ABSTRACT
Henry A. Kissinger does not claim any special expertise on Japan. Yet in his latest book, Is American Foreign Policy Necessary?, he has expounded a ‘theory’ of Japanese dynamics (Kissinger, 2001). According to his theory, it takes fi fteen years for the Japanese to make a major decision and to take a major action. He offers two pieces of evidence and one speculation. First, in 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy visited Japan to open its ports and market. It took fi fteen years for the Japanese to reach a decision, the Meiji Restoration, in 1868. In the meantime, numerous debates and fi ghts, almost endless procrastination alternating with sudden resolute action, and dramatic coalition formation and dissolution took place, culminating in the installation of a modernizing parliamentary monarchy in 1868. Second, Japan was more or less totally reduced to ashes in 1945 in the Second World War. It took fi fteen years for the Japanese to reach a decision: the announcement of the income-doubling plan by Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda in 1960. In the meantime, the Japanese wavered between left and right, between anti-US and pro-US views, between heavy industrialization and light industrialization. But by 1960 they decided to follow the policy line of the Yoshida doctrine (Iriye, 1967), observing the Constitution’s non-use of force in the resolution of international disputes, the close alliance with the United States, the preoccupation with the economic aggrandizement of the nation. Kissinger predicts that it will take fi fteen years for the Japanese to put an end to the collapse of the bubble economy in 1991. Against all the advice of Japanese and foreign pundits about how to solve the problem, the Japanese have been wavering between resolute action and non-action, between market competition and social protection, already for more than a decade. It will take a few more years before the Japanese take a major drastic action on this issue, according to him.
