Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 DOI 10.

1007/s11186-007-9021-5

Economic development in East Asia and a critique of the post-Confucian thesis

Keedon Kwon

Published online: 13 February 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract Some scholars have put forward what they call a post-Confucian thesis to explain East Asias successful economic development. The thesis makes two important arguments: first, that Confucianism has enabled East Asian countries to take a different type of capitalism and a different path to modernity than did the West; second, that Confucianism has been the source of those ethics such as activism, hard work, thrift, and the like that have been conducive to economic development in East Asia. This article calls into question the first argument of the thesis by taking the example of the employment systems in Japan and Korea and showing that Confucianism has not been an important factor in defining their central features. In order to evaluate the second argument, this article investigates two major modernization campaigns in Japan and Korea, claiming that those supposedly Confucian virtues can be better seen as the products of the states social engineering for modernization and economic development.

The economic success of East Asian countries has led many scholars to search for its causes. That this success concentrates in East Asia naturally leads one to wonder what commonality characterizes this region. The effective developmental state1 and the exportoriented strategy of economic growth2 are such commonalities. If one searches for a
1

Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese miracle: The growth of industrial policy, 19251975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); Alice Amsden, Asias next giant: South Korea and late industrialization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Robert Wade, Governing the market: Economic theory and the role of government in East Asian industrialization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Stephen Haggard, Pathways from the periphery: The politics of growth in the newly industrializing countries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Vivek Chibber, Locked in place: State-building and late industrialization in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). K. Kwon (*) Sociology Department, Social Science Building, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1180 Observatory Dr., Madison, WI 53706, USA e-mail: kkwon@ssc.wisc.edu

DO9021; No of Pages

56

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

cultural commonality, Confucianism is the easiest to identify. Indeed, many scholars have invoked Confucianism as an important cultural cause of East Asias economic success.3 In particular, scholars such as Berger and Tu have gone so far as to propose what is called a post-Confucian thesis: that Confucianism has been not only conducive to economic development in East Asian countries but also has enabled them to take a different type of capitalism and a different path to modernity than did the West. Relying on the Japanese and Korean cases of economic development, this article attempts to assess the explanatory power of the post-Confucian thesis. Although the thesis is a somewhat impressionistic argument rather than a rigorous hypothesis and has not attracted much attention from the wider community of scholars, it is worth subjecting it to a close scrutiny for at least one important reason. The thesis has been nearly the only attempt at cultural explanation of East Asias success. A close examination of the thesis, therefore, may provide us with a good opportunity to develop the cultural approach to East Asias economic success. I begin by briefly reviewing the arguments of Harrison, Berger, and Tu, who have most consistently advocated the post-Confucian thesis. Their arguments raise various issues regarding the economic role of Confucianism among which I take up two important ones. First, the post-Confucian scholars argue that Confucianism has enabled East Asian countries to create a different type of capitalism than that of the West in many respects. Tu argues that East Asian capitalism is less adversarial, less individualistic, and less selfinterested.4 These distinctively East Asian features of Confucian origin are argued to have led to distinctively East Asian economic institutions. Thus it is also possible to argue that the employment systems of Japan and Korea have been cast in the Confucian mold. Though no scholars mentioned above have provided a detailed discussion of the Japanese and Korean employment systems, there are some scholars who have explained the characteristics of the Japanese employment system in a post-Confucian manner. We then can take these scholars arguments as a post-Confucian explanation of the Japanese employment system. Relying on other scholars findings, I evaluate the power of Confucianism to shape the employment systems in its own mold. I show that the evolutionary processes of both the Japanese and Korean employment systems defy the thesis and that it gives us little gain in explaining the Korean system in particular.

Peter Berger, The capitalist revolution: Fifty propositions about prosperity, equality, and liberty (New York: Basic, 1986) and An East Asian Development Model? In Peter Berger and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, (Eds.), In search of an East Asian developmental model (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988), 311; Lawrence Harrison, Who prospers? How cultural values shape economic and political success (New York: Basic, 1992); Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, (Eds.), Culture matters: How values shape human progress (New York: Basic, 2000); Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, An East Asian development model: Empirical explorations, In Peter Berger and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, (Eds.), In search of an East Asian developmental model, 1223; Herman Kahn, World economic development: 1979 and beyond, (Boulder: Westview, 1979); Andrew Eungi Kim and Gil-sung Park, Nationalism, Confucianism, work ethic and industrialization in South, Journal of contemporary Asia 33/1 (2003): 3749; David Landes, Culture makes almost all the difference, In Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, (Eds.), Culture matters, 2 13; Roderick MacFarquhar, The post-Confucian challenge, Economist (February 9, 1980): 6772; Edwin Reischauer, The sinic world in perspective, Foreign Affairs 52/2 (1974):341348; Wei-ming Tu, Introduction, Wei-ming Tu, (Ed.), Confucian traditions in East Asian modernity: Moral education and economic culture in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 110; and Wei-Bin Zhang, Confucianism and modernization: Industrialization and democratization of the Confucian regions (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999). 4 Tu, Introduction.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

57

Second, the post-Confucian scholars stress that East Asians have in common economic ethics that advocate competitive activism, hard work, thrift, education fever, and respect for authority, which are conducive to East Asias success. They argue that these ethical precepts directly come from Confucianism. To assess this argument, I examine various themes and practices articulated in two important modernization campaigns in Japan and Korea: the Local Improvement Movement from the 1900s to 1920s in Japan and the New Community Movement in the 1970s in Korea. They were among the most important and far-reaching campaigns for economic development in these countries that made great efforts to instill in ordinary people various economic ethics principles including the supposedly Confucian ones. Focusing on the themes of activism, hard work, and thrift, I show that the postConfucian thesis is generally misleading. The campaigns attacked and rejected many important doctrines of Confucianism. Although a certain Confucian rhetoric was present, it seems obvious that Confucianism was not so much the agent of modern transformation as the object thereof. In short, those economically favorable ethics can be better understood as the products of the Japanese and Korean states socio-cultural engineering for economic development. Following the examination of these two issues, I discuss a methodological source of the failure of the post-Confucian thesis. I argue that the thesis fails partly because it is based on the conventional view of culture as an internalized value system. In this view, culture is seen as static and non-agentic: it rarely changes, constituting the constant background whose overarching forces essentially determine the courses of peoples action; people are no more than the receiving end of various cultural forces. Likewise, Confucianism is viewed as having always been out there with an unchanging grip on people. Such a static and non-agentic view of culture and of Confucianism cannot do justice to East Asias cultural transformation, which has been beneficial to its economic development. I conclude this article with the argument that a dynamic and agentic view of culture, which emphasizes the state as an active cultural actor, provides a better cultural explanation of East Asias economic success.

The Confucian paradox and the post-Confucian thesis Weber argued that Confucianism lacked the kind of spiritual requirements that made the development of capitalism possible in the West and that were embodied in the Protestant ethic. Yet, Confucian countries have eventually succeeded in economic development at an astonishing pace. Pye calls this the Confucian paradox.5 The first example of the paradox was that Japan became one of the world powers in the early twentieth century and the second greatest economy after World War II. Hence, it was for this country that the attempts to resolve the paradox were first made. Since Japan was the only non-Western country that ascended to an advanced economy, one natural question was in what ways Japan was distinctive, especially from China that otherwise would have been a primary East Asian candidate for a world economic power. Some scholars found Japans distinctiveness in the political nature of her Confucianism, which was argued to be quite different from Chinas. Bellah, for example, argued that the former emphasized loyalty over filial piety, while the

5 Lucian Pye, The new Asian capitalism: A political portrait, In Peter Berger and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, (Eds.), In search of an East Asian developmental model, 8198.

58

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

reverse was true in the latter. This made Japanese culture more goal-oriented and thus more conducive to the state-led collective pursuit of economic goals.6 As Johnson points out,7 however, such an explanation has not been able to stand the test of time, as other East Asian countries have succeeded in as rapid an economic development as did Japan. Hence, there has been a movement toward what is called the post-Confucian thesis, which invokes Confucianism as a whole to explain East Asias collective success. In what follows, I review the arguments of Harrison, Berger, and Tu who have strongly advocated the economic role of Confucianism. First, Harrison argues that economic development depends upon a variety of cultural requirements: future-orientation, hard work, frugality, education, merit as opposed to connections, community as opposed to family, the rigorous ethical code, justice and fair play, diverse and horizontal authority, and secularism.8 He assesses Confucianism against these requirements. The balance sheet turns out to be ambivalent. Confucianism contains both stultifying and positive forces; it is not a monolithic but a contradictory whole that has various cross-currents to it. The stultifying forces are the mandarin literati, the low prestige attached to economic activity, the emphasis on the family/clan over the community, the burden of filial piety, rigid hierarchy, and authoritarianism. The positive forces are the Confucian emphasis on education, merit, hard work, and discipline, combined with the achievement-motivating tradition of ancestor worship and Tao emphasis on frugality.9 Where and once the stultifying forces were destroyed as in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, the positive forces finally find a vent for economic development. Second, Berger presents two propositions about East Asias success: first, The East Asian experience supports the hypothesis that certain components of Western bourgeois culturenotably activism, rational innovativeness, and self-discipline are necessary for successful capitalist development; second, Specific elements of East Asian civilization, be it in the great traditions or in folk culture, have fostered these values and have consequently given the societies of the region a comparative advantage in the modernization process.10 Specific elements refer to a positive attitude to the affairs of this world, a sustained lifestyle of discipline and self-cultivation, respect for authority, frugality, an overriding concern for stable family life, all of which are relevant to the strong work ethic found in the East Asian populations.11 He goes so far as to say that East Asias modernization process is so distinct that it provides an East Asian development model and even constitutes a second case of capitalist modernity.12

6 Robert Bellah, Tokugawa religion: The cultural roots of modern Japan (New York: Free, 1985). Bellah, however, partially revised his view on Japanese modernization in Reflections on the Protestant ethic analogy in Asia, In S. N. Eisenstadt, (Ed.), The Protestant ethic and modernization: A comparative view (New York and London: Basic, 1968), 243251. He feels that his methodology in Tokugawa religion of finding some motivational, institutional parallels between Japan and the West is not sufficient. Instead, we have to trace how structural transformation in the basic social structures and social value systems occurred. What this article attempts to do is exactly to trace how basic value systems in Japan and Korea were structurally transformed. 7 Johnson, MITI and the Japanese miracle, 9. 8 9

Harrison, Promoting progressive cultural change, In Harrison and Huntington, (Eds.), Culture matters, Harrison, Who prospers?, 112. Berger, The capitalist revolution, 166. Berger, An East Asian development model, 78. Ibid., 4.

