Few tall poppies in land of the rising sun

In chaotic times, the cries for strong national leadership are always loud. But why do some countries get visionaries, and some get duffers?

Historian Paul Kennedy investigates why great leaders are easy to call for, but difficult to find - particularly in modern Japan

WE live in testing times. From the small townships of midwest America to the burgeoning mega-cities of Asia, all sorts of boundaries are breaking down, as money shifts around the world in ever-greater volumes, ideas are transmitted, cultures clash, migration swells, and newer technologies change our way of doing things.

It is in such testing times that people feel the need for leadership. Women and men do indeed make their own history - the rubric of the leader throughout the ages. But as Karl Marx went on to say, they are also bound by the past. As he put it, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a mountain on the brain of the living."

How true is that for leaders today? In my Radio 4 series, I'll be taking a closer look at three nations, Japan, Russia and the United States, each of which for different reasons affect the future of the world. All are engaged in a serious domestic debate about how to respond to our new and fast-altering world. And each has unique problems regarding political leadership.

Take a look at Japan - a country with a stunning combination of tradition and modernity. This is a country of mobile phones and geishas, of super tankers and Sumo wrestlers. Like Britain it was an island empire, and each had an ambivalent attitude to its neighbouring continent, yet it has such a different history.

For over three hundred years its leadership chose isolation from the rest of the world, so as not to be contaminated by the foreigner. Then after 1868, - shocked by the appearance in Tokyo harbour of the American Commander Perry's "black ships" demanding trade - its leadership chose engagement and adaptation.

It was the first non-European society to modernise and industrialise. For two generations, it expanded through war and trade, until an unwise leadership brought it into a disastrous conflict with China, America and the British Empire. Defeated in all spheres of warfare, it was shocked into surrender by the dropping of A-bombs in August 1945.

Days later, the Japanese emperor made his first ever radio broadcast to announce to a tearful people that the war was over and Japan had lost. The symbolic leader of Japan was no longer divine and its constitution was reframed by foreign rulers - the Americans. Perhaps not surprisingly, this led to a new kind of leadership. In the post war period, there emerged outstanding Japanese businessmen such as the car manufacturer Mr Honda, or Mr Akio Morita of Sony, but no political equivalents; no Adenauers, or de Gaulles, or Thatchers. Protected by an American defence shield, Japan could simply concentrate on getting rich. Ever since, Japanese have held politicians in low esteem, as compared to businessmen and even bureaucrats Japan threw itself into an astonishing recovery, borrowing from and adapting Western technology and production, and growing so fast that it became the second largest national economy in the world by the 1980s, larger than Germany's, larger even than the Soviet Union's. It was then the world's largest exporter.

In those heady years, some even spoke of "Japan As Number One". It seemed to me a generation ago, the supreme example of how a traditional society could adapt to changes. It became a model for much of the rest of Asia and further afield.

But over the past ten years or so, this picture of an ever-more- successful Japan has crumbled. And a series of shocks have badly dented Japanese confidence. There have been many financial as well as moral upheavals. The traditional Japanese values of mutual assistance, which were so admired by the West, are being severely challenged by the depths of their current recession.

The astronomical land prices collapsed like a punctured balloon. Banks were closed, and the prestigious Yamaichi securities House, the oldest stockbroker in Japan, collapsed under the weight of bad debt in 1996. Factories have been shut. Once-proud Japanese companies have been sold off to foreigners. Experts warned that the country was falling far behind the US in the new software revolutions. Budget deficits and national debt has risen, as has unemployment.

In such gloomy circumstances, a Westerner might reasonably assume that the Japanese people would be looking for a decisive and wise leader, for their own version of Franklin D Roosevelt - and that a country of 125 million talented and educated people would not find it difficult to produce such a man. Yet all the emergence of a successful national leader in the foreseeable future is highly unlikely, if not impossible.

Why is this so? Partly as a consequence of the war as we've heard, but there are also broader cultural and social reasons for the Japanese aversion to decisive leaders. Its educational system is deliberately geared to producing uniformity and equality, and to deter charisma and individualism. It's an attitude which I encountered in Japan many years ago, that an exceptional individual is a "tall poppy" to be cut down to match the rest of the field.

In this period when Japan clearly needs exceptional individuals that attitude still prevails, according to Dr Bungo Ishizaki, a former businessman who is now a lecturer in management:

"I see it in my students. The entrance examination discourages any individual or creative thinking. The tests are 100% based on mark sheets. If you are creative you're going to flunk the tests.

"It's a very silly test. Some of them are remarkably silly questions. It tests your memory and mimicking and memorisation skills. The good students who are taken into the best jobs such as the Ministry of Finance jobs - twelve or fifteen a year - are those who make the cut at the Tokyo law school - so you can almost predict the kind of thinking that those students will have in later years".

So when this training in rote-learning and multiple-choice tests is over, those who succeed move on to the famous Tokyo Law School and then to esteemed positions in the bureaucracy. There is simply no tradition, as there is in the American "ivy league" universities, or at Oxford and Cambridge, of encouraging bright young people to enter politics. Overall, the Japanese people prefer harmony to strong leadership.

Noriko Hama believes that Japan needs to turn to another chapter of its history in today's troubled times, one that it does have in common with Britain: "I think the parallel between Britain and Japan a very interesting one - both are island nations with a very piratical past. We thought of Britain as a nation of gentlemen but that's not the real Britain. When in the 19th Century Britain started to forget its piratical past, that was the start of its decline. Similarly Japan. We are trying very much as Britain did in the early 1980's to rediscover our buccaneering past."

There is widespread impatience with Japan's current lack of direction. All of the people I talked to feel that things will have to change. Yet how likely is Japan's renewal under new, dynamic leadership? My own conviction is that this is not going to happen. Japan's education system, while increasingly unsuited to changes in the world, is not going to remodel itself fundamentally because the elites prefer things the way they are.

The youth culture is imitative and shallow; after a few years of seeming rebellion, young Japanese women and men assume traditional and deferential habits, and do not challenge the existing order. Korean Japanese billionaires will never be fully accepted.

Japan is undoubtedly under pressure, domestically and internationally. Its society is aging, its economy is stagnant. Its national confidence is low.

The problem here, one suspects, is that although the present situation in Japan is difficult and unsettling, it is not unsettling enough. This is a rich country, and its people enjoy many benefits, and a lifestyle, that would have astonished the generation of 1945. Moreover, the nation has got on well with only a minimal amount of decisive political leadership. Times might be bad, but are they really that bad? Why rock the boat?

And this, ironically, is the dilemma of all societies in times of great change: is it better to stay with tried and tested policies, even if they look less adequate than earlier? Or to plunge boldly into newer fields, newer policies, newer ways of doing things, although the outcome is far less certain?

These are, indeed, times for bold and visionary leaders in Japan; but that seems to be one of the few commodities that this astonishing society has difficulty in producing.

Lost Leaders: Great Powers in An Age of Change is written and presented by Professor Paul Kennedy of Yale University, is broadcast on Radio 4 on Tuesday May 16, at 8.00pm.

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