I know I am venturing into the world shared by sociologists, cultural anthropologists, cultural historians, and economists in the current research that I am pursuing. The question is whether traditional Japanese values are compatible with a mainstream ideology that pursues ever increasing GDP growth as a goal, if not a reality. The current Japanese government is pursuing what they previously referred to as a ‘high pressure’ growth strategy and aim to end the decades of low GDP growth deflation which has become embedded in the psyche of the corporate and household sector. This strategy is running into severe constraints, not the least coming from the demographic shifts that will see the population shrink to around 105 million by 20250 (from 123 million currently). In past posts I have suggested that Japan represents an ideal model to demonstrate how a degrowth strategy would work to maintain essential material prosperity yet reduce the nation’s ecological footprint. I am now looking into whether the degrowth notion has roots in the traditional cultural values of the nation. This is my first report (Part 1) on that theme.
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I have previously explored the concept of degrowth within the context of modern developments in Japan – for example:<\/p>\n
1. Japanese government investing heavily in technologies to help its population age<\/a> (October 21, 2024).<\/p>\n 2. Degrowth and Japan \u2013 a shift in government strategy towards business failure?<\/a> (July 17, 2024).<\/p>\n 3. Japan\u2019s municipalities disappearing as population shrinks<\/a> (April 29, 2024).<\/p>\n 4. Japan sinks into recession \u2013 but there is more to the story than the mainstream narrative would care to admit<\/a> (February 19, 2024).<\/p>\n 5. Degrowth, food loss and food waste \u2013 Part 7<\/a> (February 26, 2023).<\/p>\n My basic premise is in several parts:<\/p>\n 1. With low and now declining population growth in Japan, the nation can sustain stable or improving material standards of living with very low measured GDP growth.<\/p>\n 2. Rising dependency ratios mean that fewer people of working age are left to produce for an increasing number of people who no longer work.<\/p>\n 3. The declining population is manifesting as a skill shortage in certain industries.<\/p>\n 4. Rather than construct the difficulties that firms might be facing attracting sufficient labour (the \u2018skills shortages\u2019 narrative), I prefer to see the situation as providing an indicator of the limits of economic activity or the space that nations have to implement a fairly immediate degrowth strategy.<\/p>\n 5. A low growth scenarios, where people are still well-off and living long lives with good health care and nutritional possibilities would appear to be better than pushing for high growth rates where people are unhappy and sick.<\/p>\n 6. A significant proportion of businesses in Japan are owned by people over 70 years of age and there is a cultural preference to handing these businesses down within the family (typically to a male heir) – however the younger generation are not inclined to take on the businesses of their fathers.<\/p>\n 7. As a result, the government should allow for the natural attrition of businesses when the skill shortages or the age of the owners render such a business nonviable – rather than try to develop policies to maintain these work places.<\/p>\n 8. While the \u2018zombie\u2019 firm sector (the nonviable firms) has been a source of stability for jobs and there is an entrenched reluctance among business owners to lay off their workers, the employment losses associated with allow these firms to disappear must be dealt with through appropriate transition policies.<\/p>\n 9. Japan is thus well-placed to demonstrate to the rest of the world how a degrowth strategy can maintain social order as long as a policy framework is introduced to ensure that any ‘losers’ are minimised and the costs of transition are spread widely.<\/p>\n The National Accounts framework (System of National Accounts or SNA) was introduced in 1953 by the United Nations as the first standardised international approach to measuring economic activity (Source<\/a>).<\/p>\n It followed the publication in 1947 of – Measurement of National Income and the Construction of Social Accounts<\/a> – which was the culmination of the work of the Sub-Committee on National Income Statistics of the League of Nations Committee on Statistical Experts led by Cambridge academic Richard Stone,<\/p>\n That work was commissioned before the start of the WW2 and was resumed once peace ensued in 1945.