10 11 12

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

59

Third, Bergers second case argument is more fully pursued by Tu.13 Yet he does not endorse the idea of Confucianism as the functional equivalent of Protestantism, the idea to which many scholars including Harrison and Berger subscribe explicitly or implicitly. As such, appreciating the role of Confucianism in East Asias modernization requires bringing its unique features in relief. And they are government leadership propped by moral authority, the centrality of the family and the pervasive presence in wider society of the family metaphor, the idea of duty rather than the idea of right as a regulatory principle of human relationships, and the communal spirit.14 These unique features of Confucianism have made it possible for East Asia to walk an alternative path to capitalist development and modernity. Tu argues that the resulting modernity of the East is less adversarial, less individualistic, and less self-interested, but still highly active and competitive. The preceding review raises at least two important issues.15 First, Bergers and Tus second case arguments allow one to infer that Confucianism has had a power to cast economic and other institutions in its own mold. We then can ask, Has Confucianism determined the shapes of economic institutions such as employment systems in East Asia? Second, the post-Confucian scholars argue that the economic ethics conducive to East Asias economic development come from Confucianism. Our second question is, Are they really of Confucian origin? In what follows, I attempt to answer these two questions. For the first question, I rely on other scholars findings to examine the Japanese and the Korean employment system. I show that Confucianism did not have the power to determine the traits of the employment systems. For the second question, I explore two important state-led modernization campaigns, the Local Improvement Movement in Japan and the New Community Movement in Korea. I argue that much greater causal weight needs to be assigned to the states social engineering by moral, economic campaigns than to Confucianism in tracing the origins of the supposedly Confucian economic ethics.

The Japanese and Korean employment systems This section attempts to answer the question of whether Confucianism has played a significant role in defining the traits of economic institutions in East Asia. The Japanese employment system (JES) provides an excellent case to answer this question. The JES has long been a subject of hot debate in social sciences. Some scholars have seen it as a carryover of the Tokugawa tradition of which Confucianism was a central part, proposing a resemblance of the post-Confucian thesis. Thus we may treat the carryover argument as a variant of the thesis.16 If it should turn out that the legacies of Tokugawa tradition has greatly influenced the JES, the thesis could be confirmed. I also examine the Korean employment system (KES), which can serve as a good test to assess the durability of the

13 14 15

Tu, Introduction. Ibid., 79.

There is another big issue: if the post-Confucian thesis is right, does this mean that Webers view of Confucianism as hindering capitalist development in China was wrong? The three scholars offer differing positions over this issue. While Berger sees Webers view in The religion of China as simply wrong and Tu seems to be suspicious of it, Harrison is more favorable to it. For Harrison, Webers arguments about Confucianism may be interpreted as stressing its negative aspects. In any case, this issue involves so many complicated other issues that it cannot be pursued in this article. 16 Berger, An East Asian development model and Hsiao, An East Asian development model: Empirical explorations do mention corporate culture in East Asia, if only in passing.

60

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

Confucian influence on East Asian economic institutions because there is a long lapse of time between Koreas and Japans industrialization. The Japanese employment system The JES, whose main features are lifetime employment, seniority-based compensation, and enterprise unionism, has caused hot debates on both empirical and normative fronts since the 1950s. Earlier debates were mainly concerned with its economic and social origins. It was Abegglen who first triggered the earlier debates by arguing that the JES was essentially a carryover into the modern period of Japans traditional employment practices.17 Many scholars, especially Japanese scholars, followed suit.18 Many more scholars, however, have refuted such a carryover argument, claiming that the JES is the product of economically rational responses by Japanese large firms to changing business environments and reveals a fundamental discontinuity with Japanese tradition. The debates over the origins of the JES are directly relevant to our discussion, and thus our focus is on these debates. Since the collapse of Japans bubble economy in the late 1980s and the resulting deep recession, scholars have been mainly concerned with how this has affected the JES and its two major components life-time employment and seniority-based compensation in particular. Evidence shows that the JES has been undergoing some noticeable change, though the change has not been fundamental. I discuss the implication of this new tendency for the post-Confucian thesis later in this section. Although very few American scholars support the carryover argument, there are a number of Japanese scholars who endorse it. Most of them, despite their disagreements in many other respects, agree to one thing: they view groupism as one of the central aspects of the JES. For them, therefore, exploring the sources of groupism constitutes the essential part of investigating the origins of the JES. It is traced back to Japans traditional family (ie)19 or traditional village community (mura)20 or Japanese peoples basic psychological traits such as the strong distinction between the inside and the outside.21 Such social, cultural traits constitute the deep structures of groupism that tend to defy historical change. These cultural structures are what make the JES truly distinctive. Scholars of this persuasion tend to argue that the prototype of the JES was established in Tokugawa merchant houses where lifetime employment and seniority played a significant role in consolidating the feudal hierarchical, collectivistic order. Although this prototype is not denied some historical evolution and adaptation, it imprints indelible genetic marks on later employment systems. Tsuda, for example, characterizes the merchant house in the Tokugawa period as the patrimonial Gemeinshaft. The pre-war zaibatsu, despite their modern guise, are seen as the same old
17 18

James Abegglen, The Japanese factory: Aspects of its social organization (Glencoe: Free, 1957).

Takashi Nakano, Shka dzokudan no kenky (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1964); Chie Nakane, Japanese society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970); Kanji Haitani, The Japanese economic system: An institutional overview (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1976); Ryshi Iwata, Nihon-teki keiei no hensie genri (Organizing principles of Japanese-style management) (Tokyo: Bunshind, 1977); Hiroshi Mito, Ie toshite no Nihon shakai (Japanese society as ie) (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1994); Kunio Odaka, Nihon-teki keiei: sono shinwa to genjitsu (Japanese-style management: Myth and reality) (Tokyo: Chkronsha, 1984); and Masumi Tsuda, Nihon no keiei bunka: 21-seiki no soshiki to hito (Manangement culture in Japan: People and organization of the 21st Century) (Kyoto: Minerva shob, 1994).
19 20 21

Hiroshi Mito, Ie. Odaka, Nihon-teki keiei. Iwata, Nihon-teki keiei no hensie genri.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

61

patrimonial community. The post-war Japanese-style management shows some modern traits, but does not shed the genetic ie marks in the final analysis. He further argues that since 1985, Japanese companies have changed to juridical-person communities in which we can view large companies assets as the patrimony of the ie and that this change represents a return to the venerable patrimonial Gemeinshaft.22 Obviously, Tsudas arguments are quite reductionist and ahistorical. Reductionism and ahistoricity are more or less shared by other scholars of this persuasion. Consider Nakanes words regarding Japans modern institutions: It can be argued that the basic system of modern Japan was inherited from the previous Tokugawa regime and that the modern changes of the Meiji period, which appear so drastic, occurred without any structural change in terms of the basic state configuration.... In other words, the wheels of the vehicle had been made long before modernization, and it required only changes in the type of passenger carried and the direction taken.23 This type of structural, reductionist approach to the JES has various methodological and substantive problems. I bring up two of the more serious problems. First, a consistent cultural-structural argument would claim that the main components of the JES such as lifetime employment and seniority-based compensation can be observed from the Tokugawa period all the way down to the present without much discontinuity. Yet, most studies now date the JES back to no earlier than the World War I period. Taira argues that lifetime employment was not widespread between the two world wars, but took its present form only after World War II.24 Noguchi claims that it evolved out of the wartime employment system during the years around 1940 and is a simple extension and intensification thereof.25 There are some scholars who trace it to earlier periods, however.26 Hazama, for example, finds its earliest ideological germ in the rules to deal with workers, laid out in 1893 by the All-Japan Coalition of Fellow Spinners in which the ideas of lifetime employment and seniority emerged.27 Yet ideology is not reality. Gordon presents a detailed account of the historical evolution of the JES, synthesizing all these scholars arguments. He shows that the ideological germ and the early-stage practices of the JES can be observed at the end of the nineteenth century, but began to take its present shape only in the 1930s.28 The second problem of the cultural-structural approach is that it tends to downplay the economic rationality with which the JES has evolved and operated in response to changing environments. This might sound an unfair imposition, since the scholars of the carryover
22 23 24

Tsuda, Nihon no keiei bunka, 161. Nakane, Japanese society, 11415.

Kji Taira, Economic development and the labor market in Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

25 Yukio Noguchi, The 1940 System: Japan under the wartime economy, The American Economic Review 88/2 (1998): 404407.

Robert Cole, Functional alternatives and economic development: An empirical example of permanent employment in Japan, American Sociological Review 38/4 (1973): 424438, and The late-developer hypothesis: An evaluation of its relevance for Japanese employment practices, Journal of Japanese Studies 4/2 (1978): 247265; Ronald Dore, British factory Japanese factory: The origins of national diversity in industrial relations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), and More about late development, Journal of Japanese Studies 5/1 (1979): 137151; Hiroshi Hazama and Jacqueline Kaminski, Japanese labor-management relations and Uno Riemon, Journal of Japanese Studies 5/1 (1979): 71106; and Hazama, Nihon no shiysha dantai to rshi kankei (Tokyo: Nihon Rd Kykai, 1981).
26

Hazama, Nihon, 63. Andrew Gordon, The evolution of labor relations in Japan: Heavy industry, 18531955 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1985).
28

27

62

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

argument do recognize the adaptive evolution of the JES to historical conditions. Yet the imposition is not unfair, provided that they place more emphasis on the political aspects of the JES as a source of Japans economic success. Nakane, for example, argues that the vertical structure of Japanese society has led Japans success, for it is effective for centralized communication and is capable of efficient and swift mobilization of the collective power of its members.29 Extra-economic factors such as loyalty and the like can make a great contribution to economic development but not in the absence of economic rationality, as socialist countries once amply showed. Hence, most scholars assign unmistakable economic rationality to the JES. Galenson and Odaka argue that it has been a completely rational policy in terms of costs and benefits for large Japanese employers.30 Cole regards the JES as a Japanese functional alternative to industrial societies universal need for employers to reduce the costs resulting from employee turnover and for employees to have some degree of employment tenure and internal replacement and upgrading.31 Calling various aspects found in the internal structures of Japanese firms the J-mode, Aoki argues that the JES practices are related to two main features of the J-mode, that is, horizontal coordination and on-site information sharing.32 These two features require long-term employment and related practices because only the workers who are sufficiently familiar with various production processes can make horizontal coordination and information sharing effective and efficient. Although these scholars refer mainly to the mature form of the JES in the post-war period, its economic rationality does not decrease at all even in its formative years. In what follows, I rely on other scholars studies to provide an alternative account of the genesis and evolution of the JES that does not invoke those mystifying cultural structures mentioned above. We can best explain the genesis and evolution of the JES by taking into account at least four factors: the demand and supply of modern labor, technology, class conflicts, and ideologies. Regarding the first factor, Gordon provides an interesting account, focusing on the evolution of labor relations in Japans heavy industries. The practices such as lifetime employment and seniority-based compensation including various fringe benefits that would constitute the JES were first directed against the extremely frequent turnover among skilled workers who came from preindustrial artisan society. Japans artisan society was different from Europes in significant ways: Japanese artisans did not build the kind of broad, inclusive craft networks that could be found in Europe and could control the numbers of journeymen and distribute jobs. This resulted in the extremely high turnover of skilled workers in the early industrial society of Japan. Moreover, the final aim of their working lives was, for the large part, to establish their own small shops. In Gordons words, For several decades, traditional artisans brought not only their skills, but their unregulated mobility and their aspirations into this modern factory [Nagasaki Shipyard].33 They were independent-minded and insensitive to the rules of the modern factory. A more serious
29 30

Nakane, Japanese society, 63.

