On a visit to Tokyo this week, on more than one occasion when I asked how Japan should tackle the economic crisis, my interlocutor turned with ninja-like alacrity to the topic of pre-Meiji Japan. The period before American warships forced the country open in the mid-19th century was regularly invoked as a prelapsarian idyll, a time when Japan did not have to deal with the grubby business of earning its crust in the world. Eisuke Sakakibara, the former vice-finance minister indelibly branded Mr Yen, describes a country that was peaceful, orderly, unspoilt and friendly. “That was what pre-Meiji Japan was like. We should go back to that,” he says.
Asked about economic policy, one shadow cabinet minister finds himself pondering Edo Japan's almost non-existent imports. (That is hardly surprising given Japan's 200-year virtual ban on entering or leaving the country.) Japan started exporting, the politician says, only because it needed to build a military to defend itself. That decision has led inexorably to today's over- dependence on supplying manufactured products to customers overseas.
Gerry Curtis, a seasoned academic from Columbia University who spends half the year in Japan, confirmed that, instead of a sense of crisis, Tokyo is laden with the heavy scent of nostalgia. “A lot of intellectuals are rejecting the US altogether, including ones who previously swallowed neoliberal free-market capitalism hook, line and sinker,” he says. “The intellectual mood now is a lot about how wonderful Japan's past is.” The economic crisis has invited a re-evaluation of Japan's postwar – if not its post-Meiji – record in at least three main spheres.