ABSTRACT
In MITI and the Japanese Miracle, Johnson highlights Japan’s political economic philosophy by comparing it with the American model of regulatory orientation, in which the state’s laissez-faire approach to the market is ideally impartial and concerned with procedural matters. The Japanese model of developmental orientation, however, views the state as more involved in the market, concerning itself with plans, goals, and specific outcomes (1982: 18–19). “Industrial policy” and “administrative guidance” (gyōsei shidō) are the conceptual footmen of what has come to be known as the capitalist developmental state, a view that dovetails with the “strategic economy.” Huber (1994) sees the state, in league with elite economic interests, integrating, building hierarchies, and in general ordering the relations between different government organs and commercial enterprises (discussed in Chapter 5). These rationalizing tendencies are visible in other state–society relations, such as Japan’s educational bureaucracy, the ideological instilling institution that is charged with reproducing the beliefs necessary to run Japan’s economy. In the pedagogic sphere, the counterpart of the developmental orientation may be called an education of cultivation. This is an academics of inducement, designed to motivate and exhort students to learn. The teacher’s role is to bring about learning by supplying knowledge. Because the state’s role is activist, it assumes that it has a stake in the “what” of learning. In other words, the state is granted the right and responsibility to furnish the necessary knowledge, morals, and civility for a modern, highly rationalized, and industrialized nation-state. 1 Of course, it can be argued that all sociopolities have an education of cultivation, but it is a matter of degree; i.e. relatively speaking, in Japan, the “what” takes precedence over the “how” of learning, so that there is an emphasis on training over teaching, socializing over studying.
