Not so long ago, Japan was the height of fashion. Then came the post-bubble recession and it rapidly faded into the background, condemned as yesterday’s story. The same happened to the Asian tigers: until 1997 they were the flavour of the month, but with the Asian financial crisis they sank into relative obscurity. No doubt the same fate will befall China in due course, though perhaps a little less dramatically because of its sheer size and import.

These vagaries tell us nothing about East Asia, but describe the fickleness of western attitudes towards the region’s transformation. A combination of curiosity and a fear of the unknown fuel a swelling interest, and then, when it appears that it was a false alarm, old attitudes of western-centric hubris reassert themselves: the Asian tigers were victims of a crony culture and Japan was simply too Japanese.

During Japan’s crisis, western — mainly American — witch doctors advised that the only solution was to abandon Japanese customs like lifetime employment and adopt more Anglo-Saxon practices such as shareholder value. The age-old western habit of believing that its arrangements — of the neo-liberal variety, in this instance — are always best proved as strong as ever: it is in our genes. The fact that the US was at the time in the early stages of its own bubble might have suggested a little humility was in order. In the event, Japan largely ignored the advice and has emerged from its long, post-bubble recession looking remarkably like it did before the crisis.

Japan has long been part of the advanced world. It was the only non-western country to begin its industrialization in the 19th century, following the Meiji Restoration in 1867. It has the second largest economy and enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. By any standards, it is a fully paid-up member of the exclusive club of advanced nations. Yet Japan is quite unlike any western society. In terms of the hardware of modernity — cars, computers, technology, motorways and the rest — Japan is, unsurprisingly, largely familiar. However, in terms of social relations — the way in which society works, the values that imbue it — it is profoundly different.

Even a casual observer who cannot understand Japanese will almost immediately notice the differences: the absence of antisocial behaviour, the courtesy displayed by the Japanese towards each other, the extraordinary efficiency and orderliness that characterize the stuff of everyday life, from public transport to shopping. For those of a more statistical persuasion, it is reflected in what are, by western standards, extremely low crime rates. Not least, it finds expression in the success of Japanese companies. This has wrongly been attributed to an organizational system, namely just-in-time production, which, it was believed, could be imitated and applied with equal effect elsewhere. But the roots of the success of a company such as Toyota lie much deeper: in the social relations that typify Japanese society and that allow a very different kind of participation by the workforce in comparison with the west. As a result, non-Japanese companies have found it extremely difficult to copy these ideas with anything like the same degree of success.

So how do we explain the differences between Japan and the west? The heart of the matter lies in their different ethos. Individualism animates the west, now more than ever. In contrast, the organizing principle of Japanese society is a sense of group identity, a feeling of being part of a much wider community. Compared with western societies, Japan is a dense lattice-work of responsibilities and obligations within the family, the workplace, the school and the community. As Deepak Lal argues in his book Unintended Consequences, the Japanese sense of self is quite distinct from the western notion of individualism. As a result, people behave in very different ways and have very different expectations, and their behaviour is informed by very different values. This finds expression in a multitude of ways.

Following the recent train crash in which 106 people died, the president of the operating company, JR West, was forced to resign: this is the normal and expected response of a company boss when things go seriously wrong. Income differentials within large corporations are much less than in their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, because it is group cohesion rather than individual ego that is most valued. Even during the depth of the recession, the jobless figure never rose much above five per cent: it was regarded as wrong to solve a crisis by creating large-scale unemployment. Even those who do the more menial tasks — shop assistants, security staff, station attendants and canteen workers — display a pride in their work and a courtesy that is in striking contrast to the surly and resentful attitude prevalent in Britain and other western societies.

In a survey conducted by the Japanese firm Dentsu, 68 per cent of Americans and 60 per cent of Britons identified with “a society in which everyone can freely compete according to his/her will and abilities” compared with just 22 per cent of Japanese. In the same survey, only 15 per cent of Japanese agreed with the proposition that “it’s all right to break the rules, depending on the circumstances”, compared with 37 per cent of Americans and 39 per cent of Britons. This finds rather bizarre expression in the way pedestrians invariably wait for the pedestrian lights to turn to green even when there is not the slightest sign of an approaching vehicle. Even the preferred choice of car reflects the differing ethos: whereas in the US and Britain, the fashionable car of choice is a 4x4 — the very embodiment of individualism — the equivalent in Japan is the tiny micro-car, a genre that is neither made nor marketed in the UK.

The differences are legion, and not always for the better. Japan, for example, is still blighted by a rigid and traditional sexual division of labour. In a survey on the gender gap published last week by the World Economic Forum, Japan came 38th out of 58 countries, an extraordinarily low ranking for a developed nation. Or take democracy, that hallowed and allegedly universal principle of our age. Japan has universal suffrage, but the idea of alternating parties in government is almost entirely alien. Real power is exercised by factions within the ruling Liberal Democrats rather than by the other political parties, which, as a consequence, are largely marginal. We should not be surprised: in a society based on group culture rather than individualism, “democracy” is bound to be a very different kind of animal.

