One of the unsurprising but disturbing results of my enquiry into neoliberalism in Japan is the way the so-called ‘progressive’ side of politics has embraced the main tenets of neoliberalism. For a Westerner, Japanese politics is somewhat confounding and to understand what is going on, one must abandon the typical Left=Progressive/Right=Conservative dichotomy. In Japan, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party looks like a conservative party in most ways except for its approach to economic policy. Similarly, the opposition parties are quite often the ones espousing ‘market-based’ economic policies, while also aspiring to be like any progressive party anywhere on social issues. The discussion today is about why the progressives act in this way and it goes to the heart of the tension between the traditional cultural norms and a desire to be free of them. This is Part 3 in the series on this topic.

This weekly report will provide some insights into life for a westerner (me) who is working for an extended period at Kyoto University in Japan but who over the years of working here has increasingly began to understand the language and local cultural traditions.

Neoliberalism has scammed everyone. It told citizens that if we were liberated from government regulations and government control of enterprises that delivered essential services then we would attain the best possible outcomes that were available. A barrage of messaging from media companies blatantly serving the interests of capital and think tanks masquerading as independent research organisations but which are in reality just propaganda machines for their funding sources reinforced the narrative that freedom lay in reducing the government footprint on our lives. That was all a ruse. In his 2005 book – A Brief History of Neoliberalism – David Harvey referred to the use of “vague rhetorical devices” that worked on our intuition. Of course, cognitive linguists and related scientists repeatedly tell us that our intuition regularly leads us astray. The ‘freedom’ narrative hid the real agenda, which was to overturn the progressive advances achieved during the full employment period following WW2. Neoliberalism was about restoring the dominance of capital and creating mechanisms to retrench the advances that had reduced inequality and improved prosperity for workers. In Japan, the same forces were unleashed by the context was somewhat different to the West, particularly the English-speaking world. This is Part 2 of my brief enquiry into the neoliberal ideology has interacted with the traditional cultural features of modern Japan.

In the West, particularly the English-speaking world, neoliberalism seemed to easily replace the collectivist values of the full employment era that followed the Second World War. It constructed a world where individualism was prioritised over society, even though it claimed that society (all of us) would be better off by pursuing our own greedy interests. All the collective apparatus of the full employment era – welfare state, democratic institutions, social solidarity – were attacked by the phalanx of think tanks, media companies that sprung up in the 1970s to propagate the ideology. These machines played on our natural suspicion of politicians to mount a major reconfiguration of the state under the pretence that through privatisation outsourcing, and the promotion of unfettered ‘markets’ we would all prosper. It was a fraud – a deliberate deception and the question is whether the ideological onslaught has become so entrenched in our value structures that it will be hard to move beyond. Today, I want to convey some of the research I am doing tracing the way the neoliberal ideology has interacted with the traditional cultural values of Japan. Japan is a curious mix or hybrid of Western and Eastern values and one might venture to say that the latter make it harder for neoliberal precepts to spread as deeply as they have in the West. That is what I am writing about today. This is Part 1 of a two-part series on this topic.

This weekly report will provide some insights into life for a westerner (me) who is working for an extended period at Kyoto University in Japan but who over the years of working here has increasingly began to understand the language and local cultural traditions.