Recommended Preface
Introduction
introduction

Part 1: The Origin of the Shackles

Chapter 1 Japan before the Edo period
The Imperial System | The Fujiwara Family and the Establishment of Heian-kyo | The Legacy of the Heian Period | Literature Written by Women | The Makura no Soshi and The Tale of Genji | The Collapse of the Heian Order and the Rise of Feudalism | The Shogun | The Mongol Invasion, the Fall of Kamakura, and the Ashikaga Shogunate | Japanese Feudalism | Culture and Religion in the Feudal Era | The Arrival of Europeans | The Reunification of Japan

Chapter 2: The Birth of Japan as a Modern Nation
The Tokugawa Period's Isolation | The Tokugawa Shogunate's Obsession with Order and Stability | Economic and Social Change | Popular Culture | The Story of the 47 Ronin | Commodore Perry's "Black Ships" and the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate | The "Revolution" of 1868? | The End of the Shogunate

Chapter 3: From the Meiji Restoration to the US Military Government
Iwasaki Yataro and the Birth of Modern Japanese Industrial Organization | The Accumulation of Capital and the Appearance of a Constitutional Government | The First Sino-Japanese War of 1895 | The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 | The Tragedy of Modern Japan Rooted in the Meiji Era | Natsume Soseki's "Kokoro" and the Legacy of Meiji | Yamagata Aritomo and the Bureaucracy that Overcame Political Control | The Disasters of War | The Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the Battle of Nomonhan | Pearl Harbor, Surrender, and the Legacy of War

Chapter 4: The Economic Miracle
The Unusual Circumstances of the Postwar Decade | The Political and Cultural Foundations of High Growth

Chapter 5: Institutional Framework for High Growth
Japanese corporations | Industry associations and competition control | Employment practices | Education system | Financial system | Bureaucracy | 'Management of reality'

Chapter 6: What We Gained and Lost Through Growth
The Price of Growth | Baseball and the Emergence of Salaried Worker Culture | Women in Japan during the High-Growth Era | Seiko Matsuda | The Institutions of High-Growth and the Global Economic Framework

Part 2: The Shackles of Yesterday That Bind Today's Japan

Chapter 7: Economy and Finance
Balance Sheet Depression | The Japan Difference | Avoiding Panic: Rescuing Japan's Financial Institutions | Faulty Assumptions and the Wide Open Door to a Fiscal Deficit | The Origins of the Asian Financial Crisis | The Japanese Government's Fiscal Spending

Chapter 8 Business
The Service Sector | Changing Employment Practices | The Challenges of Globalization | Global Brands and Foreign Direct Investment | Abandoning Sunk Costs | Challenges from Korea | The Future of Japanese Business and the Global Crisis of Capitalism

Chapter 9 Socio-cultural Change
Japanese Culture Spreads Globally | Gyaru | Obatarian, Sodai Gomi, and Twilight Divorce | Herbivorous Men | Japanese Masculinity | The Changing Landscape of Japanese Men | The Rise of Class | The Decline of Japan's Leadership

Chapter 10 Politics
The 1955 System | Kakuei Tanaka | The Nixon Shock and Tanaka's Prime Ministership | The Lockheed Scandal | Shogun Tanaka | Close Entourage: Noboru Takeshita and Shin Kanemaru | Ichiro Ozawa | Guardians of Political Order | The 1994 Electoral Reform | Junichiro Koizumi | Yasukuni Shrine and the Koizumi Administration's Foreign Relations | The Liberal Democratic Party after Koizumi

Chapter 11 Japan and the World
'New Japan Experts' | Okinawa and the Futenma Marine Base | The Collapse of the Hatoyama Administration | 'Agents of Influence' | The Fate of the Naoto Kan Administration on March 11th | The Self-Destruction of the Noda Administration | The Senkaku Islands and Japan's Territorial Dispute | The Return of Shinzo Abe | Economic Recovery? | The Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets Act, and the Abe Administration's Priorities | Establishing Relations with China | The Unsustainable US-Japan 'Alliance' | Returning to Asia | Abe's Excessive Greed and the Future

Appendix 1: Meiji Leaders
Appendix 2: Powerful Politicians and Bureaucrats in Postwar Japan

Further Reading
Author's Note on the Korean Edition
Translator's Note

A complex country like Japan
Amazing insights that are transparently revealed
“The most important book about Japan by a foreign author in the past 20 years!”

Combining thoughts on Japanese politics and economics with history and culture

When he received the offer from Oxford University Press, Professor Taggart Murphy decided to “combine Japanese politics and economics with history and culture in a way that no other kind of writing could do.”


