Understanding the Trajectory of Japanese Capitalism

Setting the Stage

This Afterword situates Japan on a broad canvas stretching across both the region and the globe. East Asia’s regional dynamics figure prominently, shaping the trajectory of Japanese capitalism (Arrighi et al., 2003; Selden, 2015) not only in the formative Age of Empire and postwar reconstruction, but also in the emergent Asian Century. A historical examination of geo-politics highlights imperial entanglements and both the routes and the roots of capitalist development in Japan. Economic fortunes and misfortunes cast a long shadow over scarred Asian landscapes. Japan’s loss of imperial territory did not erase residues of an empire whose traces resurfaced in economic rivalries playing out among countries in East Asia. Japan’s once famed “economic miracle,” battered and buffeted by gale-like economic forces, masked inherent contradictions only coming to light during the prolonged recession. The initial rumblings of the current economic crisis occurred as a result of oil shocks in the 1970s. Two decades later, Japan had lost its leading edge as an economic powerhouse, unable to recapture the momentum realized in the decades before the “surge in China’s economic and financial strength” (Selden, 2015: 519).

Contemporary Japan comes into focus through the case studies presented in this special issue. Hideo Aoki (in the first paper) introduces topics and provides the context for explaining the particularities of Japanese capitalism. What follows here seeks to understand the trajectory of Japanese capitalism through an examination of regional dynamics and gendered dimensions. The essay unfolds thematically in a rough chronological order, starting at the height of the Age of Empire and ending with the 2020 Olympics. A short section on Empire excavates how economic and colonial expansion propelled industrialization intertwined in the region, culminating in the Pacific war. Year Zero ¹ evokes 1945 and its aftermath in which the US aided and abetted the reconstruction effort in Japan. The variety of Japanese capitalism grew out of a reproductive bargain reinforcing the divide between gendered spheres of activity.

Historical legacies repeatedly reassert themselves to shape interactions within the region and the world at large. Historicizing Japan’s past and present international and imperial entanglements can lift the veil shrouding the national narrative of class and racial homogeneity used in the service of its hegemonic rule. State-led modernization was a cultural as well as an economic and political project. By defining Japaneseness, the state created a hierarchy of statuses in the management of circular migration. Migration flows along corridors established in the period of Empire reflect intra-regional inequalities in power, income, and wealth. This discussion follows by setting the stage of post-World War II Japan, elaborating on the reproductive bargain that characterizes Japan’s political economy, investigating the importance of national identity as it informs who can participate in Japan’s economy, revealing the underbelly of contemporary Japan, discussing forces for change, and revisiting the methodological approach used to understand Japanese capitalism.

Any analysis of contemporary Japan must begin in 1868 with its entrance into the modern era during the Meiji Restoration (or revolution, reform, or renewal, as it is often alternatively referred). Japan’s imperial project both emulated and rejected Western models of empire: on the one hand, Japan’s political elite commandeered the idea of gunboat diplomacy from the West (Chae, 2013: 402) in order to accomplish the annexation of Taiwan, Manchuria, Korea, and swaths of China and Pacific islands at the turn of the 20th century; and on the other hand, the state articulated both an ethno-historical discourse that emphasized a common Asiatic cultural and racial identity and a colonial narrative in which Japan claimed control over ancient Korea to justify its colonial rule (Chae, 2013: 204–205). Though the territorial expansion was more limited in scale and scope than either the British or French empires, the close geographic proximity of these areas fostered frequent flows and exchanges of people, ideas, and material culture throughout the East Asian region—this would prove significant for the circulation of radical political thought energizing movements in 1920s to 1930s (see Aoki in this volume). The borders of the Japanese Empire soon extended beyond the confines of East Asia, projected by a southern expansion as far away as Peru and the Brazilian interior. The Japanese state encouraged rural laborers to emigrate, thereby dispersing surplus labor from the countryside and defusing possible social unrest among workers faced with dispossession (Jacobowitz, 2014). Later in the 20th century, Brazilians of Japanese descent were recruited as a pool of cheap labor for work in the fields and factories.

