The antidemocratic ideology of the shoguns ruled unchallenged in Japan for hundreds of years. Herman Ooms has observed rightly that "Tokugawa ideology is the only ideology that Japan has ever had." "Respect Heaven, serve the earth, worship and venerate the gods, venerate your parents, and make practice your teacher," counseled Sawada Gennai in the Warongo (The Japanese Analects, 1669). This counsel of loyal subordination contained only one chink in its wall: "Make practice (shiwaza) your teacher." And it is this passionate pragmatism, this insistence on the best of what works, that has been the Japanese pathway out of the stifling corridors of the ideology of petrified past privileges. "Do as you must," this ideology commanded, "do as you always have done, do as you are told."
"No!" answered the revolutionary Meiji samurai of 1868. "We'll do what works." And with this radically commonsensical assertion, there came in steamships, cannon, steel mills, railroads, banking, battleships, technology, the market economy, universal schooling, universal conscription, universal suffrage, and democracy.
Well, democracy has had a good long run in Japan. A century and a quarter ago, the Meiji samurai set up a constitutional monarchy because it looked as if it would work. And it did work, until the combined effects of economic depression and the dream of a special national destiny to be conquered by the sword gutted the body politic in the thirties. A brief but tragic romance with the phantom of military empire and religious-nationalist destiny, and the whole thing was to be done over again. But at that point it was clearer what worked and what didnt.
And it is now almost a half century since that renewed beginning. It is a fair question and a timely one: How far has Japan come, and what does Japanese democracy look like? What are the prospects for the future of democracy in Japan? And, since Japan will be a model for Asia in the political sphere as it has been in the economic, what are the prospects for the future of democracy in Asia? No, let's go even farther. Japan is now the richest and the healthiest nation in the world, and will be a model for all of us. If democracy can flourish in Japan, where it had no indigenous roots to speak of, it can flourish everywhere. So what are the prospects for world democracy, judging from the Japanese experience?
Luckily we have a number of excellent diagnostic tools to use in this sociophysical examination. We know what factors favor the growth of democracy and what factors are inimical to it, so we can use these elements as gauges of the patient's condition. Let us put Japan on the scales of prosperity, check its eyes for literacy, sample the
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