Walter Galenson and Konosuke Odaka, The Japanese labor market, In Hugh Patrick and Henry Rosovsky, (Eds.), Asias new giant: How the Japanese economy works (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1976), 619.
31 32

Cole, Functional alternatives and economic development, 432433.

Masahiko Aoki, Toward an economic model of the Japanese firm, Journal of Economic Literature 28/1 (1990): 127, and The Japanese firm as a system of attributes: A survey and research agenda, In Masahiko Aoki and Ronald Dore, (Eds.), The Japanese firm: The sources of competitive strength (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1140.
33

Gordon, The evolution of labor relations in Japan, 25.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

63

problem was that the management, which was ignorant of modern labor processes, relegated control over the work force to the oyakata bosses who themselves were undisciplined. The emerging JES practices aimed to hold the mobile tendency of these key skilled workers in check and disciplining their traditional work ethic. In this sense, the JES involved rational transformation into the disciplined modern working class of the traditional petite bourgeoisie.34 Industrial technology was no less important in shaping the evolution of the JES. Dore proposes what he calls the late-development effect to explain the development of organization-oriented companies in Japan as opposed to market-oriented companies in Anglo-Saxon countries. A late developer like Japan is likely to experience the bigger technological leap from traditional skills to the new technology imported from advanced countries. This leads to the bigger organizational leap to more rationalized bureaucratic forms of organization, the longer time horizon for the cost-benefit calculation of personnel policies, and the sharper dualism between the big firm sector and the small firm sector.35 Hazama provides us with another window through which we can see how Japans transition to modern technology transformed Japans preexisting employment practices.36 As suggested above, it was feudal oyakata bosses who dominated the shop floor in the earliest stages of Japans industrialization. They had their own independent armies of workers and were responsible for their welfare. Employers hired oyakata bosses in the form of in-house subcontracting because it made more economic sense under premodern technologies. Hazama notes that the degree of in-house subcontracting differed among various industries depending on their degrees of mechanization: the more mechanized, the more in-house subcontracting. Hence, in-house subcontracting was relatively quickly eliminated in light industries where modern technologies were introduced in Japan earlier on, while heavy industries only began to see employers direct control over the work force from the later years of the Meiji period. This process, of course, involved the appropriation by employers of the welfare responsibility oyakata bosses used to take for their junior workers. Finally, class conflicts and the existing configuration of ideologies also had great influence on the evolution of the JES. In order to be consistent, the reductionist approach or the carryover argument should assume that the establishment of the JES was a smooth process without any serious conflicts between capital and labor. For deep cultural structures underlying the JES must have been internalized in capitalists and workers alike. This is the assumption that Tus argument about less adversarial Confucian culture also suggests. Yet this assumption is simply wrong. Japan was not free of class conflicts. Social problems began to be felt around the time of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Japanese workers then began to organize themselves actively in the 1910s, and the period from the end of World
Dore, too, notes in British factory Japanese factory, 389 that the formation of the JES involved taming some well-entrenched oyakata bosses or routing the feudal barons. Surpirsingly, Haitani and Nakane themselves claim that skilled-labor shortage and high labor turnover was quite responsible for the establishment of the JES. See Haitani, The Japanese economic system, 99, and Nakane, Japanese society, 1418. It is difficult to understand why then they should still argue that it is a simple carryover of Tokugawa legacies. In any case, their economic-rational explanation is overshadowed by their mystifying explanation when they ascribe the strong emotional ties between employers and employees to the JES and rejects it any contractual basis. For this, see also Morishima, Why has Japan succeeded?, 120121.
35 Dore, British factory Japanese factory, 416. This sharp dualism points to another critical problem of the structural approach, for the JES, observed only in large companies, should be ubiquitous in all firms including small companies, if deep structures were really the prime mover of the JES. 36 34

Hazama, Nihon-teki keiei no keifu (Origins and development of Japanese-style management) (Tokyo: Nihon Noritsu Kyokai, 1963), 8088.

64

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

War I to the mid-1930s in Japan was the era of militant labor movements including socialist ones. These points in time were significant for the establishment of the JES. Hazama notes that capitalists and managers began to put forward what he calls management familism the beautiful custom of benevolent paternalism as a response to the introduction in the 1900s of the Japanese factory law.37 Recall also that Gordon and other scholars view the JES as beginning to take its present shape only in the 1930s. In short, we can attribute the consolidation of the JES in the 1930s to active labor movements in this period. Hazamas study of the rise of management familism shows that emerging class conflicts conjured up the ideology of the JES, which capitalists created using the traditional ideology of Confucian familism. Yet many of the earlier practices of the JES were little more than lip service shrouded by Confucian rhetoric.38 Among the main impulses that made the empty practices of the JES substantive in the 1930s were the particularly militant labor movements. Tradition, more specifically Confucian familism, mattered only to the extent that it gave capitalists ideological resources with which to beautify the JES. In conclusion, we can find a better explanation of the evolution of the JES in the interactions among the supply and demand of modern labor, technology, and class conflicts. The JES has been subject to enormous pressure for change since Japans bubble economy broke down in the late 1980s and caused a long recess. Most scholars have reported some change in the JES, and it appears that seniority in particular has suffered more erosion than other JES practices like life-time employment.39 It seems fair to say that change in the JES is unmistakable, yet its main features are still in place.40 Thus, Jacoby notes that On the market-organization continuum, Japan is moving, albeit slowly, toward the market pole.41 This might point to convergence between Japanese and US capitalism. Yet he also argues that varieties of capitalism remain significant, because the United States has also been reinforcing the market-orientation and thus the distance between Japan and the United States remains almost the same as before.42 What does this new development of the JES tell us? Nothing definitive for the moment. At least, however, it does tell us that the JES is very much open to change as it was before. Management familism cannot any longer serve as a binding ideology today in Japan the way it could many decades ago. The Korean employment system Korean society still retains a good deal of Confucian tradition, so much so that some scholars even think that Korea is the most Confucian society in the world today, more
37 38 39

Ibid., 103106. Gordon, The evolution of labor relations in Japan.

K. Matsuura, M. Pollitt, R. Takada, and S. Tanaka, Institutional restructuring in the Japanese economy since 1985, Journal of Economic Issues 37(4): 9991022; and S. Baba, Remodeling employment for competitive advantage: What will follow Japans lifetime employment?, Asian Business & Management 3(2) (2004), 22140.
40

See James Lincoln and Yoshifumi Nakata, The transformation of the Japanese employment system: Nature, depth, and origins, Work and Occupations 24/1 (1997); Ronald Dore, Stock market captalism: Welfare capitalism: Japan and Germany versus the Anglo-Saxons (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Takeshi Inagami and Hugh Whittaker, The new community firm: Employment, governance and management reform in Japan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Sanford Jacoby, The embedded corporation: Corporate governance and employment relations in Japan and the United States (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005). Jacoby, The embedded corporation, 158. Ibid., 179.

41 42

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

65

Confucian than China.43 Hence the post-Confucian scholars would expect that Korea has an employment system similar to Japans that preserves Confucian tradition and whose essential structures are more or less insensitive to social changes. Indeed, Korea developed a resemblance of the JES in large corporations.44 Yet the KES differs from the JES in significant respects. Form and Bae argue that organizational patterns in large Korean firms showed a mixture of indigenous, Japanese, and Western practices.45 Hamilton and Biggart claim that the state was more responsible for Korean firms managerial culture than was Confucianism and that American business ideology had more influence in Korea.46 Thus, the payment system of Korean large firms fell again somewhere between Japans nenko [seniority] system and the western market system,47 and the Confucian ethic of authority had at best only an indirect impact.48 A more recent study confirms these findings. In an analysis of the 1998 Korean Labor and Income Panel Study, Lee and Lee find that seniority plays some role in determining the wages but that workers reach their peak earnings at as early as age 3038, a curious finding that cannot be explained by seniority alone.49 Moreover, it appears that the KES has begun to move rapidly away from the weak resemblance to the JES toward a more flexible system in the course of adopting neo-liberal economic policies after the exchange crisis in 1998. Early retirement has become a common phenomenon among white-collar salaried workers. A recent estimation reports that the average retirement age of Korean workers is about 45, the earliest among the OECD members.50 In Korea, then, lifetime employment and related practices never developed as fully as in Japan, and no sooner had they taken immature root in Korean large firms than they are beginning to be taken apart. Another important difference between the KES and the JES revolves around management familism. While Japan saw its rise in the early twentieth century, Korea did not know it until the late 1970s. The following testimony by a former union leader in his early 1950s in a steel company is very interesting. In my memory, the word familism was hardly used in the 1960s.... I began hearing the words family and home as the 1970s set in. Maybe that happened as the Factory
43 Kahn, World economic development; and Byong-ik Koh, Confucianism in contemporary Korea, In Tu, (Ed.), Confucian traditions in East Asian modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 191201. 44 Ezra Vogel, The four little dragons: The spread of industrialization in East Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Kyu Han Bae and William Form, Pay strategy in South Koreas advanced industrial sector, American Sociological Review 51/1 (1986): 12031; William Form and Kyuhan Bae, Convergence theory and the Korean connection, Social Forces 66/3 (1988): 618644; Kyu Han Bae, Labor strategy for industrialization in South Korea, Pacific Affairs 62/3 (1989): 353363; and Hee Park, Organizational operation and labor relations in big corporations: A study of the effects of familism in Korea (in Korean) (PhD Dissertation, Department of Sociology of Yeonsei University [Seoul, Korea], 1993). 45 46

Form and Bae, Convergence theory and the Korean connection, 624.