The imperial state was a patriarchal state. It utilized ideologies of patriarchal authority associating the nation with the family to shore up the allegiance of the people. Such symbolic measures sought to mobilize the nation for colonial and military pursuits by explicitly calling on Confucian patriarchal ideology (Gluck, 1985), with the Emperor as the father, the Empress as his subordinated wife and the mother of the nation, and all subjects as children (Ueno, 2009). Patriarchal authority was the ideological basis for promoting women’s obligation to serve their husbands’ families, just as all families were obligated to serve the national family state (Ueno, 2009). During this period, Japanese capitalism instrumentalized “women’s reproduction and domestic labor in the service of the nation,” which was consequential for the development of the post-World War II political economy. ²

This empire-building and colonial expansion plays important roles in the contemporary narrative of Japan. Kobayakawa (in this volume) situates the emergence of a discriminated minority, treated differently even though they are ethnically Japanese, during the expansion of naval power in some military cities in Japan. The construction of naval bases in key harbors around Japan relied on cheap laborers living in undesirable housing in nearby communities that stigmatized their residents. While the Burakumin are normally identified as a population who had a humble status in feudal Japan and often treated as a caste in academic and popular literature, Kobayakawa demonstrates that contemporary Burakumin emerged during early militaristic and expansionist capitalism in the Age of Empire. We will return to the consequences for contemporary Japanese society at the end of this essay. In a similar fashion, through military conquests and colonialization of neighboring countries—most notably Korea—the occupying Japanese forces exploited women for the pleasure of soldiers. These so-called comfort women remained invisible after the defeat of the Japanese in World War II, but as Park describes (in this volume), their cause finally came to light with the 1993 admission of responsibility by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono after the surviving women went to court for recognition and compensation. Like the case of the Burakumin whose modern identity is rooted in imperial Japan, the experiences of these women were the by-product of Japan’s militarism and colonization, and like the Burakumin, their experience led to contemporary social action and the emergence of social movements.

Postwar Japan

Modern Japanese capitalism was formed in the crucible of postwar reconstruction. The early postwar period saw a regional mapping of East Asia carved out of the new geopolitical world order. Table 1 delineates the time period from the end of World War II to the 1950s, a period that set Japan on its economic path. The US security apparatus initially spread its sphere of influence through Occupation by quelling massive protest movements (see Hayashi in this volume), aiding in the reconstruction of the economic infrastructure, and reviving Japan’s production facilities (see Aoki in this volume). At first, socialist and communist parties actively mobilized workers and won elections giving them seats in the Diet. US foreign aid was significant in enabling the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), formed out of a merger of conservative parties, to rule—a notable flexing of their political muscle occurred when they physically ejected Socialist MPs from the Diet. This ensconced LDP cemented the business–bureaucrat alliance. After the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Forces receded, the United States projected its power by creating an anti-communist bulwark turning “Okinawa into a US Military colony” (Hein and Selden, 2003) and establishing “an empire of bases” throughout the Pacific and beyond. Hayashi’s counterhistory belies Chalmers Johnson’s influential work on the developmental state. The “Johnsonian picture” looks quite different when viewed from Hayashi’s vivid account of the actual levels of protest activity. Japanese style management was not endemic to Japan’s collectivist ethos but rather the result of the combination of coercion and consent. Several of the papers in this issue detail the role of the state in channeling class politics and in securing a cheap labor force (see Kobayakawa, Yoshida, and Ogaya in this volume).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Historical Turning Points in Postwar Japan: 1948–1958.

International Relations	Direct military rule after the close of World War II, under the leadership of General MacArthur, and overall Occupation until 1952, results in:
	Policing and suppressing labor militancy, especially the general strike of 1947 when an estimated 2.4 million workers threatened labor action
	Prior to strike call, Japanese union membership peaked at 45%, then declined
	Drawing up Japan’s constitution and enacting labor laws modeled on US National Industrial Recovery Act
	US cold war foreign policy, its need to station troops in Japan, and its desire to hold Japan up as an example, led to an economic and security alliance, producing:
	US absorption of Japanese exports
	Facilitated bank loans to the Japanese government
	Provided subsidies
National Politics	Merger of two conservative parties in 1955 to create the Liberal Democratic Party
	LDP “savings” used to shore up political patronage and solidify political power from 1955 forward, holding 60% of seats in the Diet by 1958
	“Red purges” decimates labor leadership and militancy
	Removal of the Socialist Party MPs from the Diet
	Ratification of 1959 Security Alliance Treaty with the United States; resignation of LDP leader to blunt oppositional focus
Company Citizenship	Corporate-centered welfare system and a weakened labor movement result in:
	Consensus enterprise bargainingLifetime employment (job security)Seniority-based promotionAge-graded wage increases (income security)Firm-based welfare benefits (housing and transportation allowances, pensions, yearly bonuses)