Although it is not widely known, the author's basic position is that "it is difficult to understand Japan by separating each issue," considering the central role that Japan's creation of credit and credit unions has played in shaping the framework of today's global financial markets.
It is difficult to understand any aspect of Japanese reality without addressing the sum total of the Japanese experience.
In other words, the Bank of Japan's monetary policy, the personnel practices of Japanese companies, Tokyo's bizarre street fashions, the endless game of musical chairs in Japanese politics, and Japan's centuries of isolation—these issues are all interconnected in some way.
The author, whose thoughts had reached this point, said, “It would give me the opportunity to organize the themes that had captivated me since I was fifteen, when I got off at the old, bustling Haneda Airport, took a long-distance bus, and saw the gray, vibrant cityscape I had never seen before, and to bring order to my lifelong thoughts.
“That’s how I decided to write a book,” he says.

"Japan's Shackles" covers Japan's politics, economy, society, culture, and history.
As I mentioned in the preface to the book, it combines Professor Murphy's thoughts on Japanese politics and economics with his thoughts on history and culture.
The author's multifaceted analysis of Japanese society, combining an outsider's perspective with an insider's understanding, offers insights unparalleled elsewhere.


A country brimming with responsibility, a country running at the height of irresponsibility

Most Japanese people take their responsibilities very seriously.
In the West, they say that if something is worth doing, you should do it well.
In Japan, even if something isn't worth doing (and everyone knows it isn't), you have to do it well.
The level of courtesy and service I encounter in Japan, even in the most menial or, indeed, grimy tasks, is so high that it's almost impossible to imagine anywhere else, to the point where I sometimes find myself fantasizing that the world exists solely for my pleasure.
If you do even a little bit of something, you will hear a cry of "Otsukaresama deshita! Thank you for your hard work!" (a tone of exaggerated gratitude that says "Thank you for your great sacrifice").


If you treat someone to a cup of tea and dessert, you will be thanked for treating them to a sumptuous feast (gochisosama deshita).
On the other hand, if you are invited to a grand dinner, you will be greeted with an embarrassing greeting because the food is not very well prepared.
Of course, all this is a formality.
But even if this is a formality and everyone knows it, we must act as if the formality is filled with spontaneous emotions.
Because everyone is acting in accordance with such expectations, and because it is an open secret, perhaps the most empty and formal acts actually take on meaning.

This formality also applies to interpersonal relationships.
Even if you're working a boring job dealing with difficult, lousy clients who don't particularly like you or who have no intention of rewarding you financially for your efforts, treat them as if they were your best friend or passionate colleague.
But when you act as if you genuinely care about the well-being of others, as if you have the best colleagues, as if your most important job is to meet the needs of whoever the customer is, you actually internalize feelings like affection, respect, and a will to do the best job you can.
Before I know it, I am surrounded by people I care deeply about, and I feel like they care about me too.

It's easy to see that there are tremendous advantages to a society where everyone can be reassured that they will do what they promise, and that they will do it well.
What is often overlooked is that this attitude of trying to deny contradictions while believing that everything is going well when in reality it is not, has a fatal political dimension.
That attitude may be what makes Japan so attractive and successful.
But this also explains the tragedy of modern Japanese history.
Because it creates an ideal environment for exploiting the public.

It's not just a matter of the public internalizing the attitude of accepting everything as it is, which they consider maturity, and finding meaning in life by pursuing goals they know are perhaps worthless.
When the influence of these fluid values, deeply ingrained in Japan, reaches the level of society's leaders, it causes those in power to engage in double-think, deluding themselves about what they do and their motivations.

The Japanese people's victim mentality and habit of resignation

Japan is no longer a country that poses a threat enough to turn its own country and its neighbors into a sea of ​​fire.
However, the awareness that we live in a world where various things happen for reasons that are neither clear nor explainable, and that individuals have no choice but to do their best to adapt and fulfill their own duties, still prevails.
The Japanese have a word for this ritual.
This is the victim consciousness (higaisha ishiki).


There are many situations in which victim consciousness can lead to real-world consequences, including:
For example, Japan, in order to solve its dire fiscal dilemma, has abandoned the social norms that once ensured near-universal economic stability for its entire population.
They also raised taxes and prices, destroying household purchasing power and breaking promises that the national pension system was supposed to keep.
The world of corporations guaranteeing a quality of life for their employees has been replaced by a world of low-income contract workers with no security or future.