Gary Hamilton and Nicole Biggart, Market, culture and authority: A comparative analysis of management and organization in the Far East, American Journal of Sociology 94/Supplement (1988): S52S94. Bae, Labor strategy, 359. Bae and Form, Pay strategy, 130.

47 48 49

Byung-Joo Lee and Mary Lee, Quantile regression analysis of wage determinants in the Korean labor market, Korean Labor Institute Working Paper 6, retrieved December 6, 2003 (http://www.kli.re.kr/30_labp/ 22_work_p/upfile/20023.pdf).
50 Chosun Ilbo (Chosun Daily), Nojo i iljari chikigi wa iljari nanugi (Job protecting and job sharing of labor unions), February 7, 2005.

66

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

New Community Movement started out earnestly in the late 1970s, didnt it? As industrial disputes increased in the late 1970s, they [the government] began inspecting half-coercively whether the Factory New Community Movement was being enforced smoothly.... You mean what about the 1980s?.... I quit the company in 1982.... Because the slogan, My company is my home or my family, was being just parroted when I was working for the company, I dont think it was quite effective, but it must be a total lie to say that workers didnt have that kind of idea.51 Two things stand out in this interview: first, it is only in the late 1970s that companies began to propagate familism; and second, Koreas management familism was not a natural manifestation of Confucian family values, but came primarily from the initiative of the state, as is suggested above by Hamilton and Biggart. It should be further noted that fullblown management familism in Korea began to be in place only from 1987 onward when Korean workers rose up at the heels of the large-scale democratic struggles in June that year. One of the management practices against which the workers protested most strongly was employers highly repressive, authoritarian treatment of workers which has been characterized as the military-camp style of labor control.52 Confucian familism has since been mobilized as a means to enervate the labor movements that have increased their volatility and militancy in some industrial sectors. As in Japan, class conflicts conjured up familism. Unlike Japanese familism, however, it is doubtful that Korean familism has been as effective as wished, because Koreas labor movements, especially in some key industries like automobiles and in large enterprises, have been well known for their unremitting militancy. In conclusion, the evolution of the KES refutes the post-Confucian thesis, maybe more strongly than is the case for the JES. Moral economic campaigns for cultural transformation The post-Confucian scholars view East Asians competitive activism, hard work, thrift, high savings rate, and stress on education as Confucian legacies. Although we cannot entirely refute this view, I believe that many of these ethical precepts must be attributed primarily to moral campaigns and other such efforts carried out by the states for modernization. One salient feature of the modernization process in East Asian countries is that the states launched various campaigns for social and economic development. In Japan, the first major campaign was the Local Improvement Movement (LIM) carried out from approximately 19051925. This campaign was later joined by the Campaign to Foster Peoples Strength in 1919 and the Campaign to Encourage Diligence and Thrift and the Campaign to Arouse Peoples Spirit around 1924. These campaigns from the later Meiji to the Taish period were succeeded by the Moral Suasion Mobilization Campaign (19291930), the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement (19371940), and the New Life Movement after World War II. The Korean state, too, led a number of campaigns since Park Chung-Hees seizure of power in 1961: The Peoples Movement for National Reconstruction beginning soon

51 52

Quoted in Park, Organizational operation, 99.

Joon-shik Park, A study on the industrial relation patterns in heavy industry companies: The cases of steel, automobile, and ship building corporations (in Korean) (PhD Dissertation, Department of Sociology of Yeonsei University [Seoul, Korea], 1991); and Sang-n Park, A study on the historical change of labor control strategies among large Korean firms: 19701990 (in Korean) (PhD Dissertation, Department of Sociology of Yeonsei University, 1992). Also see Hagan Koo, From farm to factory: Proletarianization in Korea, American Sociological Review 55/5 (1990): 669681.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

67

after Parks coup, the New Community Movement (NCM), which was initiated in 1971, and the New Mind Movement in the late 1970s.53 All these campaigns aimed to promote more than one of those supposedly Confucian virtues. Taken together, the nature of the campaigns can be better grasped as the states efforts for rapid transformation and intensive rationalization of traditional culture and society. True, some of the campaigns, especially earlier ones in Japan, were riddled with traditional, Confucian language. Under the Confucian guise, however, we can frequently find radical discontinuity with Confucianism. In both Japan and Korea, the state was the primary agent of such a socio-cultural transformation for economic development. In this section, I show how the Japanese and the Korean state engineered such a transformation by focusing on the LIM in Japan and the NCM in 1970s Korea. And I limit my attention to the themes of activism, work ethic, and thrift among the many discourses and practices produced in the course of these campaigns. But let me first give a brief outline of these two campaigns. An outline of the LIM in Japan and the NCM in Korea Officially, the LIM in Japan began in 1909 when the Home Ministry held the first Local Improvement Project Workshop from July 12 to August 1 with 152 local government officials and local leaders participated. The main themes of the LIM, however, had been already articulated since the years of the Russo-Japanese war (19041905). The LIM in fact started out primarily as what government officials called post-war management, a response to the aftereffects left behind by the war. Yet, the LIM was not just a passive response to the new crisis, but it was also an active drive to preparation for a coming economic war, as Home Ministry officials put it, to sustain Japans world power status won from the war. Such a drive was to continue for the next two decades, with changing intensities. It is not clear when exactly the LIM ended. The last sixteenth Local Improvement Project Workshop was held in 1922, but similar workshops and conferences at the local level continued to be organized until the end of the Taish period. The driving force of the LIM was the Home Ministry, and the Local Improvement Project Workshop was the most important of LIM activities the Home Ministry organized to deepen and widen the campaign. Most workshop proceedings were stenographed for a publication entitled Chih Kairy Koensh (Collected Lectures on Local Improvement). The Workshop at the national level found its numerous counterparts at the various levels of local governments from prefecture to village. Some local governments even published their own Collected Lectures. The LIM was not driven by the Home Ministry alone. It was also strongly supported by the Central Htoku Association (Htoku means repaying heavenly grace). The association was a parastatal organization set up in 1906 by the lead of Home Ministry officials and other influential civilians. Its official monthly organ was Shimin (My People) that aimed at promotion of public morality, management of local self-government, development of education, and consolidation of peoples strength.54 It was published until 1946. Like the Home Ministry, the association offered local leaders and the general public numerous conferences and workshops for local improvement and economic development. It also
53

The Kuomintang government in Taiwan, too, carried out the New Life Movement that originated in the 1930s in mainland China. As a matter of fact, Japans New Life Movement borrowed the name from the Chinese version. The same name was also used for the small campaigns that aimed to rationalize peoples everyday lives in 1960s Korea. Shimin: Ch Htokukai kikanshi (Tokyo: Rykie Shosha [Reprinted in 1984]) 1/1 (1906): 3.

54

68

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

reached out to the local level to help establish local Shimin associations and similar organizations. Hundreds of them were created across the entire nation in the initial periods of the LIM. Many of them were not simply paper organizations, but regularly organized their own small workshops and conferences sponsored by young and vigorous Home Ministry bureaucrats and civilian leaders in the Central Htoku Association. It is difficult to assess how successful all these efforts were. Pyle conjectures that the LIM was successful in establishing systematic links with the leaders of local society and imbuing them with the nations goal and ideology55 and that it set a model for all the later modernization campaigns. A more specific assessment of the LIM has yet to be made. In this article, I confine myself to tracing the discourses and practices against feudal tradition and Confucianism that appeared in certain important primary sources. My discussion uses two most important sources: Chih kairy koensh and Shimin. Let us now turn to the NCM in Korea. It started out in 1970. Its launch was a product of several accidents. One of them was the problem of huge surplus cement produced this year by a state-owned factory. As a solution to it, the government made the decision to distribute free 300 sacks of cement to each of about 5,000 villages throughout the nation. This was carried out from November 1970 to March 1971, but under the proviso that the cement had to be used for community-wide projects such as street-widening not for individual purposes. Additional sacks of cement were to be given only to those villages that met the condition. Farmers response was extremely enthusiastic and very much surpassed the governments expectation. Even those villages that showed no response and spent away the free cement individually at the first round soon joined the bandwagon witnessing their successful neighbor villages. Thus inspirited by such an enthusiastic response, the government systematized the NCM: it made annual and long-term NCM plans, established the Training Institute for Diligent Farmers in 1972 whose name was changed to the Training Institute for New Community Leaders in 1973, and organized the NCM Central Council in 1972, which was civilianized in 1976. To propagate the NCM and provide peasants with various instructions about how to modernize farm villages, the NCM Central Council published the monthly magazine Samal (New Community), and the Training Institute the quarterly magazine Samal undong (New Community Movement). In addition, the national, government-owned broadcasting company, KBS, regularly broadcast various programs about the NCM such as instructions on agricultural management, and stories of New Community leaders and heroes. The stated official goals of the NCM were: first, to achieve spiritual enlightenment featured by diligence, self-help and cooperation; second, to achieve higher productivity; third, to improve rural circumstances; and fourth, to bring about technological revolution in agriculture.56 It is not exaggerating to say that the entire nation, especially entire farm villages, was devoted to these goals during the entire 1970s. Although it is quite difficult to measure the LIMs specific achievements, the NCMs are available and simply astonishing: for example, the total number of villages that participated in the NCM was 355,512, that of the NCM participants 1,125,176,000, and that of the NCM village projects 13,106,000 during the 1970s57; and the total number of people who completed the Samal education by the end of 1979 amounted to 28,571,700.58 The material and spiritual impact on Koreans of the 1970s
Kenneth Pyle, The technology of Japanese nationalism: The local improvement movement, 19001918, Journal of Asian Studies 33/1 (1973): 5165, 65. 56 Naemubu (Ministry of Home Affairs), Samal undong shib nyn sa (The ten-year history of the new community movement) (Seoul: Naemubu, 1980), 678.
55 57 58

Naemubu, Samal undong shib nyn sa (charyopyn) (Seoul: Naemubu, 1980), 17. Naemubu, Samal undong shib nyn sa, 687.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