Japan’s Reproductive Bargain

Japanese capitalism blurred the boundaries between the public and private by “the instrumentalization of women’s reproduction and domestic labor in the service of the nation and militarized aggression, culminating in fascism” (Shire and Nemoto forthcoming). This divide between the private domestic sphere of women and the public sphere of men became more marked with the birth of the “housewife” and a shift in her primary role from wife to mother (Ueno, 2009; Osawa, 2002), or what Koikari (2002) calls an “Americanization” of Japanese women’s domestic roles. Moreover, the dominance of US armed forces and their explicit anti-communist politics curtailed the influence of the more critical proletarian feminist movements (Uno, 1993). In the first postwar elections, the takeover by conservative liberal parties tipped the balance of democratic institutions toward preserving many aspects of male privilege. As General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Japan stated, women’s enfranchisement would enable politics to benefit from “the noble influence of womanhood and the home, which has done so much to further American stability and progress” (The Records of the U.S. Occupation to Japan, documented and cited in Koikari, 2002: 29). ³

At the heart of this formerly militarist, expansionist state was large-scale production, which became the anchor of export-led manufacturing. Though stripped of its militaristic trappings, with aid from the United States, Japan rebuilt its industrial capacity to jumpstart their war-torn economy. Core manufacturing, especially automobiles, steel, and electronics formed the backbone of the male breadwinner reproductive bargain both securing the gender division of labor in the household and establishing a form of male industrial citizenship. Japan’s decentralized industrial unions settled for an enterprise-based bargain channeling benefits to male company citizens who successively negotiated the so-called “three treasures” of lifetime employment, age-graded wage increases, and seniority promotion, along with a package of fringe benefits (housing, yearly bonuses, transportation allowances). Such corporate-centered welfare rewarded “insiders” with an interest in defending the profitability of their firms over pressing for statutory rights and universal entitlements. This historic compromise reinforced the conservative gender regime, relying on women’s unpaid labor for the delivery of elder care and childcare. ⁴

Foregrounding this construct reveals the nature and terms of the capital and labor wage relation, not only as a class compromise, but also as a gendered bargain forged during the reconstruction after World War II. Japan’s welfare through work narrowed the coverage of employment-based benefits to those male workers in core sectors of the economy. Corporate-centered welfare tied workers to the economic fate of their firms while women’s unpaid reproductive labor in the family buffered old sources of insecurity forestalling crisis and stabilizing capitalist social relations.

Race and National Identity

A national(ist) narrative has filtered modern subjects through the binary of Japanese/non-Japanese, based on the exclusion of (colonial) “Others.” To sustain this juxtaposition, the modern state reinvented a tradition of an authentic monolithic culture. “The meaning of ‘Japaneseness’ was created from the new nation-state, linking nation, family, and the Japanese way of life. The next step, linking blood and culture, was made explicit in 1940 by Kada Tetsuji, who argued for a biological or genetic basis for the ‘distinctiveness and superiority of the Japanese people’” (Roberts, 1999: 399). ⁵ More recently, restrictions on migration enforced the conception of Japan as a homogeneous nation. The revised Immigration Control Law of 1990 accorded a special status to those with Japanese heritage, Nikkeijin, principally Latin Americans, who mostly came from Brazil and Peru (Roberts, 1999: 399). As overseas descendants of Japanese, Nikkeijin were allowed to stay in Japan as “spouses or children of Japanese nationals or as ‘long-term residents’ without limitations on work” (Ito, 2005: 56). The subsequent lifting of restrictions gave workers with specific skill sets temporary visas, ensuring their return to their home country after a brief training/work stint. Through exclusion and selective inclusion, the Japanese state enforced the boundaries and terrain on which social consensus and compromises were negotiated. In particular, the construction of Japaneseness erased the recognition of other subject positions and fostered a kind of historical amnesia in attempting to forget Japan’s colonial past.

