Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [39]
The aim of the contraption the Ministry of Finance had rigged up for Japan's financial world was peace or, rather, stasis. No bank could ever fail; no investor could ever lose by playing the stock market. Everywhere, cartels and monopolies ruled, guided by the firm hand of bureaucrats. This desire for peace, for no surprises, is such a strong factor in traditional Japanese culture that the Law of No Surprises comes first in my personal Ten Laws of Japanese Life. There is no better paradigm for this than the tea ceremony, where detailed rules determine in advance every slight turn of the wrist, the placement of every object, and virtually every spoken word. No society has ever gone to such extreme lengths to rein in spontaneity. In the industrial arena, employees rarely change companies; small start-ups do not challenge established large firms. Concrete slabs armor river-banks and seacoasts to guard against any unwelcome surprises from nature.
The Law of No Surprises means that people find it difficult to let go of failed policies and cut their losses-a process that we will see at work in many fields in Japan. The inability to cut losses is what underlay the Daiwa Bank scandal of July 1995, when the U.S. Federal Reserve discovered that Daiwa had hidden $1.1 billion of trading losses from federal authorities, and also the Sumitomo Trading scandal of October 1996, in which a copper trader for Sumitomo Trading in Great Britain ran up $2.6 billion in secret losses. Both cases involved a spiraling series of bad trades that lasted years-in the case of Daiwa, for more than a decade. Neither the traders nor their parent companies were able to call a halt at an early stage.
Traditionalists hold the hallowed word Wa (peace, or harmony) as Japan's ultimate ideal, even going so far as to use Wa as an alternate name for Japan itself. The nation's first constitution, promulgated by Prince Shotoku in 604, began with the words «Harmony [Wa] is to be valued, and an avoidance of wanton opposition to be honored.» To update this to the twentieth century, read «market forces» for «wanton opposition.» There is a hankering after a peaceful golden age, when everyone knew his place and all human relations worked like clockwork-the quiet harmony of the feudal era. In the words o^ the seventeenth-century novelist Ihara Saikaku, Japan is the land of peace, with «the spring breezes stilled and not a rippl upon the four seas.»
The trouble is that the world does in fact change, and as it does, inflexible systems grow increasingly removed from reality. Small losses accumulate into torrents of red ink, as Daiwa Bank and Sumitomo Trading discovered. A beautiful stock exchange, lovingly engineered with a thousand clever devices so that prices will always rise, results in the biggest banking fiasco the world has ever seen. With a twist: in banking fiascos elsewhere, banks typically go under; in Japan, with a few exceptions, the government cannot allow that-so the nation has paid the price in other ways.
There is a moral to the story, and it strikes at the root of authoritarian societies everywhere. The Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Japan under its bureaucracy-each is an example of a society that believed it had achieved eternal balance: central planners had everything under their control. Change, and all the social chaos to which it gives rise, had been banished. But alas, we can never banish change. Machiavelli writes: «If a man behaves with patience and circumspection and the time and circumstances are such that this method is called for, he will prosper; but if time and circumstances change he will be ruined because he does not change his policy... Thus a man who