Those who pursue these policies don't snicker at the thought of what they've done, like the Wall Street bankers who destroy corporate assets and lay off employees.
Instead, they bow their heads with gloomy faces, thinking that they too have no choice but to join the ranks of sacrifice.
It doesn't matter if they gain personal benefit through that sacrifice.
Because millions of Japanese people will just shrug their shoulders, sigh, and say, “Shikaga nai (I can’t do it).”
The fact that there are other alternatives (strong unions, a healthy political party representing workers, a robust social safety net, and various policies to boost real household income and stimulate domestic demand to revive Japanese industry) is not taken into account.
Even if it is considered, it is criticized as immature populism.
Even if such an alternative were somehow initiated, it would be attacked as "un-Japanese" and belittled by a system that has evolved to silence those who threaten the establishment.

In the book, the author examines some of these systems from the Heian period through Edo and into modern times.
The last two chapters, in particular, deal with how the forces that could have offered a better alternative to Japan's dilemma in recent decades were destroyed by direct American complicity and intervention.


The author emphasizes that we must begin by understanding how organizations like corporations, banks, governments, the military, and police, whose purpose is to provide citizens with a decent and safe life, have been corrupted and controlled by those who exploit them to fill their own pockets and those who attempt to control and monitor the entire population under the pretext of protecting the nation from imaginary threats.
These people require a peculiar psychological state of doing what is necessary to run an organization in this way, while hiding their real motivations from themselves. George Orwell famously gave this ideological acrobatics the name "doublethink."
Those in power in Japan were accustomed to a political and cultural tradition in which tolerance of contradiction was not only permitted but essential.

The Origins of Japan's Political Structure: The Shackles of the 100 Years Since Meiji

This book basically deals with Japanese history.
Among these, it is worth recalling that the Edo period maintained peace for hundreds of years based on the strong authority of the shogunate, and achieved remarkable socioeconomic development beyond imagination.
The accumulation of wealth was centered around the merchants at the very bottom, but the enormous contradictory energy that arose from the tenacious and thorough maintenance of the class system dominated by the samurai is still useful in explaining various phenomena in Japanese society today.
This analysis is brilliant, showing how the compressed efforts of just one generation after the Meiji Restoration to break away from Asia and join the ranks of Western powers transformed the Japanese mentality and how it still serves as a shackle to Japan's future.
And the analysis that while the Meiji Restoration put forward the two "fictions" of the imperial system and the parliamentary system, in reality the main players of the Restoration practiced oligarchic politics behind the scenes, and that the large power vacuum left by their deaths in old age gave birth to the current structure of Japanese politics, which is swayed by bureaucrats without ultimate responsibility, and that the reason fundamental reform in Japan's organization is so difficult is precisely because of this culture without a place for ultimate responsibility is also insightful.

As a scholar of international political economy, the author also devotes a significant portion of the book to discussions of politics and economics after World War II.
The author clearly differs from the "new Japan experts" in the United States who act to protect the existing US-Japan relationship.
As the title suggests, the book not only criticizes Japan's chronic problems, but also unhesitatingly criticizes the United States, which bears the original sin for Japan's current problems.
The fact that the US military government was largely responsible for the difficulty of reconciling Japan's past by blocking the opportunity for the Japanese people to reflect on their own mistakes during the post-war process is something that Americans should hear with pain.
The issue of the Futenma naval base in Okinawa, which has been a hot potato in U.S.-Japan relations since the 1990s, has also been criticized for being unnecessarily prolonged and complicated due to competition and selfishness among U.S. bureaucracies.

Discussions about exchange rate policy and bubbles delve into considerable depth, allowing you to grasp the dramatic trajectory of the Japanese economy.
One of the important themes covered in this book is that after Japan's defeat in the war, it entrusted its national defense and foreign affairs to the United States, and instead used the United States as leverage to develop its economy. Later, the United States, in turn, relied on Japan's economic power to maintain a dollar-centered global economy.

The more I read this book, the more I am surprised by how many aspects of Korean society resemble those of post-war Japan.
Even though our country's economic growth model is inevitably similar to that of Japan, there are many sentences that would not be awkward at all if only the subject were changed from Japan to Korea.
Korea, which had been following Japan in this way, has gradually changed its trajectory since the late 20th century. However, I think that is why the same issues that Japan is struggling with - chronic low growth, media independence, judicial reform, and a low birth rate and aging society - are also homework for us.

An insightful analysis of what ails Japan.
- [The Economist]

"The Shackles of Japan" is an excellent and immersive introduction to Japan.
Analysis of Japanese politics and economics is also full of intellectual stimulation.
There are many lessons to be learned not only for Japan, but also for the United States and other countries.
- [Complete Review]

Murphy concretely demonstrates how Japan is dependent on the United States to maintain its existing political system and future.
The final part of the book provides an in-depth analysis of the Abe administration.
- [Publisher's Weekly]