economic development in east asia and a critique

7/31/2019 Economic Development in East Asia and a Critique

1/29

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 thefirst 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 export-

oriented strategy of economic growth2 are such commonalities. If one searches for a

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583

DOI 10.1007/s11186-007-9021-5

DO9021; No of Pages

1Chalmers 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).2Stephen 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 lateindustrialization 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: [email protected]


2/29

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 ofcapitalism 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 self-

interested.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 andKorean employment systems, there are some scholars who have explained the character-

istics 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.

3 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.

56 Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583


3/29

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: theLocal 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 post-

Confucian 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 Protestantethic. 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 China

s.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.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 57


4/29


5/29

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 moralauthority, 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 toConfucianism 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 aresemblance 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

15

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.

14 Ibid., 79.

13 Tu, Introduction.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 59


6/29

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 ofthe 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, forexample, 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

18 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 asie

) (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1994); Kunio Odaka, Nihon-teki keiei: sono shinwa togenjitsu (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).

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

20 Odaka, Nihon-teki keiei.

19 Hiroshi Mito, Ie.

21 Iwata, Nihon-teki keiei no hensie genri.

60 Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583


7/29

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 Nakane s 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 observ ed

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

23 Nakane, Japanese society, 11415.

24 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.

26 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).27 Hazama, Nihon, 63.28 Andrew Gordon, The evolution of labor relations in Japan: Heavy industry, 18531955 (Cambridge and

London: Harvard University Press, 1985).

22 Tsuda, Nihon no keiei bunka, 161.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 61


8/29

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 leastfour 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 theirworking 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 the ir 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

31 Cole, Functional alternatives and economic development, 432433.32 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.

30 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.

29 Nakane, Japanese society, 63.

62 Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583


9/29

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 traditionalpetite 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 heavyindustries 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 problemsbegan 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

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 Hazama, Nihon-teki keiei no keifu (Origins and development of Japanese-style management) (Tokyo:

Nihon Noritsu Kyokai, 1963), 8088.

34 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 anycontractual basis. For this, see also Morishima, Why has Japan succeeded?, 120121.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 63


10/29

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 theJES 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 Stateshas 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

38 Gordon, The evolution of labor relations in Japan.39 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 UniversityPress, 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).41 Jacoby, The embedded corporation, 158.42 Ibid., 179.

37 Ibid., 103106.

64 Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583


11/29

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 thatorganizational 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 didnot 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

45 Form and Bae, Convergence theory and the Korean connection, 624.46 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): S52S94.47

Bae, Labor strategy, 359.48 Bae and Form, Pay strategy, 130.49 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.

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).

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.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 65
http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/current/tmp/scratch_7/http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/current/tmp/scratch_7/http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/current/tmp/scratch_7/http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/current/tmp/scratch_7/http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/current/tmp/scratch_7/http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/current/tmp/scratch_7/


12/29

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 parrotedwhen 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 full-

blown 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 stronglywas 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 approximately19051925. 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-Hee s seizure

of power in 1961: The Peoples Movement for National Reconstruction beginning soon

51 Quoted in Park, Organizational operation, 99.52 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.

66 Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583


13/29

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, especiallyearlier 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 Japan

s 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 theirown 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

54 Shimin: Ch Htokukai kikanshi (Tokyo: Rykie Shosha [Reprinted in 1984]) 1/1 (1906): 3.

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, Japan s New Life Movement borrowed the name from the

Chinese version. The same name was also used for the small campaigns that aimed to rationalize people s

everyday lives in 1960s Korea.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 67


14/29

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 DiligentFarmers 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 ruralcircumstances; 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 numberofpeople who completed the Samaleducation by the end of

1979 amounted to 28,571,700.58 The material and spiritual impact on Koreans of the 1970s

55 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), 678.57 Naemubu, Samal undong shib nyn sa (charyopyn) (Seoul: Naemubu, 1980), 17.

58 Naemubu, Samal undong shib nyn sa, 687.

68 Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583


15/29

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 ofthe 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 late-

Tokugawa equivalents of the Protestant ethic penetrated into ordinary people, it is stilldoubtful 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

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

61 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 Bellah, Tokugawa religion.63 Eiko Ikegami, The taming of the Samurai: Honorific individualism and the making of modern Japan

(Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 69


16/29

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 townsand 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 self-

government 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 firstLocal 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 ofquotation 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 reactionto the free distribution of cement into a more enduring, fervent activism. Although the

64 Shimin 1/1 (1906), 1.65 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.

70 Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583


17/29

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 NCMwere 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 economicethic 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 individualand 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

68 Ibid., 139147.

69 Chung-Hee Park, Our nations path: ideology of social reconstruction (Seoul: Dong-A, 1962), and Minjokui Choryok (The potential power of our nation) (Seoul: Kwangmyong Chulpansa, 1971).

70 Park, Our nations path, 6982.71 Ibid., 15.72 Ibid., 14.73 For example, Ibid., 74.

67 Ibid., 686.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 71


18/29

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 Saemaulspirit.76 In some cases,

vigorous activism indeed took on a religious tint. A student of Saemauleducation confessedin 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 throughthe 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, throughouthistory, 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

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 Ibid., 65.

77 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.

74 Nam-Shik Choi, Sobakhan kwahak chk sago pangshiki kylshil, (A fruit of a simple, scientific way

of thinking) Saemal undong 3 (1975): 5463, 62.

72 Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583


19/29

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

81 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.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 73


20/29

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 middle-

class 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, aregular 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 forbusiness 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 thedistinction 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 Naganoprefecture 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

86

Tokiyoshi Yokoi, Nson seikatsu to rd mondai, (Life in farm villages and the problem of labor)Shimin 16/6 (1921): 1114, 1112.

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

87 Eiz Yahagi, Kokuminsei no kaiz, (rebuilding of the national character) Shimin 11/7 (1916): 2631, 31.

89 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.

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

(1916):1921, 19.

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.

74 Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583


21/29

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 asecond-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

91 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 Park, Kukka wa hyokmyong kwa na (The nation, revolution, and I) (Seoul: Chiguchon, 1997), 275.94 Pyng-Yp Kwon, no title, Saemal undong 4 (1975): 169171, 171.

90 Thompson, Time.

Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583 75


22/29

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 hisvillagers 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 thepure 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 effortsfor 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 In-Hwa Lee, Saemal moksa, (A new community pastor) Saemal undong 2 (1974): 1521, 16.96 Naemubu, Samal undong shib nyn sa, 465.

76 Theor Soc (2007) 36:5583


23/29

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 institutionsincluding 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 leader

economic development in east asia and a critique

Documents