor sweeper and the CEO was so many times lower than the USA or even Europe. And lifetime employment and a good retirement was the rule. Who needs a high-tax government-run welfare state when the “Kaisha” corporation, nurtured by industrial policy, with a high-priced domestic consumer goods market and an export-driven foreign consumer goods market, could provide it for you?

Of course, there were some serious problems with this cozy corporatist arrangement, even if you conceded their statist premise.

For starters, ecology fell by the wayside. Japanese cities had and to a lesser extent still do have a level of air quality and water pollution that would be politically intolerable in Western Europe or the United States.

Secondly, for leftists enchanted with “diversity”, Japan does not suffer such idiocy. “The nail that sticks up will be hammered down”. Feminism? A lack of women executives? Don’t make the Japanese bosses laugh. Minority rights? They don’t exist there. Japan has not imported a large underclass of Latino or Muslim immigrant gruntworkers that at best prove somewhat difficult to integrate into the larger society, as we are seeing in the USA, and at worst prove to be downright deadly to it, as we are seeing in Europe. The few minorities that do exist in Japan are either clearly second class (make that even third or fourth class) citizens like Korean residents, or, like Western expatriates, are seen as exotic “gai-jin” objects of curiosity, like creatures from another world. And in a very monocultural and conformist society like Japan, they are.

Third, the cozy “I’m from the government and I am here to help” relationship between politics and business led to corruption and scandals that also would also have been politically intolerable in Europe or the USA. Part of the reason for Japan’s apparent economic might in the 1980’s, and Japan’s fall from economic grace in the early 1990’s, was the fact that the Japanese were using accounting methods that would have made the Enron and WorldCom executives blush. There’s no antitrust enforcement or “consumer rights” to speak of in Japan.

But 15 years ago, even ignoring those three drawbacks, the sweet magic of industrial policy clearly turned into a sour and phony parlor trick. Japan became the macroeconomic equivalent of a Pokemon craze.

Industrial policy may have worked well when it came to rebuilding infrastructure from the rubble of World War Two, and it worked tolerably well for those industries closely tied to that infrastructure: textiles, steel, motor vehicles, shipbuilding, machine tooling. Even electronics, like stereos and televisions, could be said to be tied to the basic infrastructure, like telephones.

But when it came to anything at a higher level higher than that, the MITI wonks were, well, less than successful. Productivity slumped, and new products fizzled. High Definition TV? Computer Networks and Software? Cell phones and advanced telecommuniations? The Mighty MITI misstepped and stumbled badly. In 2001, it was reorganized and renamed the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, focusing on the economy as a whole and not just industrial policy.

A linked article indicates that even in MITI’s heyday, industrial policy didn’t always work either, but at least then it was dealing in industrial and technological catch-up, rather than leadership.

George Will notes:

“The economy succumbed to the cumulative inefficiencies of government commands. It buckled beneath the "iron triangle'' of favors-seeking big businesses, the favors-dispensing Liberal Democratic Party, and government bureaucracy. That system produced the ballooning of nonperforming financial assets. Japan's nominal Gross Domestic Product still is less than it was in 1997; America's Nominal GDP has increased more than 50 percent since then.”

Moreover, like Western Europe, Japan faces the same problem of a generous benefits for a growing population of old people, old people who are living longer as medicine improves, to be financed by a shrinking population of young people. And this shrinking is not just in relative terms either. Japan has closed 4,000 schools in the last 20 years, and the nation has a fertility rate -- the number of children per woman of childbearing age -- of 1.32. The replacement rate, which keeps population from shrinking, is 2.1. (This assumes a 50/50 male/female birthrate; the extra 0.1 is necessary for those whose lives are cut short by wars, disease, accidents, natural disasters, and other tragedies). Last year, Japanese deaths exceeded births by 21,408.

The U.S. fertility rate is right at replacement level, but immigration of one million a year legally (and probably another half million a year illegally) still causes relatively rapid US population growth.

It is a telling sign that some industries in Japan are seriously declining: toys and games, infant and children’s apparel, educational products. The new crop of kids just isn’t there in enough numbers.

Moreover, the toys that are appearing are essentially robot companions for lonely adults:

Given that the proportion of old is rising and the absolute numbers of young are shrinking, Japan has three hard choices:

1. Cut benefits and have the old people work longer. This is politically difficult if not impossible.

2. Import many more cheap alien workers, the way the USA and Europe have. In a very conformist and monocultural society like Japan, this is culturally and also politically impossible. Moreover, as George Will notes, in a Japan that is more crowded and polluted than Europe, the attitude seems to be: “Fewer people? Whew! What a relief….”

3. Increase the productivity of the working population, through more entrepreneurship, with tax cutting policies that encourage this.

Japan has mostly chosen the third option. Japan’s economy has been rising since 2002, and why is that? Because the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (don’t let the name fool you, it’s quite Right-Of-Center) has embraced more entrepreneurship. Former Prime Minister Junichiro_Koizumi and his successor Shinzo_Abe have been very explicit about this.

But more entrepreneurship means more inequality of outcomes, even though the overall outcome is more prosperity for all. And here is where the industrial policy wonks of the past will no doubt kick up their heels and start screaming. This is where the dreaded “age of greed and selfishness” that they deplore emerges. In other words, Japan is experiencing the Reagan Revolution nearly twenty five years after the United States.

In a way this quarter century lag isn’t new. Japan had its technocratic “end of ideology” and relative harmony between big government, big business and big labor in the 1980’s, about 25 years after the USA did in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Chalmers Johnson and Lester Thurow had NOTHING on Daniel Bell.