The border regime has relied on absences no longer tenable with the increasing presence of workers from other countries, particularly from other parts of Asia. Japanese capitalism faces a labor shortage that is filled by heretofore excluded “foreign” workers. Both Yoshida and Ogaya comment on immigration policy reform, which provides context for the disciplinary state policies regulating labor. Immigration policy, still very restrictive, allows for so-called trainees to work for limited term employment that ensures a revolving door of cheap labor. Ogaya adds a largely neglected topic of intergenerational class structuration as a cross-border process. The plight of Japanese Filipino children has been treated as an individualized, private matter rather than as a structural issue of the capitalist system relying on a large pool of cheap labor. Japan differs in the specific features and provisions of their circular migration management policy—chiefly relying on bilateral agreements with countries in the region, most notably the Philippines and Indonesia. Intimate histories and political economies of Japan and the Philippines (along with the United States) shaped the migration of Filipinas to Japan. “Filipinas’ migration to rural Japan as entertainers has been conditioned by a U.S. military presence in Japan and the Philippines, economic necessity, a scarcity of Japanese women willing to remain in rural Japan, a history of Japanese sex tourism to the Philippines, and cultures of respectable dance performance and labour migration in the Philippines” (Pratt, 2011). The examination of citizenship and immigration policies and practices highlights how the tension between inclusionary and exclusionary principles impacts on the capacity of differently positioned (women) workers to make claims and to exercise rights in a political community, to recall Hannah Arendt who asks who has “the right to have rights.” A national(ist) narrative filters modern subjects through the binary of Japanese/non-Japanese based on the exclusion of “Others.”

Placing people in the category of “temporary foreign workers” allows for their differential inclusion as lawfully subordinated people in the receiving nation and labor market. These temporary migration schemes “are political-legal arrangements for producing labor markets that advance a neoliberal agenda” (Fudge, 2019). At issue are the questions: Who is Japanese, who has a right to work, and what is the basis for social differentiation? As the authors in this issue demonstrate, the answers are fluid. Recognition came slowly for the comfort women and was supported by their Japanese women allies. The struggle for recognition by Japanese-Filipino Children (JFCs) depended on several court decisions and adjustments to state policies. Segments of the Japanese population exist with in-between statuses and are differentially recognized as having the right to live and work in Japan. These practices foster “partial citizenship” creating ambiguous forms and degrees of belong.

Piercing the Bubble

Intra-Asian economic rivalries and reconfigured geopolitics play out on the Olympic stage. The Tokyo Olympic games bookend two periods key to capitalist development in Japan vis-à-vis neighboring countries and the United States. Japan’s winning bid for the 1964 Olympics occurred at an early critical turning point for economic renewal—Tokyo at the time looked like a lunar landscape after aerial bombings. Using the Olympics as a platform, the Japanese state embarked on massive infrastructural construction that jumpstarted the economy at the cusp of the 1960s, showcasing modern Japan on the move joining the new liberal world order. International sport competitions, especially the Olympics, were a centerpiece of the nation’s postwar reconstruction. At the first session of the Japanese Diet convened since the establishment of the postwar pacifist Constitution, politicians debated how sports could improve the country’s aggressive image. The United States acted behind the scenes, the midwife to Japan’s political rebirth as a conservative liberal democracy. The International Olympic Committee readmitted Japan in 1951, which was facilitated by forceful intercession of Avery Brundage, the International Olympic Committee’s first American President and a friend of Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for Allied Forces in occupied Japan (Guthrie-Shimizu, 2017: 371). Before leaving office in 1960, Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, whose last political act delivered ratification of the controversial Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (Gottfried, 2015), spearheaded the winning bid for the 1964 Olympics and funneled substantial funds to pay for massive infrastructure and “public works” projects. The Olympic narrative enabled the state to rehabilitate symbols so closely tied to the empire.

While the 1964 Tokyo Olympics gave the state a platform for realizing economic resurgence on the world stage and for shedding vestiges of imperial aggression, the (now delayed) 2020 games will take place on a different competitive playing field. Like his maternal grandfather Prime Minister Kishi, whose national(ist) agenda paved the way for the 1964 Olympics, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe oversees the 2020 Olympics seeking to reclaim the spirit of the first games. The pandemic, however, has stalled Japan’s Olympian aspirations to relaunch the country’s economic standing recently eclipsed by the rise of China, an ascendance on display during the spectacular 2008 Olympic games. Memories of the Bird’s Nest’s intricately interwoven steel latticework lingered in the public’s imagination long after the closing ceremony’s synchronized spectacle and fireworks lit up the national stadium in Beijing—stagecraft in the service of statecraft. Japan’s Olympics, both past and present, are emblematic of its nation-building project.