69

NCM proved to be deep and long-lasting in a more recent survey, conducted in 1997 by a leading newspaper and a leading survey institution in Korea: the NCM ranked first among the greatest achievements that the Korean people reached during the period of 19481997.59 To see how the NCM influenced Koreans so deeply in the 1970s, I relied mainly on Samal, Samal undong, and the works of President Park Jung-Hee who brought up the very idea of the free distribution of overproduced cement in 1970 and who energetically drove and orchestrated the NCM during the entire 1970s. Activism, autonomy, and self-help Does the kind of competitive activism that is found among East Asians today originate from Confucianism? It is inherently difficult to give a definitive answer to this kind of question. Weber argued that Confucianism was characterized by adjustment to a given world and thus passivity.60 Yet such prominent scholars as Metzger, de Bary, and Chang have refuted Webers view on this substantially or even entirely.61 Bellah also seems to think that Tokugawa religion of which Confucianism was a significant part showed no lack of activism, because it was politicized and thus strongly goal-oriented.62 Ikegamis discussion of the way of the samurai as honorific individualism is also an important effort to trace modern activism in Japan back to its premodern ages if not necessarily to Confucianism.63 I cannot here adjudicate between these two opposing views, which I will return to later. Instead, I just point out that the opponents of Weber all tend to focus exclusively on the ruling classes who were the main bearers of Confucianism (and Bushid in Ikegamis case), not on ordinary people as well. Though Bellah does address the extent to which some lateTokugawa equivalents of the Protestant ethic penetrated into ordinary people, it is still doubtful how much they penetrated nationally. What this article attempts to show for the Japanese case is that activism, at the level of ordinary people at least, did not begin to take shape on a national scale until the Meiji period. We will also see that Korea witnessed a dramatic emergence of popular activism in the course of the NCM. The 1868 Meiji Restoration in Japan laid the institutional ground for the emergence of modern popular activism by abolishing the stifling Confucian class distinctions among samurai, peasants, artisans, and merchants. Rising activism among ordinary people was exemplified by the enormous success of An Encouragement of Learning written by Fukuzawa Yukichi (18341901), the most prominent thinker and author in Meiji Japan, who leveled an excoriating modern attack on Confucianism and advocated peoples free, independent, and active lives. Rising political conservatism since 1880s could not repress the general trend towards activism. If anything, the Japanese state, which was striving to transform the backward country into a world power, consistently encouraged people to
59 Chosun Ilbo, Chngbu surip 50nyn taehanminguk 50nyn i 20tae pchk (The twenty greatest achievements of the Republic of Korea for fifty years since the establishment of the government), July 16, 1998. 60 61

Max Weber, The religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (Glencoe: Free, 1951).

Thomas Metzger, Escape from predicament: Neo-Confucianism and Chinas evolving political culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Theodore de Bary, The trouble with Confucianism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Hao Chang, The intellectual heritage of the Confucian ideal of Ching-shih, In Tu, (Ed.), Confucian traditions, 7291.

62 63

Bellah, Tokugawa religion. Eiko Ikegami, The taming of the Samurai: Honorific individualism and the making of modern Japan (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

70

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

nurture and exercise energy, vigor, initiative, entrepreneurship, and any other virtues that the term activism could involve. The LIM was the states first systematic effort along this line. One of the reasons the LIM stressed activism, autonomy, independence, and so on was that one of its central goals was to complete the local self-government system. The organizational groundwork of the system had been laid by establishing the system of administrative towns and villages in 1888 and the prefectural system in 1890. Yet, the new system was in conflict with the traditional old system because administrative towns and villages were created merely by mechanically combining natural hamlets. This was hampering the effective functioning of the central government at the local level. The first step for the perfection of the new local selfgovernment system was to consolidate the newly born administrative towns and villages as the molecules of the nation. And the self-government of administrative towns and villages was to be possible only when people with the spirit of autonomy vigorously pursued their own betterments and actively participated in the development of their towns and villages. The individuals autonomy and vigor would lead to the towns self-government and improvement that finally would lead to the nations independence and prosperity. The term vigor was one of the words that were most frequently employed by the ideologues, governmental or civilian, during the LIM. For example, the first issue of Shimin asserted that national prosperity rested in two things: peoples moral vigor and peoples economic vigor.64 Stimulate peoples vigor became a clich. The frequent use of vigor and other similar words may seem trivial to us. But this must be seen against the historical backdrop of Japans feudal legacies, which many intellectuals and bureaucrats thought were stumbling blocks on the road to modernization. They saw that the Japanese people still suffered passivism, dependence, and lack of an enterprising spirit. The theme of action, therefore, was articulated from the start of the LIM. In the first Local Improvement Project Workshop, Kan Hisanobu said: What is called local improvement must rest on progressivism, and this progressivism must be an absolute progressivism and activism.65 In a similar vein, Nakashima Rikiz after World War I asked people to make efforts for a stronger Japan by nurturing the spirits of initiative and enterprise, saying: The majority of the Japanese people used to have the habit of relying on the government for whatever business they do. This must be a legacy of the feudal age and is a great weakness of the Japanese people. Hence, though the projects the government leads go well, the undertakings advocated by people are inferior to their counterparts in other countries.... If social customs should continue to be like this, people would remain babies all the time and would not stop simply obeying the government.66 This kind of quotation is not an isolated one coming from only a few authors, but abounds in the LIM publications. And the articles of hundreds of local associations established during the LIM manifested the spirits and ethics advocated by campaign leaders. Of course, it is inherently hard to measure how deeply such spirits penetrated into ordinary people. There is no doubt, however, that the disintegration of traditional fatalistic notions such as the idea of preserving ones proper place in ones life was facilitated by the states projects like the LIM and other later moral, economic campaigns. We can find a more dramatic manifestation of activism in Koreas NCM. President Park and his bureaucrats eventually succeeded in channeling farmers initial enthusiastic reaction to the free distribution of cement into a more enduring, fervent activism. Although the
64 65

Shimin 1/1 (1906), 1.

Hisanobu Kan, Chson no keiei, (The management of villages) In Naimush, (Ed.), Daiichikai chih kairy kensh vol. 2 (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1909), 119, 3.
66

Rikiz Nakashima, Sengo no kakugo, (Preparation for the Post-War) Shimin 11/10 (1916): 3440, 26.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

71

NCM began as an economic campaign, the government characterized it as a spiritual revolution as well from the outset. Hence the central aim of Saemaul education was to create a new man: It is essential and only natural that Saemaul education initially is conceived as a means to a better life, to create a new person, or at least a modern man out of a traditional and poor farmer or urban laborer.67 The model new men set by the NCM were men of independence, creation, pioneering, cooperation, and practical life.68 It is important to recognize that President Park had long had in mind the theme of creating new men and revolutionizing peoples consciousnesses. Park argued in a book published in 1962 that modernization consisted primarily in human revolution or modernization of man.69 This was necessary because Confucian feudalism originating from the Choson dynasty of Korea spoiled the spirit of the Korean people and instilled fatalism and resignation in them. The evil legacies of the dynasty included lack of independent spirit, indolence and desire for unearned income, lack of pioneering spirit, lack of enterprising spirit, malicious selfishness, and lack of sound judgment.70 Park urged people first to establish their egos firmly and to participate actively in modernization. The establishment of the ego meant the establishment of independence and spontaneity without which one is inevitably subjected to be controlled by others and compulsion. And obedience, in however good grace and however gentle, would block the process of modernization and democratization.71 He sharply contrasted the virtue of individualism with the vice of Confucianism, saying: Where there is no established ego but only fatherson, masterslave and adultchild relationships, there can be no equality, and no human rights; In the West, modern progress has been made on the basis of established individualism. Without established individual, there can be no modernization, and no democracy.72 It is interesting to note that Park mentioned the Protestant economic ethic or its variants in several places.73 Although the acuteness with which Park criticized Confucianism and stressed individualism in the early 1960s became blunt in his works written after the mid-1970s, the keynote of the NCM, exuberant activism, never waned throughout the 1970s. He had tried in vain to realize his idea of the modernization of man through the Peoples Movement for National Reconstruction launched immediately after his coup. He finally achieved the goal in the NCM. The NCM produced numerous success stories written by ordinary heroes. They were wonderful human dramas in which ordinary farmers, very often women, happened to become village NCM leaders and overcame many challenges which frequently came from villagers themselves opposed to the leaders innovative plans with almost superhuman individual and collective efforts. As evidence for popular activism penetrating ordinary people, I give some of the voices heard in those success stories. Choi Nam-Shik, a village leader, said: There is the old saying ... that heaven saves all the people. We are too obedient to heaven. We do not know how to overcome heaven and make miracles. There is the
67 68 69

Ibid., 686. Ibid., 139147.

Chung-Hee Park, Our nations path: ideology of social reconstruction (Seoul: Dong-A, 1962), and Minjok ui Choryok (The potential power of our nation) (Seoul: Kwangmyong Chulpansa, 1971).
70 71 72 73

Park, Our nations path, 6982. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 14. For example, Ibid., 74.

72

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

saying that those who obey heaven prosper, while those who oppose fall. We ought to overcome nature and defeat heaven, reversing the saying to those who obey heaven fall, while those who oppose prosper. When a drought befalls upon us, let us dig wells; let us block rivers; let us build dams. Let us then bring about ten thousands years of good harvest.74 This may sound farcical, but he was quite serious. In 1978, a nationwide drought befell farmers and they fought it by digging ditches and wells all over Korea. Kim Yong-Tae, vice-editor of a prestigious newspaper, saw this nationwide battle against nature as a new social phenomenon.75 In earlier times, people ascribed drought to someone who offended heaven or considered it already prophesied in ancient divination books, ending up with the resignation that they could not help natural disasters. This time, he went on to say, they did what all men can do. They went into action with the belief that We can do it.... This is precisely what our farm villages today are, armed with the Saemaul spirit.76 In some cases, vigorous activism indeed took on a religious tint. A student of Saemaul education confessed in the middle of the education: Forty nine years of what I was died and I was reborn in November 23, 1977. I was proud of myself as a Saemal leader, but I am now so ashamed of the pride. With the living lessons I acquired here, I will be running for my life.77 Another Saemaul leader even exalted the NCM as a popular religious movement, suggesting that people preach the Saemaul spirit and become martyrs who cry for Saemaul when alive or dead.78 This must have seemed overblown even in the eyes of his contemporaries. Yet, one can find in those success stories a great number of ordinary people who came to reveal a quasi-religious passion during the NCM. Peoples energies and passions revealed in the NCM may remind one of what Gerschenkron said about economic development in a backward country: To break through the barriers of stagnation in a backward country first and foremost requires faith ... that the golden age lies not behind but ahead of mankind. This faith is a quasi-religious fervor and a New Deal in emotions by which all involved must feel the past being broken asunder and the new age coming.79 Work ethic and time Now we turn to the question of whether the ethic of hard work in East Asia stems from Confucianism or other sources. Human beings have always had to work, throughout history, to survive. Hard work is not a specifically modern phenomenon at all. But the ethic of hard work is. An ethic is something that is established when it is valued by the society in which it exists. Labor, however, was imposed on men as a divine punishment for
74 Nam-Shik Choi, Sobakhan kwahak chk sago pangshik i kylshil, (A fruit of a simple, scientific way of thinking) Saemal undong 3 (1975): 5463, 62. 75 Yong-Tae Kim, Mam i kamum l yigy nagaja, (Let us overcome the drought of our mind) Saemal undong 13 (1978):6466, 64. 76 77

Ibid., 65.