Far from conforming to the western model then, Japan remains profoundly different. And so it has always been. After the Meiji Restoration it deliberately sought to engineer a modernization that was distinctively Japanese, drawing from its own traditions as well as borrowing from the west. Globalization notwithstanding, this is still strikingly the case. Indeed, Japan remains unusually and determinedly impervious to many of the pressures of globalization.

The lesson here, perhaps, is that we should expect the same to be true, in some degree or another, of the Asian tigers — and ultimately China too. That is not to say they will end up looking anything like Japan: China and Japan, for example, are in many respects chalk and cheese. But they will certainly be very different from the west because, like Japan, they come from very different histories and cultures.—Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer is a visiting professor at the International Centre for Chinese Studies at Aichi University in Japan

WHETHER Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gives his government six out of 10 or whether the Left is a reluctant supporter, the performance of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has not been people-oriented. The reason is not what the government has done or has not done.

The fact is that four persons — George Fernandes, Laloo Prasad Yadav, Narendra Modi and Arun Shourie, the last to join the fray — hijacked the country’s agenda in the past one year rule of UPA. They came to represent India’s polity and their story tells about the acts of omission and commission of the government.

They hogged the attention, dominated headlines and indulged in rhetoric to sound as if they are the voice of the people. They are, in fact, the disease which is corroding the nation. The disease is lack of integrity in public life. Values, they believe, are what they uphold or mould. For them, success justifies the means.

The point that at least three of them underline is not just corruption which, in their case, is under scrutiny before the law court or the commission of inquiry. They want to establish that those in power have the right to lay the law of the land without being questioned. One case here or another inquiry there does not stop them. They want to make the prevalent porous, parochial system still more promiscuous and the bureaucracy still more obedient so that they can exploit any situation for their own purpose or for the party to which they belong.

This was visible even in the days of Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri. But they took the corrective steps and punished top ministers for even misdemeanours. The first made Petroleum Minister K.D. Malaviya quit the cabinet for not rendering account of funds collected from an individual for the party. Shastri forced Finance Minister T.T. Krishnamachari to resign on a matter of impropriety.

The gravity of charges has increased since then and so has their frequency. But ministers go scot-free. A coalition government is too dependent on the support of its constituents to dare take any action against the erring ministers. Manmohan Singh could not ask Laloo to resign even after the charges were framed against him because his Rashtriya Janata Dal, with 23 members in the Lok Sabha, threatened to withdraw support from the government. Consequently, the effort in a coalition is to cover up things or rationalize them. It happened during the rule of the BJP-led NDA government and it is happening when the Congress-led UPA is in power. There is no escape from such a scenario for many, many years to come because no political party is likely to win an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha on its own.

It does not mean that the party with a majority ceases to have skeletons in its cupboard. Rajiv Gandhi had a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha. Still the Bofors gun scandal chased him all his life. Now with the Congress in power, the case is as good as dead. There has been no information about Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s acceptance of a briefcase which someone had handed him over with lakhs of rupees in it.

The best course would have been the appointment of Lokpal (ombudsman), a proposal that has been hanging fire for more than three decades. Such machinery with an independent apparatus may be able to fight against political corruption. But its independence is what the government fears and hence the delay in the appointment.

One thing common against Fernandes and Laloo Yadav is that they can get into any clothes. One has come to don the saffron, the other has raised the standard of caste. Yet, both were once socialists. Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narain were their gurus. They still mention their names but they have torn their teachings into shreds. All that Fernandes and Laloo want to remember is which side of their bread is buttered. This has come to be their ideology.

If it is of any satisfaction to Laloo, Fernandes is the strategist on the NDA side. He is said to have initiated the boycott of parliament and the NDA’s meeting with the president of India to ask for Laloo’s resignation. Laloo too can take credit for crafting the policy of concentrating on Fernandes when he was the defence minister. The problem with people in the Left is that they have no sense of wrong when they move to the right. Their ideology is all about convenience.

Common friends of Fernandes and Laloo are unhappy that the two are not leading the socialist movement in the country. But what they do not see is the change in them. Power politics and money have done the trick. Modi’s is a foregone case. No amount of disclosures — a police official has made his diary public — can make the centre go beyond dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. It does not want to provoke the BJP after the latter’s boycott of parliament. Former Gujarat governor Sunder Singh Bhandari’s statement to find out why the system failed has gone awry. However, one would like to know why he did not speak out when “the system failed” during his governorship.