However, the reality of the preparations for the 2020 games belies such Olympic dreams. The government’s promotional documents and glossy photo spreads cannot conceal problems behind the façade. From its inception, the green-aesthetic principles espoused by the government and favored by the architect of the National Stadium ran up against the reality of sourcing nonsustainable materials and employing questionable construction practices. A 2017 editorial in The Japan Times reported on allegations of illegal logging and human and labor rights’ violations linked to the harvesting of timber for the stadium. Japan’s Olympic foray summons a simpler time before gleaming skyscrapers, elevated highways, bullet trains, and other hallmarks of global capitalist landscapes transformed the city. Today, as the architectural hub radiates the memetic design of the new national stadium on its original footprint, the renovation of Kenzo Tange’s serpentine Yoyogi Stadium is like a palimpsest that bears ghostly traces of Tokyo’s former economic prowess.

Walking around the city of Tokyo leaves an impression of relative prosperity, a city less plagued by the markers of poverty seen in other large industrial metropolises. Yet Japan’s poverty rate is relatively high (Gini coefficient of 37.9, compared to 27 for Germany, 32.4 for the UK, and 45 for the United States) and the incidence of homelessness is more prevalent that it would seem. ⁶ Japan defines the homeless narrowly, referring only to those living on the street (i.e., street dwellers) and excluding those who may stay in shelters or with family but who do not have a permanent residence (see Kitagawa in this volume). As a result, the official statistics disguise the magnitude of homelessness in Japan. A comparison to New York City suggests the potential scale of homelessness. According to the US Housing and Urban Development agency, in 2019, approximately 3675 people live on the streets in NYC, the remainder of the 60,000 estimated homeless sought temporary refuge either in homeless shelters (Blint-Welsh, 2019), and many more were living with family members. The New York City Coalition for the Homeless estimates that the population of the city’s homeless hovers around 63,000 individuals, including 15,000 families accounting for 22,000 children. ⁷ Japan’s housing policy is a stopgap measure to get the homeless off the streets, and thereby artificially lowering the official number of homeless given the restrictive definition of the homeless as street dwellers. The gender profile of the homeless in Japan contrasts to the US case—no children and families can be found on the streets and few women. Among the homeless population a gender composition of single older men derives, as Aoki suggests, from the use and discarding of a labor force predominantly in construction. In addition, the Japanese family absorbs surplus labor and the reserve labor force. Precariously employed men and women in their twenties and thirties might have otherwise ended up homeless, as happens in the United States. Generally, women not formally employed for wages or informally employed, and many single men unable to establish an independent household, either return to or never leave their parent’s domicile. This is why women are less likely to appear in unemployment statistics they disappear into the family/household when discouraged from looking for a job. Japan exhibits one of the highest rates of adult children living at their parental homes. This trend hides the real extent of poverty in Japan, and in Tokyo more specifically.

Japan cannot escape from contradictions inherent in its capitalist model. The 2020/21 games cannot spur another hoped for economic miracle. Instead, the Olympic Committee has built a Potemkin village. The growing number of homeless shows how capitalism casts off workers and creates a surplus labor population, often too old to work and unable to access the limited welfare system. Moreover, the conditions underwriting the former reproductive bargain are coming undone as reproduction is no longer sustainable in the Japanese form of capitalism. Fewer jobs offer “permanent” long-term employment in Japan. Japanese companies are opting out of subcontracting networks by transplanting supplier chains throughout Asia in search of lower-wage alternatives. The promise of the “three treasures” no longer holds for a new generation of workers. Precarious employment among youth alongside large swaths of women and older men expose social fissures and faultlines of social inequalities unsettling the former reproductive bargain.

Cracks in the system became more pronounced in the wake of the 3/11 tsunami. Japanese capital moves production to lower-wage countries in Asia (Vietnam, China, Indonesia) shrinking the need for core workers in Japan, which was the basis of the class (and, we would argue, gender) compromise, stretching commodity chains across borders, particularly in lower-wage zones in Asia. Capital transplanting production abroad undermines the commitments to the former consensus with unions and to their keiretsu groups. As capital flows outward, migrant labor increasingly fills niches in low-wage economic sectors, thereby further eroding the reproductive bargain. The Japanese state tries to manage migration through its stringent border controls. However, migration accentuates temporal and spatial gaps that complicate the social reproduction of labor. Through a transnational framework, attentive simultaneously to global conditions and to local specificities (particularly the regional context), the connected histories can be seen. East Asian regional dynamic is more than the sum of separate national dynamics (Arrighi et al., 2003: 10).