Yun-Han Chu, 49 nyn tongan i na wa chigm i na, (Forty nine years of what I was and what I am) Saemal undong 12 (1978): 153. 78 Chae-Ryng Song, Saemal namu e michin chidoja, (A leader obsessed with the Saemal trees) Saemal undong 4 (1975): 114120.
79 Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic backwardness in historical perspective, In Economic backwardness in historical perspective: A book of essays (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), 529, 2425.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

73

a human sin in Christianity; it was something extra in ancient Greece, for ascholia, occupation or busyness, was an extra of schol, leisure; and, in Confucianism, those who exerted their physical power were inferior to those who exerted their mind. Only in modernity does labor cease to be something damned, extra, and despicable and become valuable and sacred. In modern philosophy and political economy in the West, labor acquires its full philosophical, economic justifications. Locke was the first to treat labor as intrinsically valuable by arguing that it was the source of property: since labor is a property in our own person, a property that contains our labor is properly ours.80 He here ushers in the labor theory of value, which in itself reflects the supreme status of labor in modernity. Of course, it is Marx who crowned labor with a laurel not only by completing the labor theory of value but by honoring it philosophically: with labor, humans rise above the animal kingdom. What further distinguishes labor in modernity from labor in premodern ages is the order and discipline of modern labor. Bringing order and discipline to labor requires the reorganization of time. Writing about the fourteenth century when the modern notion of labor time was dawning, Le Goff says that labor time was still the time of an economy dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of charge, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity.81 Even early modern labor before the Industrial Revolution did not break up with such a labor time. Some idle weekdays combined with some other intense weekdays were followed by the heavy drinking weekend. What was true of a week was also true of a year. Thompson observes that the irregularity of working day and week were framed ... within the larger irregularity of the working year, punctuated by its traditional holidays, and fairs.82 This was even truer in agricultural labor that could not use the modern factory system to bring order and discipline to production processes. We see below that his description applies as well to Japan and Korea in the eve of their economic development as to England. We will also see that, just as England needed the Methodist campaign to discipline the working class and throw it in the modern orderly time-framework, Japan and Korea needed the state-led moral campaigns to imbue people with the ethic of hard work and transform the traditional work-time relation into a modern one. Confucianism did not hold labor in general and physical labor in particular in high esteem. It is natural, therefore, that we find lots of fierce attacks on that tradition in the speeches and works of many LIM leaders. For example, we read in a small article entitled Kokumin no kinrshugi (Peoples Laborism) published in 1906 by the Home Ministry: There are still the kind of people in our country who retain the notion that laboring is shameful. This is the product of Confucianism or feudalism: because the samurai were extraordinarily noble men, and peasants, artisans, merchants were humble, mens laboring has come to be seen as humble.... In Japan, what is called gentleman is treated as if he were infirm.83 This kind of accusation frequently led to another accusation: that the Japanese worked less than the Western peoples. Inoue Tomoichi, a major figure of the LIM, compared the annual work days in various countries in the first Workshop: about 300 days for Protestants counting out 52 Sundays and about 10 national or religious holidays; fewer

80 81

John Locke, Two treaties of government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 287288.

Jacques Le Goff, Time, work, and culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44. 82 E. P. Thompson, Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism, Past and present 38/Dec. (1967): 5697.
83 Naimush, Kokumin no kinrshugi, (Peoples laborism) In Naimush, (Ed.), Chih kairy unshi shiry shsei (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shob, 1986), 312316, 314.

74

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

days for Catholics, who have more religious holidays; and about 250 days for Russians who work the least. He wished that Japanese people worked about 300 days a year as did Protestants.84 A village chief in the Nagano prefecture also deplored that even the middleclass and lower farmers usually worked only about 150 days and rarely 200 days.85 Nor were Japanese viewed as working rationally and intensively. Yokoi Tokiyoshi, a regular contributor to Shimin, argued that Japans agriculture was not concerned with an appropriate distribution across the year of labor and suffered from lack of the timely supply of efforts because of the seasonal nature of agricultural labor and that farmers not only worked less than 6 h a day but their labor also lacked substance.86 Yahagi Eiz brought the issue home, making the distinction between premodern and modern labor: ... even if large enterprise organizations have recently made some progress, small-scale industries and small farming still dominate. And though workers working motion does not look lazy but diligent, this diligence (benky) is old-fashioned and cannot be said to be the same as industry (kinben) in a modern way. There is no tension found in Japans labor. Inaccuracy of time is taken for granted. They take a continuous series of short rests even during work time. This kind of people in small-scale businesses is not aware of the capitalist spirit of making efforts for business per se and wealth-making per se.... We can say that Japanese are not modern yet.87 Numerous efforts were made to order and discipline agricultural labor, not to speak of industrial labor. The LIM and other campaigns around 1920 not only encouraged people to acquire the sense of time-thrift but also attempted to transform the traditional conceptions and practices of time. One of those time issues that was most frequently pointed out was the problem of holidays. The Meiji government abolished the Chinese lunar calendar Japan had long used, introducing the Gregorian calendar after the Meiji Restoration. Sundays and the distinction between weekdays and weekend came into being: hence the official distinction between work and rest. The solar calendar brought with it another complication. The traditional holidays and festivals were based on the lunar calendar with their own rationality and thus did not simply go away. As a consequence, many Japanese enjoyed the New Year holidays twice, lunar and solar. The holidays heretofore in our country, thus complained a village chief in the Saitama prefecture, were extremely irregular and disunited. If people amuse themselves overnight for half a month in January, they ceaselessly work in summer and fall.... The holidays are different from village to village.88 All this brought agricultural labor, which was already suffering lack of the distinction between work and life because of its very nature, into more disorder and less discipline. The village chief in the Nagano prefecture mentioned above, therefore, tried to regulate and reduce the annual holidays and events to give his villagers about 40 days of rest a year, but only succeeded in reducing the holidays to eighty to ninety days.89 Ordering the work year went hand in hand with
84

Tomoichi Inoue, Jichi kunren no hh, (The methods of training self-government) In Naimush, (Ed.), Daiichikai chih kairy kensh vol. 1 (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1909), 33166, 154.

85 Yasue Fukuzawa, Jissaika no tachiba yori mite, (From the perspective of a practical man) Shimin 11/4 (1916):1921, 19.

Tokiyoshi Yokoi, Nson seikatsu to rd mondai, (Life in farm villages and the problem of labor) Shimin 16/6 (1921): 1114, 1112. 87 Eiz Yahagi, Kokuminsei no kaiz, (rebuilding of the national character) Shimin 11/7 (1916): 2631, 31.
86 88 89

Takehir Shigeta, Kkybi, (Holidays) Shimin 16/7 (1921): 3132, 31.

Fukuzawa, Jissaika no tachiba yori mite, 20. See also Chji Iguchi, Tzai kokon htoku senwa (The thousand stories of Htoku in the East and West in ancient and present times) Shimin 15/2 (1920): 5658, 56.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

75

disciplining the work day: early rising, no siesta, and early sleeping were strongly encouraged. The regulations of numerous associations set up in the course of the LIM often included articles about sleeping and rising. And just as Christian ministers such as Baxter preached early rising in England,90 nearby Buddhist temples in Japan helped people practice early rising by striking their bells. Emphasis on hard and rational labor could not but involve stress on the sense of time, punctuality and time-thrift. The actual developments of the LIM made this all the more necessary because numerous workshops and conferences organized for local improvement turned out to reveal how little sense of time and punctuality people had: they could usually only start out at least 1 h after the scheduled time! The emerging public spheres only proved to be least public. Hence, Imai Kenkan, director of the Htoku Association, lamented that most Japanese lacked respect for time, punctuality, and prudent use of time because they still retained the long-lasting corrupt, feudalistic customs and were not awakened from the sweet dreams of the paradise. He went on to argue that disrespect for time is the primary evidence of the underdeveloped sense of public virtue and is what civilized nations should be ashamed of most.91 As such, respect for time or punctuality became the catchphrase of the day, one of the most stressed virtues that did not fail to be included in the rules of numerous LIM local associations. The campaign for time was featured by the establishment in 1920 of the League for Daily Life Improvement under the aegis of the government. Besides regular activities, it annually held the special event of propagating the sense of time among people. In June 10, 1921, for example, it stopped passers-by to encourage punctuality, distributed 500,000 handbills nationally, and had elementary schools hold the lectures commemorative of the event.92 This way, Japanese people were asked to respect time and punctuality. There is not as much to say about labor and time in Korea as was the case for Japan. Korea in the 1970s was much more advanced in terms of social development than Japan in the 1910s and 1920s. As such, the NCM does not provide us with as many interesting stories as does the LIM. Wrist watches, for example, were luxuries only a few Japanese could afford in the 1910s, while they were increasingly necessities to the 1970s Koreans. Korea had no need to mobilize Buddhist temples bells to encourage early rising. Yet they do share some common experiences. First, the Confucian legacy of despising physical labor was also severely criticized. Again, Park spearheaded the accusation. In his book published in 1963, he composed a poem in which he said that he hated the lovely hands of a girl reading French poems in a second-class passenger train.93 This poem is followed by pep talks that are full of such words as blood, sweat, and tears. Parks portrait of the girl was to be reproduced as the image of Confucian gentlemen in the writings of the NCM leaders in the 1970s. Confucian gentlemen, a leader accused, spent a whole day wearing big hats, closing their eyes, and immersing themselves in poetical imaginations and swung their bodies left and right.94 This was a typical image of the Confucian nobility, which was repeatedly evoked to be contrasted with a newly emerging notion of labor as sacred. Similarly, the traditional

90 91

Thompson, Time.

Kenkan Imai, Toki ni kansuru kokumin teki kunren to sono shisetsu, (National training of time and training facilities) Shimin 15/5 (1920): 3337, 33. 92 Shimin 16/7 (1921): 701.
93 94

Park, Kukka wa hyokmyong kwa na (The nation, revolution, and I) (Seoul: Chiguchon, 1997), 275. Pyng-Yp Kwon, no title, Saemal undong 4 (1975): 169171, 171.

