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106 (van Wolferen 1990, 164-165)
(van Wolferen 1990, 164-165)
Wars always make it easier for bureaucrats to dictate to business managers. In this case, Japanese bureaucrats were also helped by the lack of a traditional distinction between the ’public’ and the ’private’ realm. Two or three centuries ago, Japanese on all levels were kept under control exclusively through personal ties, which were part of a complex of paternalistic structures. The lowliest tiller of the land and his family knew of no authority other than that of the land manager whose servants they were. For the land manager and his family, authority was solely embodied in a single figure above them: the vassal of the daimyo (baron). And the latter, in turn, owed allegiance only to his daimyo. As Tokugawa economic life became more complex, self regulating occupational classes and functional groups developed. But even though the urban worker, merchant or artisan was occasionally made aware that power also emanated from sources other than his own superior or guild, he would still have had no sense of any impersonal political organisation, any possible precursor of the state, that might judge his conduct objectively. ’Public’ affairs meant simply the sum of those things that occupied the attention of his superior.
While over the centuries political integration increased and a national culture evolved, there was no parallel development of the idea of belonging to a state. Had such a notion established itself in Japanese thinking, political attitudes would probably be quite different today. Equipped with the concept of ’the state’, one can imagine a boundary drawn around authority. It enables the mind to create a map of separate public and private realms—a prerequisite if one is to detect where and how the first is unnecessarily encroaching upon the second. Without this intellectual construct to help sort out one’s thinking, the political order and ’society’ are congruent. And indeed, the Japanese intellectual tradition has consistently failed to distinguish between a political realm and ’society’.