<\/p>\n The work laid out the framework that is still in use today by national statistical agencies all around the world even though it has undergone significant revisions in definitions and coverage as time has passed and circumstances have changed.<\/p>\n While economists had began making estimates of national income as far back as the C17th in England and France, the modern work was motivated by the work of John Maynard Keynes and other, who for the first time developed a truly independent concept of macroeconomics (differentiating it from the extant neoclassical approach which considered the aggregate economy to be just a summation of the individual markets.<\/p>\n The related macroeconometric work of Han Tinbergen, which created structural models of the national economy also drove the need for consistent datasets.<\/p>\n The concept of Gross Domestic Product was never intended to be a measure of well-being or happiness.<\/p>\n It was designed to measure how much economic activity (in currency units) was produced in a given period in response to expenditure flows.<\/p>\n However, for whatever reason, the summary measure also has become a proxy for indicating how well-off a nation and its people are, which leads to severe distortions in assessment, given that it fails to account for environmental degradation, income inequality, and a range of other problems that beset modern economies.<\/p>\n The development of alternative approaches, such as the – Genuine progress indicator<\/a> – was a response to these shortcomings.<\/p>\n The upshot is that pursuing GDP growth as an end in itself is not a guarantee that the nation will be improving the lot of its people or managing the resource usage to move into and remain within the ecological boundaries that define sustainability.<\/p>\n The next step to this enquiry is to delve into cultural history.<\/p>\n It is clear that Japan lost more than the war when it finally surrendered on September 2, 1945.<\/p>\n The subsequent – Occupation of Japan<\/a> – by the allied forces, principally the Americans, was instrumental in imposing Western ideas into the legal and economic framework of Japan.<\/p>\n The obsession with economic growth defined the Post War period in Japan as it did across the world.<\/p>\n At the end of the War, Japan was in crisis with most of its infrastructure destroyed or at least damaged and its population starving.<\/p>\n It is little wonder that the nation became receptive to the growth paradigm because essential needs, that were severely lacking at War’s end, were met with the rapid growth after the mid-Fifties.<\/p>\n Japan traversed from being a very poor nation to a materially prosperous nation by the end of the 1960s.<\/p>\n The imposition of Western values during the Opposition and subsequent opening up of Japan to the cultural influences of the West through the media etc, held out that if Japanese people worked hard (read excessive hours) to support GDP growth then happiness would follow.<\/p>\n That sentiment dominated the 1960s and the 1970s.<\/p>\n This stark assessment from the 2008 paper by Junko Edahiro and Reiko Oda – Japan’s Paradigm Shift From Growth To Happiness: Slowing Down to Advance Wellbeing<\/a> – provides a stark assessment of what this growth mania has delivered:<\/p>\n \nOur society is suffering from dysfunctional families because of absent fathers, juvenile delinquency, and mental depression. There has also been a rash of shocking murders. Elementary school kids have been killed by their friends. Parents have been killed by their children, and vice versa. In some incidents, for no other reason then a sense of frustration, some people have taken the lives of strangers.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The growth obsession has also meant that Japan has more than played its part in the climate problem that the world now faces.<\/p>\n The estimates are that Japan is one of the worst offenders.<\/p>\n The – How many Earths? How many countries?<\/a> – site tells us that while:<\/p>\n \nHumanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet\u2019s biocapacity can regenerate …. If everyone on Earth lived like the average Japanese resident, humanity would need 2.3 to 2.9 Earths to sustain the resource use and waste absorption.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In terms of income distribution, income and wealth inequality has increased in Japan since the 1970s.<\/p>\n The Gini measure of earnings inequality has risen from 0.24 to 0.29 over the last four decades and although this shift is less than in some of the English-speaking world. it still represents a major shift in societal terms in Japan.<\/p>\n Wealth inequality has also risen significantly mainly via share market growth.