On Sept. 1, 1923, a 7.9-magnitude temblor struck Tokyo. More than 100,000 people lost their lives and more than 3 million were left homeless in the Great Kanto Earthquake. Fueled by rumors that ethnic Koreans were poisoning water wells, mobs killed thousands of Koreans in the days that followed. The Japanese government declared martial law, but the civilian authorities’ inability to deal with the disaster contributed to an eventual military takeover.
Seventy-one years later, on Jan. 17, 1995, Kobe was hit by a 6.9-magnitude quake. The Great Hanshin Earthquake killed 6,400 people. Damage was estimated at more than $100 billion, or 2.5 percent of Japanese national income — similar to current estimates of the toll of last week’s 9.0-magnitude temblor in the Tohoku region of northern Japan. Yet, within 18 months, economic activity in Kobe had reached 98 percent of its pre-quake level.
It is tempting to regard the different responses to these tragedies as proof that a more advanced society will respond more constructively to adversity. The simpler truth is that disasters can transform a nation — for better, or for worse.
Which way will Japan go?
Last week’s earthquake and tsunami devastated a society that, for all its wealth, was stuck in a rut. Over the past two decades, Japan’s economic growth averaged an anemic 1 percent a year. Politically, the country was rudderless. The Liberal Democratic Party, which had governed almost continuously since the end of the U.S. military occupation following World War II, had finally worn out its welcome. And the novice Democratic Party of Japan, which had assumed power in 2009, was flailing.
For four decades after the war, Japan experienced cozy politics backed by a robust economy. Lightly populated rural districts had a disproportionate effect on national politics. The government financed multibillion-dollar bridges to nowhere, expensive port facilities for small fishing villages and bullet trains to traverse bucolic rural areas — and seemingly lined every riverbed in Japan in concrete.
But in 1990, the bubble burst. The working-age share of the population began to fall. In 1998, the labor force started to shrink, and a decade later, the country’s population began to decline. Eventually, voters concerned about the mounting costs of wasteful projects tossed out the LDP.
Before the earthquake and tsunami devastated the Tohoku region on March 11, the country was already facing a slowing economy, fiscal strain and deflation, and decades of wasteful spending had saddled the country with a debt more than twice the size of the economy. Now, beyond the tragedy’s human toll, the economic costs are still being counted — and could be vastly expanded if the nuclear reactor damage is closer to that of Chernobyl than to Three Mile Island. If rebuilding is handled skillfully, there is hope that a different kind of Japan will emerge.
Despite its weak starting point, the government holds a few cards. Ninety-five percent of Japan’s debt is owned by its citizens, not foreign hedge funds; it’s unlikely that those citizens would dump their bond holdings if the government takes on more debt to rebuild the city of Sendai, for example.
Japan’s shrinking labor force could constrain the country’s ability to rebuild — thus forcing politicians and the public to confront its misgivings about immigration. Among leading industrial nations, only South Korea has a lower share of foreigners in its workplaces. The foreigners now in Japan fall into various niches: highly skilled white-collar expatriates; low-skilled, often illegal, laborers; imported rural brides. Economists have long argued that Japan needs to welcome more workers to remain economically competitive.
The rebuilding process can also help slow, if not reverse, the extraordinary concentration of economic power in Tokyo. Over the past 10 to 20 years, hundreds of Japanese corporations have moved their headquarters from cities such as Osaka and Kitakyushu to the Japanese capital. But post-earthquake rebuilding could help spread economic activity across the country.
But what is really at stake — and what will determine whether these other changes have any chance of coming to pass —is the structure of Japanese politics. If the incumbent DPJ successfully manages this emergency, the episode could reassure Japanese voters that this fledgling party represents a credible alternative to the LDP. Japan would then have a true two-party system in which political power and ideas are genuinely contested.
Such a transformation could allow the nation to confront sensitive issues that it has avoided for too long: the coddling of its heavily subsidized farmers, its self-defeating trade policy, its unwillingness to face immigration reform, its awkward defense policy, and its uncertain place in Asia and in the world. Japan could emerge as a more conventional and modern country with more genuinely democratic politics.
But if the government does a poor job in the crisis — if the Great Tohoku Earthquake becomes Japan’s Hurricane Katrina — then the country’s aging and cautious electorate could flock back to the LDP and reestablish the status quo of much of the past half-century.
So which will it be? No doubt, Japan — resilient and socially cohesive — will rebuild Sendai and other devastated areas. But will that push the country back into its past, or propel it into a more ambitious future?
The safe bet is a return to the status quo: comfortable decline in experienced hands. But Japan has been changed by natural disasters before. The Great Tohoku Earthquake could be the shock that pushes Japan not only to rebuild a city, but to remake itself politically.
Marcus Noland is deputy director and senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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