Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World

The conversation opens with a short preview of themes that return later, then introduces Pradyu Prasad (transcribed variously as Pradumna and Pratumna). He has just graduated from high school in Singapore, runs a blog and a podcast (transcribed as Brennan Goods), and has received an Emergent Ventures grant. He says he is working on reserve currencies, a long-standing obsession, and that his longer-term aim is a blog that answers any economic history or economics question he cannot answer and that nobody else can either, a kind of mini encyclopedia of whatever interests him. The book under discussion is Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix.

The host places Hirohito as the third emperor after the Meiji Restoration and the first to treat Japan as an international power. He reigned during the invasion of China and its atrocities, and during Pearl Harbor. Bix takes a sharply critical line: Hirohito had the authority to stop those atrocities or at least dull them. The conventional view is the opposite. On that account he was a constitutional monarch, much like a British one, without real authority over politics, and where he did act he did his utmost to lessen the war's effects, for example by surrendering in 1945.

Prasad reads the book as a synthesis of the two positions. Hirohito was a constitutional monarch because he chose to be. On paper he could not act, since Japanese constitutional law was poorly made, as he thinks it would be for any autocratic-leaning state, but he could have done something and did not. He rates the book as well written toward the end and poorly written at the start, because a collection of events becomes a biography only through a story and the opening has none. He still credits the author for working through sources in Japanese and, to a small extent, Chinese and English, which he calls rare and deserving of commendation.

The host calls the early chapters on Meiji's influence on Hirohito the most interesting, since Meiji's reign saw Japan move from a semicolonized power to a colonial one with holdings in Korea and Taiwan. He uses this as an argument against a friend's view that differences between countries are largely genetic: a country that changed this much in 150 years makes such explanations hard to sustain. Prasad answers by contrasting the pre-1868 Tokugawa Shogunate with the Meiji era. Power became far more centralized, with one ruler instead of feudal lords, and the country opened up, where earlier Japanese who dealt with outsiders faced the death penalty. Japan then followed what he calls the "holy utility" (as transcribed) of industrialization: open labor markets, government investment and foreign capital.

Prasad presents this as a general pattern. In East Asia, and in parts of Africa such as Botswana and to a smaller extent South Africa and Nigeria, a latecomer's best route has been to take capital from rich countries, copy their innovations, use their knowledge to get rich, and then slowly push against their hegemony. He rates the results as mixed: the US did "okayish", Japan did not do well, and he sees the same issue now with China.

On why Japan moved first, Prasad cautions that he avoids the historiography, which he finds too detailed and not well done, so his answer is a view rather than settled history, and he says the outcome was very elite-dependent. First, Japan's elite had less of a rent-seeking class than China's, where a vast bureaucracy built to administer a huge country left too much power with intermediaries who then blocked modernization and opening. Second, Japan already had a small tradition of treating the emperor as a god, which became politically convenient, and a small civil war was won, by luck in his telling, by people who wanted to open the country. Third, being a small island nation forces leaders to face reality, as he explains in the passage below.

the Japanese were just forced to deal with reality a lot faster.

The host links this to Lee Kuan Yew's biography: Singapore started with hostile neighbors and expected to lose about 25% of its GDP when the British left their naval bases. Prasad generalizes it into a measure of leader competence, how close a leader is to reality, and offers 2022 as an example: leaders closer to reality responded faster to COVID, got better vaccines, and both tightened and reopened faster. He says Japan's 1860s elite was closer to reality than other countries' elites, so it opened up quickly and brought American industry in. He adds that much economic development history is also a history of intellectual piracy, euphemistically called forced technology transfer. By the 1910s and 1920s Japan was rich enough to project power across East Asia, and in 1905 it had already fought a war with Russia.

The host asks whether Japan struggled with the sudden shift from being coerced by the Americans to coercing others. His argument is that when the shift is slow, norms can evolve, but traditional war norms of destroying the enemy, pillaging and looting may suit a village-scale conflict and become extremely brutal when modern war can do the same to millions. In the West, he says, industrialization left time for things to settle before the worst weapons arrived. He grants that the world wars may be counterexamples but notes that the Western theater lacked the atrocities seen in the Pacific and China. The cost of rapid industrialization, in his account, is that cultural norms do not catch up with technology. He also cites a Scholar Stage essay by Hanna Gur (as transcribed) on honor, respect and justice cultures, paraphrasing it as saying that less industrialized societies tend to have strong patriarchal cultures.

Prasad agrees that norms lag but disagrees that this is peculiar to Japan or that the West had caught up. He points to colonialism: very few members of the House of Commons thought Warren Hastings (transcribed as Juan Hastings) should be impeached for atrocities in India through the East India Company. His conclusion is that norms are slow to catch up almost everywhere. The passage breaks off mid-sentence as he turns to Japan.

Prasad first finishes the point about norms. In his view the Japan seen today is largely an artifact of the Americans, who, he says, put a gun to the Japanese cabinet and told it to accept a new constitution. Parts of the Japanese left liked it and parts did not, and the resulting coalition was made up of those who liked it, older people, and members of the old regime willing to accept the new reality. His lesson is that norms can change fast, but when they do it is under force rather than through some internal process. Asked why there were so many atrocities, he says norms matter but that public choice theory explains much of Japan's early twentieth-century war crimes.