Policy Centralization in Japan Under the Kokutai Principle

Abstract

CENTRALIZATION of business policies in Japan is different from what it is in the United States and England, where the process began in periods formally committed to laissez faire. In Japan, feudalistic carryovers have from the beginning been contemporaneous with mercantilistic practices and monopoly-oriented capitalism. From the Meiji Restoration of i868 the setting has been predominantly patriarchal, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and anti-laissez faire. Superficial concessions to Western economic and political liberalism only emphasize this fact.1 The principle of Kokutai-the state body corporate-was carried over from ancient times. In the present era of large-scale government-fostered industrial capitalism it serves to knit the seemingly disparate elements of old and new into an efficient authoritarianism. Although not yet fully articulated, this Japanese totalitarianism is converging swiftly and unmistakably toward a system generically similar to that advocated by lawgivers of the Axis Powers. Business enterprise in Japan has from the earliest days unfolded under principles, controls, and social philosophies which are congruous with what we have come more recently to identify as fascism in the Western world. Japanese symbolism, however, in keeping with a deep and tenacious past, is more heavily blooded with the naive chivalric pietism of a society still organized on lines of status.