Japan: Enduring Strengths,
Declining Trends

T¬¬Though Japan remains one of the world’s 5 largest economies--- at no. 4 in 2025 with a GDP of about $4.4 trillion --- its rank in the global scale of human development indicators has been steadily slipping from no.6 in 1990 to no.24 in 2024. China’s rapid rise in the past 35 years is one reason for Japan’s displacement in the economic sphere.

In the other measure, there is a combination of reasons. A steep fall in the female fertility rate from the ideal minimum of 2.07 babies per marriageable-age woman to only 1.20, an aging population that deprives society of vibrancy and vigour, a shrinking workforce, and a rigid work culture are the possible contributory factors.

Social virtues:
Yet certain facets of social conduct are sustained. Deep respect for courtesy, etiquette, seniority, cleanliness, and civility --- with utmost priority for time and punctuality. Despite sweeping demographic change in the 20th century, whereby the earlier 20 per cent urban-80 per cent rural ratio virtually reversed itself, certain practices have stayed consistent. Reinforcing the strength of tradition is also the remarkable pioneering achievement of 90 per cent enrolment of children in schools by 1900, and about 100 per cent numeric and alphabetic literacy attained decades before 2025.

Roots in monarchial history?
Do the roots of resilience of certain practices and behaviour go back about a thousand years, with the sustained existence of the monarchy, which has not been a single, continuous dynasty but has comprised multiple changes over time and war? Long before today’s constitutional monarchy in which the emperor wields no executive power, Japan’s royalty nevertheless required the fulfilment of form and appearance even more than the use of force and power.

For instance, in the 3rd century AD, when the land was known as Wa, in the kingdom of Wei, Queen Himiko was a total recluse, never seen in public, with no real power and with authority exercised by a nominee. Executive might was vested in non-royal entities like the Fujiwaras and the Heiki families, generation after generation, with military leaders known as shoguns applying force. Yet never attempting to overthrow the official sovereign. So, enduring has the monarchy been through the separation of formal power and factual power that, at one extreme, Japan has had an emperor in the 16th century known as Ogimachi who was so poor and destitute that he and his court survived by selling his calligraphy and palace furniture. All the way, through better days to 2025, when Emperor Naruhito ascended the throne in 2019 and sustains the well-endowed, stable, ceremonial, non-divine dimension accepted in 1945 after Japan’s loss and surrender at the end of World War II.

Transition to modernity, resurgence:
However, 80 years before that turning point, another major landmark era came between 1600 and 1867. Known as the Tokugawa period, which also saw the Meiji Restoration and the end of prolonged isolation in the 18th and early 19th centuries, those decades witnessed the historic change of the role of the samurai, the military warriors, into civil bureaucrats and administrators. But militarism was to return, and with a vengeance.
Though Japan was plunged into initial military expansion, victory over Russia, and conquest of China and Korea in the first half of the 20th century until the catastrophic World War II experience, Japan’s renewal in just two decades after 1945 is a salutary example of a nation’s extraordinary capacity for rebuilding itself from the ashes of defeat and subjugation to foreign (American) control.

While American oversight was crucial, the fact that, in less than 20 years after the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Japan was able to efficiently organize the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964 testifies to the enduring, energizing constituent elements of Japan’s national character and capacity. That process of regeneration through demilitarization and democratization began as early as 1952, with the end of American control and the start of an elected Diet (parliament) with about 20 years of fast economic growth, benefitting in part from the Korean War of 1950-1953 during which Japan served as a back-base for American forces. Culminating with the Osaka World Expo in 1970, Japan demonstrated its exclusive ability to retain long-embedded beliefs and traditions, such as evident in the monarchy, and at the same time, adopt entirely new technologies and processes to promote material advancement, both internally and, perhaps more vitally, externally by introducing new electronic, mechanical, chemical products, and by producing steel and structures, vehicles and devices that quickly became household names across the globe.

Socio-economic reforms:
Behind such extraordinary achievements were policies and actions that wrought fundamental changes in favour of equity and social development. Redistribution of land to ensure average land holdings in rural areas of 2.5 acres for each cultivator, turning tenant farmers into land-owners, minimum guaranteed price for rice that could be 5 times higher than world prices, the earlier end of giant finance houses known as zaibatsus to make access to money and credit easier for the masses, compulsory education for 9 years, extremely competitive examinations to popularize excellence and aspiration, enable formation of effective trade unions, encourage growth of old and new corporations and fostering of a virtually life-long bond between employees and employer, permit growth of newspapers with huge circulation and new media with extensive reach, give up possessing an army, navy and air force while creating only a Self-Defence Force in 1954 (enabled by American security cover and deployment of nuclear weapons as ultimate deterrents), shifting the concept of sacredness from the throne to the people at large, and to the state.

Bullet trains, not bullets:
Creating bullet trains as role models for other countries to emulate rather than firing bullets at real or imagined enemies has not been painless and easy. Though safety on the streets is high and crime is generally low, there do exist well-organized criminal gangs known as yakuza. These operate both within Japan and overseas, while increased detection and enforcement in recent decades have steadily reduced their numbers and spread. Their areas of activity include prostitution, gambling, loan-sharking, day-labour contracting, blackmail, and extortion. Overall, using levels of violent crime as indicators, Japan offers refreshingly low statistics. In homicides, it is only 0.2 per 100,000 persons, while the USA is 30 times higher. In robbery, Japan is 1.2 per 100,000 citizens, while the USA is 81.4 for equivalent numbers.

Perhaps social cohesion is the fundamental reason for the distinctiveness of the country. Despite women being given the right to vote only in the 20th century after World War II, women and the family as basic, treasured pillars of a society that has been historically patriarchal have contributed to strengthening both society and state in the 21st century, along with vastly improved economic equity, reduction of poverty, sustained stress on holistic education, as well as technical proficiency.

A book and a film:
One would like to conclude this brief reflection with a request to readers to peruse a particular book and a particular film, neither of which will be comprehensive in fully illuminating the subject of this essay, but each of which contains an enormous, enriching range of facts and truths. One is the book “The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Power in a Stateless Nation” by Karen van Wolferen, originally published in 1990 in the USA by Vintage Books.

I purchased it in about 1993 and recently rediscovered the book in my library and re-read portions to realize anew the wonders of Japan’s history and complexity. The other is an international award-winning cinema film of 2024 titled “Perfect Days,” co-written with a Japanese writer and directed by the distinguished German filmmaker Wim Wenders. This is the riveting saga of...not a famous, or prosperous figure... but simply a cleaner of public toilets in Tokyo. He has an unusual sensitivity and cultured persona: depicting the same, repetitive actions taken by the character named Hiryama masterfully rendered by actor Koji Yakucha, the film fuses multiple themes and values such as loving art, cherishing work ethics and culture, being mindful of others, of talking less and listening more, of being immersed in the local --- to create a captivating portrait of both a single human being, and of a whole nation. And the last, long, single shot in close-up is a mesmerizing masterpiece that leaves an indelible impact --- like Japan does. May this great country recover its human development ranking as it strives to remain a dynamic economy!.