Forces for Change: Collective Action and Labor Mobilization

Waves of labor protest, mass demonstrations (such as the large-scale May Day rallies in the 1950s, antinuclear mobilizations in the late 1950s, and after the 2011 tsunami), and left-wing politics posed potent challenges to the system over the course of the 20th century (see Hayashi, Kobayakawa, and Aoki in this volume). The Japanese management system delivered a reproductive bargain channeling the interests of labor. Yet relative labor peace had to be achieved, sometimes by force as well as through hegemonic institutions.

Kitagawa’s article culminates in a section on the politics of homelessness. He wraps up the chronology of welfare measures and countermeasures, referring to how the homeless rights movement shapes the responses of the state in their treatment of the homeless. Temporary workers, who make up about a third of the Japanese workforce, have been laid off in record numbers. Grassroots efforts to publicize their plight have resulted in the villages for laid off temporary workers and the homeless, called hakenmura, appearing in sites around Tokyo. ⁸ Such events can represent a “tipping point” in labor politics in Japan (see Shinoda, 2009). The 2008 Toshikoshi Hakenmura event (literally, New Year’s Village for Temporary Workers) that brought together over 300 unemployed male and female temporary workers who spent nights in a tent camp, ⁹ is symbolically and materially significant.

Once again, the long shadow of empire is cast in the form of social mobilization. Kobayakawa describes the persistent discrimination faced by Burakumin, its contemporary status created during the expansion of the pre-World War II military apparatus, in employment, housing, marriage and overall participation in the Japanese society. In response, they formed groups like the Buraku Liberation League to advocate for fairness, for an end to their second-class status, and to validate their way of life. Similarly, Park explores how former comfort women organized for recognition, and in doing so, this led to associations with groups like the Japanese Military Comfort Women Issue Kansai Network, the Women’s Active Museum, and the Asia Japan Women Rescue Center. Park’s research led her to interview a growing sample of activists around the issue of women’s rights, and she describes how these efforts to recognize former Korean comfort women had ties to Japan’s peace movement, women’s liberation organizations, women in the labor movement, anticolonial movements, and many religious organizations striving for social justice. In both cases, Japan’s history created the conditions for social action in the present.

What is the disruptive capacity of new labor mobilizations? While traditional unions have seen their memberships shrink, community-based unions and labor advocacy NGOs organize workers by employment status (part-time/temporary, unemployed) and by gender (e.g., Women’s Union Tokyo). These alternatives derive their associational power from disruptions in public spaces due to their modular structure, one not rooted in a single occupation or industry. This strength can also become a weakness because members are scattered across many workplaces. Unlike enterprise unions whose membership dues are guaranteed, community unions, and their overworked staff, have minimal resources based not only on their small size but also as a function of the status of precarious, low-wage workers (see Chun and Argawala, 2016, on organization of informal labor). While still largely inchoate, current conditions may spirit the coalescence of forces seeking alternatives to their precarious existence magnified by Covid-19.

Understanding Japanese Capitalism

We end where the special issue begins, on a methodological discussion of Aoki’s important contribution elaborating on the less well-known antecedents of Marxist theory and a method informing critiques of Japanese capitalism. Aoki presents more than an intellectual history of ideas flourishing during the 1920s and 1930s. He shows the political stakes behind the excavation of these earlier framings of Marxist theories of capitalism in general and Japanese capitalism in particular. Staging the Debate on Japanese capitalism is a dialogic account of Marxist theorizing from the inception and reception of Marx’s texts translated into Japanese at the turn of the 20th century to the generative publications throughout the interwar period. An overview of the Debate condenses the two principal schools’ respective understanding of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, especially on how to characterize the Meiji Restoration and the remnants of feudalism in Japan.

Critical comments anticipate the next stage of the debate in the work of Kozo Uno, who interjects a three-stage theory of capitalism to derive the particular character of Japanese capitalism. Uno’s stage theory can differentiate between capitalism at different phases of development, and between the general features of capitalism and the specific character of Japanese capitalism. This is important for understanding the trajectory of Japan as a late-developing capitalist country. Considering different levels of abstraction allows for an analysis of the general laws of capitalism and then a move to more concrete particularities of each type of capitalism. Little known by scholars outside of Japanese studies, Uno’s theory as interpreted by Aoki, is worth revisiting. ¹⁰ Steeped in Marxism as a student studying in Germany, Uno returned to Japan where he initially worked for the state before taking up a position in the University of Tokyo Economics Department, a hotbed of Marxism at the time. The volatile and violent changes in Japanese society were not only a primary source informing his theoretical work but also were a platform for staging left militant anti-statist politics peaking toward the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. Uno’s biography, not coincidently, parallels the economic transformation during reconstruction of Japan’s capitalist growth machine, when the state paved the way for development of institutions for realizing the reproduction of labor power, the central question he explored throughout his writing.