Arun Shourie’s problem is his sense of self-righteousness and arrogance. But he should not get away with what is blatantly wrong. He may be right about rules and procedures but there is something called propriety which he claims to wear on his sleeve. The Centaur Hotel that he sold as the disinvestment minister may seem all right to him but not to others.

Many would like to own the hotel on the terms at which the purchaser got it. He was the sole bidder and Shourie even arranged money through a government bank. The Comptroller and Auditor General has said all that. That the hotel owner fulfilled all the requirements which Shourie’s ministry had laid down is not the point. What is at issue is that the government could have made much more money but did not do so. I still can’t comprehend the hurry with which the hotel was sold in the first instance.

In their own way, all the four have mutilated the system — some less, some more. Both political parties, the Congress and the BJP, have used the system for their convoluted purpose. The BJP is more to blame because it is desperate in the wilderness but the Congress is not giving it any space which the BJP characterizes as “lack of self-respect.”

The BJP should recall the period of its rule. It was the saffron crowd all the way. The Congress has picked up pseudo-progressives and those who have hovered around the dynasty to be a repeat. The nation has been left to grope its way through the lengthening shadows of opportunism, corruption and communalism. It has survived so far. There is no reason why it will not in the future.

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.

DURING Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz’s recent address at the Singapore Press Club, Pakistan was severely criticized by a number of Indian pressmen on the issue of the treatment of minorities in Pakistan. Not many causes are as sacred, by all civilized standards, as the safeguarding of the honour, dignity, life and property of minority groups. This applies to every country including Pakistan where there is certainly room for improvement in the treatment of minorities.

It is interesting to note that this criticism was not an isolated affair but took place in the context of other comments by Indian writers which sought to misrepresent grossly the predicament of the Muslim minority in India. In these writings, the Muslim film stars of Bollywood, the richest Indian Premjee, and the few Indian Muslims elevated to high titular positions, have been presented as an evidence of security and prosperity enjoyed by the 160 million Muslims of India.

For those familiar with the status of the Indian Muslims in the pre-independence era, the habitual equating by Indian intellectuals and analysts of the Muslim minority with the downtrodden scheduled castes and depressed classes in respect of economic and social development comes as a rude shock.

As one of the many illustrations, one may quote from a recent report prepared by Professor Ajit Kumar Singh on the socio-economic status of communities in northern India. The survey prepared under the auspices of the Giri Institute of Development Studies, Lucknow, shows that even after 57 years of independence, the Muslim minority in India occupies the lowest strata in terms of every sphere of economic development.

The report states inter alia, “we observed that a certain caste hierarchy prevailed in economic status with the higher (Hindu) castes on top, the intermediate castes in the middle and other backward castes, scheduled castes and Muslims at the bottom of the ladder.”

One may add that the intermittent efforts by the Indian Muslims to build up a base in small industries and commerce are destroyed by the havoc caused to person and property in the recurring anti-Muslim riots which took place at numerous places including Ahmedabad, Bhiwandi, Moradabad, Aligarh, Calcutta, Gujrat and Kerala.

The Indian Muslims would be well advised to activate their participation in programmes, either launched by them or others, for securing social and economic justice for all peoples of India, irrespective of their religious background. This would serve as a strong bond of unity with other groups and peoples and improve the climate of communal relations.

While the Muslims constitute about four per cent of the civil services, they do not account for more than two per cent of the senior posts, in spite of comprising about 13 per cent of India’s population.

A reference to the current telephone directories, even of major Indian cities with significant Muslim populations, listing the personnel of government departments, municipal authorities, railways, educational and medical institutions and corporations would show a negligible number of Muslim names. In the armed forces, their numbers are even less than negligible.

The intermittent brutalization of the Muslim minority constitutes a long and painful chapter with large-scale killings in Jamshedpur, Rourkela, Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Gujrat, Bhiwandhi, Meerut, Moradabad and many other places. Some of these had been described as “wholesale massacres” by eminent Indians including Jayaprakash Narayan. In 1969 Prof. S. Ray, adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had reported the killing of 5,000 members of the Muslim minority in Gujrat. A most gruesome massacre took place in 1983 in Nellie, Assam, where according to known Indian intellectual, Salman Khurshid, “Indian secularism dug its permanent grave”.

More than one Indian judicial tribunal has held the Indian police complicit in the killings and in some cases of direct involvement such as the finding of Justice Saxena in the Meerut killings. An Indian enquiry commission has recently concluded that the Godhra train fire, which was exploited for staging the Gujarat massacres of 2001, was sparked not by a Muslim crowd outside the compartment but was ignited internally by accidental causes.

Commenting on the emergence of Pakistan, the New York Times had observed editorially on August 14, 1947 that while from time immemorial, innumerable peoples had entered the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia and beyond, they had all been absorbed in the amorphous texture of Indian society, with the exception of the Indian Muslims who had retained their distinct identity. The paper described the emergence of Pakistan as a living symbol of this preserved cultural identity.