<\/p>\n Real wages growth for workers peaked in the mid-1990s and has stagnated or fallen since.<\/p>\n One might argue that these problems have arisen because economic growth has been subdued since the 1991 asset bubble crash.<\/p>\n Here we encounter a paradox.<\/p>\n Several key cultural values in Japan, on the one hand, allowed the nation to transition from a poor, defeated and damaged country at the end of WW2 into a fast growing industrial powerhouse in the 1960s.<\/p>\n But on the other hand, those very same values are not particularly aligned with the continuous ‘GDP growth’ obsession.<\/p>\n The traditional values of group solidarity (eschewing individualism) and diligence provided a perfect launch pad for the rapid growth that would follow the reconstruction of Japan.<\/p>\n But as demographic decline has accelerated, the frictions between these values and the mainstream growth paradigm are becoming evident.<\/p>\n The promotion of the concept of – New Form of Capitalism<\/a> – by the former Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during the 2021 LDP Presidential election campaign signified an ‘official’ recognition of this tension.<\/p>\n The proposal was to break from the neoliberalism of the previous regimes and replace it with a “virtuous circle of growth and distribution”.<\/p>\n Kishida boldly stated that (Source<\/a>):<\/p>\n \nThere can be no further growth without distribution. I want to deliver the fruits of growth to every corner of the country.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The vision (if we can call it that) for an enlightened Capitalism soon gave way to dealing with the economic chaos since (pandemic, wars, inflation etc) and the idea has lost traction.<\/p>\n One needs to emphasise, however, that it was never an anti-growth narrative – it just indicated that the ‘winners’ had to be widened.<\/p>\n Some of the traditional values and concepts in Japan that supported the growth era but are also in friction with the consequences include:<\/p>\n 1. The concept Shinise (\u8001\u8217)<\/a> – which is the idea that small family businesses (mostly) last a long time and their products carry “particular prestige” defines the concept of continuity.<\/p>\n Their continuity is maintained through “longstanding business relationships, sticking to the core business, accumulating cash reserves and avoiding debt and other risk.”<\/p>\n In Kyoto, for example, there are businesses that still function that were created in 771, 885, and 1000, <\/p>\n I regularly go to the aburimochi shop that was created in 1000 and the building currently used is over 300 years old. <\/p>\n It has been run by the same family over 25 generations.<\/p>\n The advantage within the growth paradigm is that specialised knowledge and craft skills are transferred across generations.<\/p>\n But the friction is that the model eschews expansion that cannot be handled within the ‘family’ resources – and is thus, at heart, a ‘low growth’ value.<\/p>\n 2. Sanpo-yoshi (\u4e09\u65b9\u3088\u3057)<\/a> – is “a traditional Japanese business philosophy prioritizing positive stakeholder relationships over profits” and is “translated as ‘three-way good'” which “signifies a way of conducting business to benefit buyers, sellers, and the society at large.”<\/p>\n It created reliable market relationships that were conducive to growth (through trust and loyalty) but comes up against the Western reverence for profit maximisation and maximisation of shareholder value.<\/p>\n 3. The principle of – \/Wa_(Japanese_culture) (\u548c)<\/a> – refers to the desire for harmony which manifests as social conformity, triumph of collective will over individualism, and comes from traditional hierarchical relationships within the family structures.<\/p>\n The famous statement in 604 from Prince Sh\u014dtoku – \u548c\u3092\u4ee5\u3066\u8cb4\u3057\u3068\u70ba\u3059 (Harmony is to be valued above all else) became Article 1 in Japan’s – Seventeen-article constitution<\/a> published in 604.<\/p>\n It supports a growth ideology because it engenders a cooperative corporate environment with smooth labour relations.<\/p>\n It is consistent with a degrowth narrative because it eschews conflict, disruption and promotes stability and survival.<\/p>\n 4. The principle of – Mottainai (\u3082\u3063\u305f\u3044\u306a\u3044)<\/a> – or ‘waste not, want not’, first appeared in the C13th and expresses discord with something that is not being used to its full potential or is being “discarded needlessly”.<\/p>\n It came out of the Shinto and Buddhist traditions.<\/p>\n In modern Japan, it is a term often used by climate change activists.<\/p>\nBackground<\/h2>\n
Cultural considerations<\/h2>\n