The reproduction of labor power presents a critical theoretical and practical problem for capital and in the circuits of capital. In this dense passage, Uno alerts us to a tension inherent to capitalism:

the commodification of labor power on the one hand is constantly shouldering the burden of the autonomy of the capitalist social system through the dismantling of communal relations, while on the other hand, it must at the same time maintain and supplement certain fixed communal relations. It is precisely this point which expresses the intensity of the impossibility. These “communal relations”—the family, the nation, in short, the entire sequence of forms of belonging—are inevitably fixed to the physical body, and therefore always inseparable from the entire process by which labor power is indirectly circulated as a commodity (see Walker, 2013: 225–226).

We quote Uno at length here because of what it says and doesn’t say. The state both must ensure and secure the reproduction of the commodity labor power and obscure its operation and technologies. Uno hints at issues not fully developed because his analysis lacks a feminist lens. Importantly, the roots of capitalist crisis stem from the [tendencies] of capital to degrade nature, instrumentalize public goods and commandeer unwaged care work, which periodically destabilizes the conditions of its own survival. This is a fundamental contradiction in capitalism; the crucial importance of social reproduction is disguised and disavowed (Fraser et al., 2018: 121).

How does capital insure the reproduction of the commodity form, and convert labor power into a reliable input in the production process? ¹¹ While dispossession compels workers to sell their labor power as a commodity, labor power is “never sold as a totality but always as a fragment contained in the laborer’s body” (Walker, 2016: 114). From his vantage point at the time, and without a specific analysis of care work, and the inner workings of the “hidden abode of reproduction” (Weeks, 2011), Uno could not foresee the acute crises of social reproduction looming over Japan today. We can read Japan’s postwar economic history in part as the establishment of institutional strategies and hegemonic mechanisms for securing and obscuring the process of reproduction. Nevertheless, Uno brings us back to an investigation of the recurrent problem of reproduction for states, families, civil society, and economic actors.

In his article reflecting on the lessons from the early debates, Aoki extends the theoretical framework provided by Uno to include a fourth level of abstraction, one based on an in-depth study of the “facts on the ground.” The lowest levels of abstraction can be viewed in terms of the philosophy of praxis. For Gramsci, the preface to The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy provides the lynch pin when Marx states “that a given structure gives rise to a field of possibilities which relatively permanent and countervailing forces seek to utilize in opposite ways” (cited in Larrain, 1983: 81). Gramsci’s mode of theorizing directs attention to the “fluidity of the situation, and the complexity of the contradictions generated” (Larrain, 1983: 278), leaving open how these contradictions will be played out. Each epoch presents contradictions that create possibilities for emancipatory struggle as well as for reproduction of exploitation and domination. Aoki typifies such an approach; his analysis moves from “factuality” of labor, capital, and the state to the particularity of Japanese capitalism that informs the “variegation” of late capitalist development and the logic of capitalism in general. The stage theory then becomes a tool for apprehending the “given structure” in the Gramscian sense.

Each of the contributions in this special issue exemplify Aoki’s methodological approach, offering critical and detailed examinations of important aspects of Japan’s society. They excavate the historical roots of social stigma (Kobayakawa and Park), the formation of a docile labor regime (Hayashi), the definition of and policies addressing homelessness (Kitagawa), and the complex arrangements that define work, paternalism, and gender (Yoshida and Ogaya). Taken together, they also identify the potential for social change through social movements and new forms of political and social organizing. These articles are written by scholars affiliated with the Institute of Social Theory and Dynamics, each one providing a piece of the complex picture that is modern Japan, each elaborating different aspects that are distinctive for Japanese capitalism while at the same time helping us form a broader understanding of how capitalism operates more generally. As a result, we get a better picture of both the particularity of Japanese capitalism, while as a collection they offer us a window on how to undertake an analysis of the varieties of capitalist development in different countries.