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- Convenors:
-
Reto Hofmann
(Curtin University)
Adam Bronson (Durham University)
Nana Gagne (The Chinese University of HK)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Janet Hunter
(LSE)
- Section:
- Anthropology and Sociology
- Sessions:
- Friday 27 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the place of Japan in the global history of neoliberalism. It focuses on three case studies to shed new light on how Japanese cultural, intellectual, and social milieus became entangled in neoliberal polices from the 1960s to the present.
Long Abstract:
Recent scholarship on neoliberalism has emphasised its globality—the transnational intellectual networks that helped it to thrive, the international institutions that supported it, and the local inflections that it took. Japan, however, is rarely placed within this global history. The political economy of postwar Japan is often told through the rise and fall of the “developmental state,” that is, the way that in the late 1950s a powerful bureaucratic apparatus engineered an “economic miracle” (1970s), which was followed by a “bubble” (1980s) which, then, fizzled into the stagnation of the “lost decade(s)” (1990s and 2000s). This narrative rarely intersects with the history of neoliberalism which, crucially, unfolded in the very same years: the ascendancy of neoliberalism in the 1980s coincided with the peak of Japan’s economic power. The goal of this panel is to investigate points of contact between Japan and neoliberal thought, policies, and subjectivities from the 1960s to the present. This long-term perspective will not only shed new light on internal, Japanese, critiques of the “developmental state” but it will also enhance our understanding of Japan’s role in shaping the neoliberal world order that we currently live in.
The panel draws on a diversity of approaches that highlight different aspects of Japan’s neoliberalism. The first paper examines how Japan contributed to the global neoliberal debates by focusing on the interaction between the core supporters of the Japanese neoliberal movement, Kiuchi Nobutane and Nishiyama Chiaki, and the Montpellier Society of Hayek and Friedman. The second one focuses on the nature of neoliberal intellectual exchange. It investigates the encounter between the ecologist Imanishi Kinji, the literary scholar Kuwabara Takeo, and Friedrich Hayek. Moving to the present, the third paper discusses Japan’s distinct variant of neoliberalism by analysing employees’ reactions to policies of “self-management.” Combining intellectual, cultural, and anthropological perspectives, the contributions will offer new methodological insights into the study of neoliberalism in Japan.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 27 August, 2021, -Reto Hofmann (Curtin University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the interaction of Japanese neoliberal activists with Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. It argues that Japan was an active reformer of the global neoliberal movement by attempting to reconcile cultural nationalism with economic globalism.
Paper long abstract:
The shift to the right in the world’s political and economic landscape in the 1980s was premised on a deep tension. If neoliberal policies called for global integration through free trade and mechanisms of world governance, neoconservative arguments championed traditional cultural and economic values centered on the nation. This paper focuses on the two doyens of Japanese neoliberalism—the banker and policy advisor Kiuchi Nobutane and the academic Nishiyama Chiaki—to examine how they attempted to resolve this conflict by drawing on Japan’s model of development.
At the heart of the problem was how to reconcile the neoliberal universalism of Hayek and Friedman with the specificities of national context. Western thinkers within the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), the association founded by Hayek, argued that their models, grounded in objective knowledge of the market, constituted the best guide for the expansion of global capitalism. But Japanese members of MPS, buoyed by Japan’s economic growth from the 1960s to the 1980s, countered that national culture was a crucial element for the development of the world economy. The significance of Kiuchi and Nishiyama’s intervention is that they attempted a culturalist revision of neoliberal theories. Thus this paper shows the understudied Japanese contribution to the global neoliberal debates, arguing that despite neoliberal thinkers’ claim about the inherently open nature of the world economy, there is no theoretical obstacle between economic nationalism and globalism.
Adam Bronson (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses a series of debates between the economist Friedrich Hayek and members of the New Kyoto School as a philosophical event relevant to understanding the conflictual reception of neoliberal ideas in Japan outside policy circles.
Paper long abstract:
In the early 1980s, advocates of neoliberal reform in Great Britain and the United States pointed to increased competition with Japan to justify their policy choices. The tables turned during Japan’s long recession in the 1990s. Economists now argued that Japan had to embrace neoliberalism – with the US and Britain as models – in order to regain its competitiveness. With this historical twist in mind, my paper examines a visit to Japan by one of the intellectual founders of the neoliberal movement one year before Thatcher’s ascent to the office of Prime Minister. In 1978, the economist Friedrich Hayek participated in four dialogues with the ecologist Imanishi Kinji and the literary critic Kuwabara Takeo in Kyoto on “Nature, Humanity, and Civilisation.” Understanding the relationship between this “philosophical event” (Gordon 2010) and the history of neoliberalism and Japan requires careful attention to the interaction between historical context and intellectual content. Partly filmed in a television studio and partly set in a temple surrounded by Buddhist monks, the dialogues were carefully staged as the newest chapter in a long series of productive intellectual encounters between Japanese and Western civilisation. The exchange turned out to be unexpectedly contentious however. Ranging from the meaning of Darwin’s theory of evolution to the revolutionary nature of the Meiji Restoration, the conversations repeatedly ended with the participants opposed or perplexed. Yet in placing Hayek at the centre of the conversation, this philosophical event also signals a deep engagement on the side of Japanese intellectuals with the ideas of the foremost theorist of neoliberalism. This paper examines the degree to which contemporary Japanese understandings of nature and civilization as expressed by Imanishi and Kuwabara were compatible with the theories of Hayek. In so doing, it sheds new light on the Japanese receptivity of neoliberalism while at the same time showing Hayek’s enthusiasm for non-Western intellectual traditions.
Nana Gagne (The Chinese University of HK)
Paper short abstract:
Based on long-term research with Japanese workers, this paper examines how individuals have responded to neoliberal discourses of risk and self-management, and reflects on the meanings of employment and unemployment for mid-career and senior workers under neoliberal restructuring.
Paper long abstract:
In the postwar period, Japan developed particular forms of welfare that closely linked Japanese citizens’ access to welfare with corporate employment, and Japanese workers came to enjoy economic and cultural prosperity as well as security and the possibility of constructing life plans. This postwar social contract of “corporate welfarism” minimized the social risks and personal career uncertainties of a fluid labor market and came to represent Japan’s “sacred cow.” However, after nearly 30 years of economic recession by the late 2010s, instead of moving closer toward social democratic regimes, the Japanese state has been scaled back and pursued various neoliberal reforms that have eroded the postwar model of corporate welfarism. Specifically, structural and management reforms have been promoted to reengineer Japan’s corporate practices and to “flexibilize” the workforce, and to promote a specific mode of control—"self-management”—among employees. What are some of the manifestations of these changes for experienced employees? Are employees responding by becoming complicit with neoliberal promises of risk-taking and self-management?
Based on long-term research on corporate restructuring and interviews with Japanese employees, this paper focuses on mid-career and senior workers whose expectations of long-term employment were directly affected by restructuring, and it examines what employment and unemployment mean to people on the ground. Specifically, this paper sheds light on the various forms of “in-house unemployment mechanisms” which have been used to cut personnel costs while avoiding outright dismissal. As a result, these Japanese workers are caught between the slippage of the older corporate ideology of corporate welfarism premised on long-term employment security, and the rise of the new global ideology of neoliberalism premised on labor mobility, in the process exposing them to new conditions of risk and uncertainty.