This cultural identity was one of the first targets of aggressive Indian nationalism with the result that even in what used to be for centuries, traditional centres of Muslim culture and learning, the Muslim youth today is illiterate in the Urdu script while well versed in Sanskritized Hindi. In a place like the Uttar Pardesh, a main nursery of Urdu, the language has not been accepted by the government as a second language.

The main criterion of secularism is not whether there is an official religion but the extent to which religion influences public policy and values, involving the relationship between the state and the civil society. The overwhelming Hindu complexion of the Indian state apparatus, its rituals and observances, does not help to confirm the state’s secular pretensions.

The Indian Muslims have long and rightly recognized the fact that their problems can only be solved in harmony with those of the majority community. It is the Indian government and civil society that they look up to for amelioration of their lot. It is axiomatic that improvement in the fortunes of the Indian Muslim community would be a source of satisfaction to the people of Pakistan. At the same time our interest in the fate of a people with whom we have shared the closest of ties, does not imply any dilution of our efforts to establish cooperative and peaceful relations with India.

The reputed Indian author K.L Gauba, known for his strong opposition to India’s division, had stated in his meticulously researched and documented book on the predicament of the Muslim minority, “Passive Voices” that “From time to time events demonstrate to the Indian Muslims that they are hostages whose life and property is at the whim and caprice of the majority community.” While this was written in 1973 it, unfortunately, still continues to be the case.

The writer is a former ambassador.

THE plight of have-not blacks in America’s urban ghettos, says economist Thomas Sowell, can be laid at the feet of white people. And not just any white folks. The culprits are that particular breed of white people known as “rednecks.”

If you follow the writings of Sowell, you’ll know that he’s not saying anything as simple as racism accounts for today’s black poverty. He’s saying something much more complex and, to my mind, far more intriguing.

Immigration from the British Isles to the New World was not so random as many of us imagine. Most of the settlers of Massachusetts, for instance, came from near Haverhill in East Anglia. Virginia aristocrats came from the south and west of England. And the Deep South was populated largely by immigrants from the northern borderlands, Ulster and the Scottish Highlands — from “among people who were called ‘rednecks’ and ‘crackers’ in Britain before they ever saw America.”

And these are the people who formed the culture — the speech patterns, preaching styles, social behaviours, propensity for violence and attitudes toward schooling — that became the culture of Southern blacks, Sowell claims in his new book, “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.”

And it is this cultural heritage, he argues, “more so than survival of African cultures,” that has produced the urban black culture of today. Sowell says, the redneck culture has been a developmental millstone for both blacks and whites imbued with it — witness the lower academic achievement in the Deep South. But he says it has been preserved most faithfully in the black ghettos — just as the French spoken in Quebec retains formulations now considered archaic in France. Indeed, in a fascinating switcheroo, the redneck culture has become, to many of its defenders, the authentic black culture and, on that account, sacrosanct.

And it continues to be a millstone, though many of the penalties it extracts are blamed on racism. But as Sowell argues — and has been arguing for decades — the racism explanation cannot account for differential outcomes among blacks from within and without the redneck culture. For instance, a recent study found that most of Harvard’s black alumni were either from the Caribbean or Africa or were children of Caribbean or African immigrants.

It is interesting to read the Sowell analysis alongside University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson’s new book, “Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?).”

I hope it won’t give away too much of the plot to reveal that his answers to his own questions are: no and yes. Dyson, who can coin a phrase with the best of them, spends a large part of this work defending the “knuckleheads” of Cosby’s inelegant description against those who (like Cosby) believe their refusal to adopt the manners and language of the middle class is holding them back. Or as Dyson puts it, defending the Ghettocracy from the Afristocracy.

The point, as he is at great pains to make, is that there’s nothing wrong in the ghetto that an end to racism wouldn’t fix. For Cosby to suggest that slovenly language and dress have anything to do with the trouble that black youth are in is to blame the victim and “let white people off the hook.” And Cosby, whom Dyson “deeply respects,” etc., has been letting white people off the hook for years — with his universal (rather than an authentically black) approach to humour and even with his toweringly successful Huxtable family (which reassured white TV viewers that the nightmare of racism had ended and that it was safe to lay their guilt aside).

The danger is that in our zeal to score points off one another, we’ll forget what the game is about in the first place. Dyson, for example, roundly defends the black youngsters whose circumstances sparked the Cosby campaign; but he has no practical advice for them. It is up to the rest of us, he suggests, to keep alive the faith that racism is the only explanation we need. Is Sowell’s redneck culture a better one? Perhaps more to the point, is it salable?

One thing seems beyond dispute: Maybe we haven’t laid racism to rest, but we have reached the point where what we do matters more than what is done to us. — Dawn/ Washington Post Service