In Memory of Chalmers A. Johnson - Part 1
In Memory of Chalmers Ashby Johnson (1931–2010)
First Part
It has been a decade and a half since he left us. I have watched the interviews with him so many times that I almost know them by heart, yet I never grow tired of Johnson’s perspective, his incredible knowledge, and his dry humor. I miss him.
I first saw him in 1994 on Japanese public television, where he was discussing his new book. I had never heard of him before—I was a novice in Japanese affairs—so the interview glued me to the screen.
Chalmers Johnson sat opposite the reporter, with a cat on either side of him, each sitting in an armchair. He introduced them to the audience: one he called the Ministry of Finance (in Japanese, “Ōkurashō”), and the other the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (“Tsūsanshō”). I decided then and there to read all of his books—not because of his cats, but because the interview revealed that he saw Japan’s economic and political system in a completely different way than most of the authors I had read until then.
Two years later, I met him in Tokyo. At the time, he was founding the Japan Policy Research Institute (JPRI), which still exists online today, funded by his royalties. This provided an opportunity for him to meet those who, like him, pursued research on Japan with a critical perspective.
I was lucky—he approached me, and though he didn’t know it, his words encouraged me for years. At the time, I was once again a student, learning the language and trying to understand the modernization of the island nation. Every day, I carried stacks of books to my dorm room, yet I felt completely unqualified. Upon hearing that I had graduated from the University of Economics in Budapest (then still named Marx Károly University, as he noted with a smile), Johnson said to me:
“Do not be misled by the reputation of those present here. In a few years, you will understand Japan’s economic and political system better than any of us because you grew up in a Soviet-type system—you haven’t just read about it, like I have. Nothing helps one understand Japan and East Asia better than that,” he said with a laugh.
Many years later, when my first English-language study on Japanese financial modernization was published, Chalmers Johnson sent me a letter of congratulations. After my second study appeared, he offered me the opportunity to publish at any time in his virtual research institute. Unfortunately, I never had the chance to thank him in person for everything I learned from him.
1.
Chalmers Ashby Johnson graduated in Chinese Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He served as a Marine during the Korean War, which was his first encounter with Japan. Later, he became a political scientist, and his doctoral dissertation was published as a book: Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China 1937–1945.
For those unfamiliar with East Asian history, it is important to understand that Japan’s military attack on China in the summer of 1937—often referred to as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (which, in reality, was a Japanese military provocation)—led to years of relentless brutality by the Japanese army against the Chinese population. This radicalized rural China, allowing Communist leader Mao Zedong to organize his partisan army around anti-Japanese sentiment. This ultimately led to Mao’s rise to power and the victory of the Chinese Communist regime—a direct consequence of Japan’s eight-year-long occupation and mass killings. For a European reader, these events might just be numbers, but in China alone, ten million people died as a result of the Japanese occupation and war.
At thirty-seven, Chalmers Johnson became the head of the China Studies Department at Berkeley. However, the Chinese Cultural Revolution made research increasingly difficult, so in 1972, he shifted his focus to Japan.
A decade later, he published a now-classic monograph on the fifty-year history of Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) from 1925 to 1975. Titled MITI and the Japanese Miracle, the book revolutionized research on Japan and the rapidly growing economies of neighboring countries.
For years, nobody believed Johnson—he was labeled a communist, a CIA agent, a “revisionist.” Yet, all he claimed in his book was that Japan’s capitalist economy represented a third type—different from both the Soviet-style command economy and the American free-market system. Instead, he described a hybrid system, which combined elements of both, allowing Japan to become the world’s second-leading economy within fifty years, right after the United States.
Johnson coined the term “developmental economy” to describe this model. According to him, Japan and its successful East Asian neighbors did not achieve their economic miracles by chance but through a development-focused economic, financial, and social policy.
Even a decade after the book’s release, debates about Johnson’s claims continued, often heated. As someone from Eastern Europe, I struggled to understand the relentless anger of my colleagues on the other side of the Pacific. At the time, I had no idea that Chalmers Johnson had challenged the universal dogma of free-market economics—an ideology that had become unquestionable.
Not only economists but also historians found it difficult to accept that Japan did not function under the American free-market system—despite the U.S. occupation forces’ attempts to impose it after World War II. In fact, Japanese economic experts had already recognized as early as December 1944 that free-market liberalism was dead. They knew that Japan would lose the war but could still win the economic war that would follow.
After regaining full sovereignty, Japan rebranded and modernized the economic institutions that the U.S. occupation had banned. For two decades, the nation mobilized society to win the global economic “war.” Many of these strategies are detailed in Johnson’s controversial monograph.
His book cracked the ideological foundation of the free-market system. Until then, most researchers (with a few exceptions) never questioned its universal validity. Johnson’s work posed a threat to American economic hegemony—not in a military sense, but ideologically. The fierce debates surrounding his book were a testament to this.
A new generation of scholars emerged, some of whom began questioning the free-market dogma and researching within the framework of the “developmental economy” model that Johnson had defined. Japanese policymakers and financial experts reacted to the book as if an uninvited guest had peeked into their bedroom. The book, which I still reread today, dismantled all the myths and speculations that the Japanese government itself had successfully propagated about what the West called the “Japanese economic miracle.”