76

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

distinctions among Confucian gentlemen, peasants, artisans, merchants were also being replaced by the idea that all legitimate trades are equally honorable. Second, like Japan in the LIM period, Korea had long had the serious problem of farmers demoralization such as drinking and gambling especially in their slack season. Almost all success stories provided by the Saemal leaders address this problem. A leader described his villagers on the eve of the arrival of the NCM as follows: the villagers were seemingly simple. But they were also indolent and accustomed to all kinds of corrupt habits and, unconscious of flying time, busied themselves in drinking, gambling and idle talks in the bars whenever they were at leisure. I felt that the villagers showed no sign of moving toward some new realms and were probably in resignation from everything.95 To eliminate heavy drinking and gambling permanently, the leaders searched for community-wide side jobs and businesses such as making straw ropes and raising silkworms, which had also been typical sidelines in Japan. The government also supported these efforts by embarking on Saemal income projects and constructing near to the villages the Saemal plants that could use the surplus labor in the farmers slack season. As a result, as of 1979, 11,520 villagers had been employed in Saemal income projects, and 1,223,000 farm households had participated annually in various projects during the farmers slack season since 1974. About 70,000 people had been employed in Saemal plants up till 1979.96 One can identify such projects in Japan, too, but they seem to have been insignificant. In any case, Korea was much more successful in solving the problem of farmers demoralization in winter and bringing order and discipline to agricultural labor because modern technology was available and effectively mobilized. Finally, the two New Year holidays became an issue in Korea as well. The 1970s saw some debates over the abolition of peoples practice of abiding by the lunar-calendar New Year holidays. While Japan eventually succeeded in eliminating it, Korea never did, because it turned out to be too deep-rooted to be eradicated. We discuss this issue more below in conjunction with the states efforts to rationalize peoples everyday lives. Savings and rationalization of daily life Let us now turn to the final question: Do East Asians high savings rates represent an inherently Confucian ethic? In fact, it is impossible to answer this question in this article, for the question itself is not quite amenable to a precise test and because, even after we can formulate the question in a testable way, we still need to take into account many other factors, such as income, interest rate, and the nature of the banking system to isolate the pure effect of Confucianism. Even then, only a comparative study of savings in Japan and Korea, on one hand, and savings in other countries of different cultures, on the other hand, would produce any meaningful result. However, if the post-Confucian thesis argues that the high savings rates more than 30% at their peaks achieved by East Asian countries would not occur in other countries and that these countries have maintained relatively high savings rates during much of the twentieth century thanks to Confucianism, there are many facts that counter the argument. The LIM, as may be expected easily, promoted thrift and savings from the start. But it is from the closing years of World War I onward that it began to make more intensive efforts for thrift campaigns. When the war brought a boom to Japan, the government was worried about overheating and over-consumption. When the war boom turned into recession, it took

95 96

In-Hwa Lee, Saemal moksa, (A new community pastor) Saemal undong 2 (1974): 1521, 16. Naemubu, Samal undong shib nyn sa, 465.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 Table 1 Comparison of savings in advanced countries 1913 Total Japan UK USA France Italy Sweden Norway Belgium 2,190,108 1,312 17,312,868 11,787 6,401 2,735 1,227 3,882 Index 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 per capita 30.5 28.15 179 296 180 485 498 508 1925 Total 11,432,450 3,058 47,295,801 39,813 35,288 6,268 4,917 17,824 Index 522 233 273 338 551 229 401 459

77

Per capita 135.41 67.18 410 980 889 1,035 1,779 2,283

Source: Kiny kenkykai, Kokumin chochiku no genj (Tokyo: Kiny kenkykai, 1928), 11. Note: The units for total are thousand yens, million pounds, thousand dollars, million francs, million liras, million kronas, million krones, and million francs, for the respective countries; for per capita, yen, pound, dollar, franc, lira, krona, krone, and franc.

pains to reinvigorate the economy by encouraging people to save. In November 1918, the government issued Instructions on Promotion of Diligence and Savings which was followed by A Note on Rice Saving in 1919 as a response to rice riots. The government also launched the Movement to Foster Peoples Strength in 1919 and the Movement to Encourage Diligence and Thrift around 1924. Campaigns at the civilian level also followed. In 1922, for example, the National Chamber of Commerce proposed the establishment of the first and fifteenth days every month as the National Thrift Days. Many institutions including newspapers offered prizes for the best slogans for thrift and savings. To give two examples of the prized slogans: Thrift is money-making that does not require capital; Firstly thrift, secondly savings, and what comes thirdly is the god of fortune.97 We cannot isolate the effects on actual savings rates of all these campaigns. All we know is that the leaders of the campaigns such as Amaoka Naoyoshi, Chief of the Savings Bureau of the Post and Telegraph Ministry, criticized Japaneses contempt for money and their lack of the ethic of thrift and savings.98 And we also have a report from Amaoka that thrift campaigns beginning in 1918 succeeded in imbuing people with the sense of thrift and thus increasing savings.99 His claims were to be echoed in a more objective study published in 1928 by the Kiny kenkykai (The Society of the Study of Finance). It compared savings from 1913 to 1927 in a number of advanced countries such as Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Italy. Table 1 reproduces one of the many tables in the study. The study reported that, although the rate of increase of savings in this period in Japan ranked second following Italy, Japans total amount of savings as of 1927 was much less than those of the United Kingdom and the United States, and Japans per capita savings were well behind even Sweden, Norway, and Belgium. Moreover, it estimated that all this performance would have been seen as even worse if taking into account only bank and postal deposits that were regarded as genuine savings.100 The study attributed such poor

97 98 99

Shimin 17/11 (1922): 35. Naoyoshi Amaoka, Chokin to setsuyaku, (Savings and thrift) Shimin 17/11 (1922): 2223, 23.

Amaoka, Ybin chokin to kani hoken, (Postal savings and postal insurance) Shimin 14/9 (1919): 3335, 34. Kiny kenkykai, Kokumin chochiku no genzy (Tokyo: Kiny kenkykai, 1928), 1112.

100

78

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

performance to the Japanese lack of the sense of savings and their wasteful lifestyle: Japanese are leading such wasteful lives in all the areas of clothing, food, residence, recreation, socialization, etc., that we may have to regard the rationalization of life as more urgent than industrial rationalization.101 LIM leaders already knew it. In the previous section, I briefly touched on the activities of the League for Daily Life Improvement. Though the LIM tried to eliminate the wasteful and unscientific elements of peoples traditional ways of life from its inception, this League subjected those elements to a more comprehensive examination and provided a guide to improving Japaneses daily lives. For example, they surveyed the costs of weddings in several countries: the average cost for a Japanese household with an annual income of 10,000 yens was 200% of the annual income, while the cost was only 8% in the United Kingdom, 10% in France and Germany, and 20% in the United States.102 The League did similar things for other various areas of daily lives including parties, gift exchange, visitation, behavior in public spaces, and even the New Years greetings as well as clothing, food, residence, and funerals. In 1924, it eventually published a comprehensive guide to improving daily lives, Seikatsu kaizen no shiori (The Guide to Daily Life Improvement), thereby consummating four years of their campaigns. These daily life improvement campaigns continued afterward and indeed would be taken over by the New Life Movement after World War II. Japans savings rates reached their peak during the three decades of astonishing economic development since the 1950s. Behind this high level of savings rates, as is well known, lay the efforts of the reinvigorated campaign of thrift and savings after the war, a discussion of which goes beyond the limit of this article.103 Although any conclusion about the causes of Japans high savings rates is impossible to draw at this moment, it is obvious that they were helped more by the campaigns for thrift and savings and rationalization of daily life than by Confucianism. Let us now turn to Korea in the 1970s. We can hear similar stories to those in Japan. First of all, Confucian gentlemen in the Chosn dynasty and their contemporary spiritual posterity were held in contempt because not only did they not deeply reflect upon the practical problem of improving the material life, said Kim Kyng-Wn, Special Aide to President Park, but they also took pride in poverty handed down from thousands years ago by calling it honorable poverty.104 People were urged to practice every possible retrenchment. For example, housewives practiced what was called chlmi chchuk: they saved a spoonful of rice each meal, put it into a rice-saving crock, and pooled the rice of all villagers to bank the money obtained from it. Every month, Samal, the official organ of the NCM, printed an individuals memoirs about how she or he saved money, and the story of chlmi chchuk abounded. It is also in the 1970s that keeping household accounts was democratized in Korea to reduce and rationalize consumption. When the Korean economy faced a recession in the late 1970s, the effort for thrift and savings was featured by an independent campaign that placed a renewed, stronger emphasis on thrift, diligence, and savings. As in Japan, the campaigns for savings in Korea were accompanied by the efforts to make peoples daily lives more rational and scientific. They inevitably touched on Koreas
101 102 103

Ibid., 5.

Shimin 15/12 (1920): 6566. See Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese minds: the state in everyday life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 104 Kyng-Wn Kim, Saemal undong kwa uri i chase, (The new community movement and our attitude) Saemal undong 5 (1976): 512, 6.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 Table 2 Savings, savings rates, and interest rates in Korea from 1962 to 1979 Year Deposits Total (billion won) 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 39.1 39.0 43.1 78.5 120.9 205.9 379.1 619.2 789.7 977.6 1,323.9 1,760.5 2,128.7 2,812.3 3,760.4 5,455.9 7,765.1 9,782.7 Rate of increase (%) 58.1 0.3 10.5 82.1 54.0 70.3 81.2 66.0 27.5 23.8 35.4 33.0 20.9 32.1 33.7 45.1 42.3 26.0 12.8 18.1 14.0 15.0 21.6 21.9 25.9 28.8 26.8 25.2 21.7 25.6 31.0 29.4 25.5 27.3 31.1 35.4 Savings rates (%) Interest rates Date Time deposits 15.0

79

Installment savings 10.0

02/01/1962

09/30/1965 04/01/1968 10/01/1968 06/01/1969 06/28/1971 01/17/1972 08/03/1972 01/24/1974 08/02/1976 10/04/1977 06/13/1978 04/20/1979

30.0

30.0

27.6 25.2 22.8 21.3 17.4 12.6 15.0 16.2 14.4 18.6 18.6

28.0 25.0 23.0 21.0 17.0 12.0 13.2 14.2 14.2 15.2 18.2

Source: Constructed from Economic Planning Board, Major statistics of Korean economy 1976, 1982 (Seoul, Korea: Economic Planning Borad, 1976, 1982).

traditional culture, attacking some Confucian customs and many superstitions. More relevant to our discussion is the states effort to rationalize various Confucian rites. The Park government established a law on the family ritual standards in January 1969 and revised it in March 1973. The law dealt with weddings, funerals, ancestor-worship ceremonies, etc., whose procedures and practices had been long shaped by Confucianism. Its aim was to simplify the rituals and eliminate their wasteful and extremely inconvenient procedurestraditionally, the first son took three years to complete the funeral of his parent and this in mourning dress all along! This campaign does not seem to have been a complete success, however. In particular, the waste involved in weddings still stands strong. And one reason why a movement to abolish the lunar-calendar New Year holidays ultimately failed, as I mentioned earlier, must have been that the dates when ancestor-worship ceremonies should be conducted were fixed on the lunar calendar. Yet, the extreme irrationalities of funerals and ancestor-worship rites have been by and large eradicated. What were the effects on savings of all these campaigns for thrift and savings and rationalization of daily life? Table 2 presents the amount of savings, savings rate, and interest rates from 1962 to 1979. Seen from statistical rigor, Table 2 shows little. Again, we can never isolate the pure effect on savings of the NCM. Yet, we can see that the change of savings rates reveals an anomaly from an economic viewpoint: ultimately, it does not follow the direction that one would expect from the change of interest rates. After visibly reacting to a drastic increase of the interest rate in September 30, 1965, savings rates were kept high even after interest rates were greatly lowered. Savings rates in the closing years of the 1970s even surpassed their levels at the earlier peak in the late 1960s. Provided that the Korean economy deeply

80

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

suffered from the second oil shock in the late 1970s, such an increased level of savings rates can hardly be explained by an economic logic alone. It is also highly dubitable that Confucianism might have been at work here. For, if this were to be true, why were savings rates so low before the increase of the interest rate in 1965? There seems to be no denying the effect on savings of the NCM. If we focus more narrowly on farmers savings alone, it appears that the NCM had an undisputable impact on them. Computing an index of a farmers savings commitment by calculating (disposable income minus household expenditure) times 100 divided by disposable income, the indices for 1968, 1969, and 1970 before the NCM were 17.5, 18.6, and 16.6, respectively. After the campaign, however, they rose dramatically, amounting to 33.5 in 1976, 29.6 in 1977, and 27.7 in 1978.105

Conclusion I have so far criticized the post-Confucian thesis on two fronts. First, I examined the origins and the features of the JES and the KES to see whether Confucianism has had the power to cast economic institutions in East Asia in a Confucian mold. In earlier years, some scholars argued that the JES was a carryover of Tokugawa legacies, thus suggesting the lingering significance of Confucianism in the Japanese economy. A majority of scholars now reject such a Confucian explanation.106 Overwhelming historical evidence shows that the JES began to be in place as the employers rational response to high turnover among skilled workers. Carefully tracing the evolution of the JES, Gordon notes that its true evolutionary story is almost the opposite of what the post-Confucian thesis leads us to believe.107 In the initial periods of Japans industrialization, paternalistic Confucian rhetoric was very often no more than a camouflage to conceal employers arbitrary, authoritarian treatment of workers and to delay the introduction of welfare programs for workers.108 One may say that JES practices such as long-term employment and seniority became regularized as more realistic measures to rationalize the arbitrary, ruleless management-labor relation shrouded in Confucian language. Japanese government officials used to tout lifetime employment, seniority, and enterprise unionism as Japans three treasures. What this really reveals is the way in which tradition is exploited rather than the way in which tradition matters. The evolution of the KES in large corporations tends to refute the post-Confucian thesis more strongly. Heavy-industry corporations such as POSCO in the 1970s were characterized by a harsh, military boot-camp style of management. It is not until the mid-1980s, when a militant labor movement began to assert itself, that Confucian rhetoric such as the company as one familycame to be exploited for a new conciliatory management strategy. Hence, Confucianism did not define the employment system, but the system conjured up Confucianism. Both Japan and Korea have strong Confucian traditions, but the paths of their employment systems parted under different historical conditions. Furthermore, neoliberalisms recent, increasing influence in Japan and Korea seriously encroaches on the plausibility of the post-Confucian thesis.

105 106

Naemubu, Samal undong shib nyn sa, 414.

But see Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity (New York: Free, 1995) for an opposing view.
107 108

Gordon, The evolution of labor relations in Japan.

Also see Sheldon Garon, The state and labor in modern Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

81

In the subsequent part, I entered into a lengthier discussion of the question: Are the allegedly Confucian ethics precepts such as activism, hard work, high savings rates, and respect for education really of Confucian origin? My answer was that emphasis on these ethical ideals should be ascribed primarily to various modernization campaigns driven by the state. I explored the LIM in Japan and the NCM in Korea, showing how these campaigns attempted to inculcate those principles in the ordinary people. Based on this exploration, I now want to point out some theoretical problems of the post-Confucian thesis. We have seen that the post-Confucian thesis often relies upon a certain functionalequivalent theory inspired by Weber. It may be a plausible theory. Yet the thesis misses one central point of Webers sociology of religion: his analysis of the central tenets of a certain religion is always accompanied by an analysis of its main carriers. He argues that a religious ethic is significantly influenced by the social, economic characteristics of its primary carriers. Thus, Christianity could develop active asceticism because its primary carriers were urban civic strata prone to follow a rational, inner-worldly ethic due to their economic foundation.109 Calvinism was an active religious movement whose main carriers were the rising bourgeoisie based on emerging civil society. It was not an isolated community of faith, but was actively engaged in reforming the world. The post-Confucian thesis does not consider such historical processes of cultural transformation driven by certain social forces as shown by the Protestant movement. A reason may be that the thesis is predicated upon the conventional view of culture as an internalized value system. Accordingly, Confucianism is seen as something that has long been internalized in people who are in effect viewed as acting uncritically within its established parameters. Such a static, non-agentic view of culture can hardly do justice to the actual processes of cultural change in East Asia that may explain the regions economic success. Indeed, a great cultural, ideological transformation took place in East Asia after the Wests challenge in the mid-nineteenth century. Needless to say, such a cultural change reached into Confucianism. Orthodox Ching Confucianism, which was extremely rigid and got rid of whatever innovative thoughts may have existed in earlier ages,110 was being destroyed. The first modernizers in East Asia vehemently resisted and destroyed this stifling orthodox Confucianism in the eve of modernization. Yen Fu (18531921), a prominent Chinese modern intellectual, is an excellent example. Schwartz summarized the contrast that Yen Fu felt between the Western thinking and Confucianism as follows: The Western ideas of dynamism, self-assertion, realization of capacities of freedom, democracy, and science starkly confront the Chinese exaltation of inertia, sterile social harmony, and the negative authoritarianism which had dammed up the physical and intellectual energy of the race.111 Earlier, I raised the question, Should Confucianism, following Weber, be characterized as adjustment to the world? Yen Fus thoughts show that at least orthodox Confucianism can be so characterized.

109 Max Weber, The social psychology of the world religions, In H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 267301, 284285; The religion of India: The sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (Glencoe: Free, 1958), 337338; and Economy and society. Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 481484. 110 Ping-ti Ho, The significance of the Ching Period in Chinese history, Journal of Asian Studies 26/2 (1967): 189195; and Jack Goldstone, Revolution and rebellion in the early modern world (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), chap. 5. 111

Benjamin Schwartz, In search of wealth and power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 81.

82

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

Thus, Confucianism has suffered a deep transformation. Using Goldstones words, it has been changed from the taken-for-granted cultural frame to a mere self-conscious ideology in contest with other ideologies.112 It has been degraded from the ideology to an ideology, and its cultural, ideological supremacy is forever gone. Moreover, as Confucianism turned out to be miserably ill-equipped to confront the Wests challenge, it increasingly gave way to modernization ideology as the leading guideline for national regeneration. As Swidler argues, in the period of unsettled lives, Established cultural ends are jettisoned with apparent ease, and yet explicitly articulated cultural models, such as ideologies, play a powerful role in organizing social life.113 The independent causal influence of newly emerging ideologies becomes marked in unsettled cultural periods because they entail new strategies of action and different styles of action. East Asian countries, along with many other non-Western countries, fell into such a situation in the latter part of the nineteenth century. New cultures and novel ideas from the West flooded into the Confucian universe, and it is these new cultures and ideas that eventually set the tone for new strategies of action. Scholars have increasingly moved away from the conventional view of culture as a stable, internalized value system toward the dynamic and agentic view of culture.114 Social actors are now seen as cultural players who can freely use the existing array of various cultural resources to guide their own actions. The state is one such cultural player and that powerful. Hence, the Meiji-Taish state and the Park state were free to use strategically various cultural resources at hand to mold ordinary peoples actions and minds for swift economic development. In this process, some central tenets of Confucianism passivism and fatalism, most notably were entirely discarded and other tenets were selectively used while the guiding light came mainly from modernization ideologies. The Japanese and the Korean state could not quite find quasi-Protestant ethical items in Confucianism and thus had to create them out of various cultural resources. The post-Confucian thesis ignores the role of social actors including the state. One might well connect hard work, thrift, respect for education, and the like to Confucianism. As Wong points out, however, Confucianism bequeathed modern East Asians ambivalent, contradictory legacies: it may have encouraged people to work hard, but at the same time despised physical labor; it definitely respected education, but simultaneously placed exclusive emphasis on the humanities.115 Thus, it is not enough simply to argue that Confucianism contains such and such ethics favorable to economic development. What matters is to trace the processes by which certain social actors deconstruct and reconstruct a variety of heterogeneous cultural resources to establish new modes of action for economic development. It is this deconstruction and reconstruction of culture by the state that this article has tried to reveal. We saw that the Japanese and the Korean state made great efforts to inculcate the ethics of activism, hard work, and thrift into ordinary people by attacking what they thought were particularly pernicious elements in Confucianism and selectively
Cultural frames are the taken-for-granted, background set of values, meanings, and symbols that are embodied in the dominant social, economic, religious, and political habits and institutions of a society, while ideologies are values, meanings, and symbols that are self-consciously offered in contest with other sets of values, meanings, and symbols. Goldstone, Revolution and rebellion, 445. 113 Ann Swidler, Culture in action: Symbols and strategies, American Sociological Review 51/2 (1986): 273286, 278.
112 114 Swidler, Culture in action. See also William Sewell, Jr., The concept(s) of culture, In Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, (Eds.), Beyond the cultural turn: New directions in the study of society and culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999), 3561. 115 John Wong, Promoting Confucianism for socioeconomic development: The Singapore experience, In Tu, (Ed.), Confucian traditions, 277293, 281.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

83

appropriating various ideas of Western origin. The Japanese and the Korean state pursued a profound transformation of traditional cultural frameworks through moral campaigns. The functional equivalent of Protestantism was not given in Confucianism, but had to be created by the states and their civilian collaborators.

Acknowledgments I thank Erik Wright, Pamela Oliver, and the Editors of Theory and Society for their valuable comments.

Keedon Kwon is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of WisconsinMadison. His interests focus on political and economic developments in twentieth-century Japan and Korea. He is completing his dissertation on modernization campaigns in these two countries.