THE ART OF EVASION

Our in-house workers union opened the New Year with a challenge. When, true to Japanese banking traditions, I arrived at nine in the morning to ritually open the vault on our first business day of the year, I found our union chairman doing the honours in my place. He had invited the whole staff to join him shortly before nine, in an obvious ploy to upstage me, and when I appeared they were just dipping into the ceremonial sake in front of the opened vault.

The chairman feigned embarrassment, but his intentions were all too dear. I decided to ignore the insult beyond a brief show of lordly surprise, and joined the staff in their celebration.

The incident was symptomatic of the declining quality of leadership of our shop union. If in the early stages after their formation in 1961 they had been rougher and more confrontational, they had also been more honest in their objectives, and thus easier to deal with. By 1972 the union had gone through several leadership changes, and with pay scales and working conditions having long since been brought up to scratch, they were hard-put to find legitimate issues to agitate over. A more underhanded, sly stance was the unfortunate result.

It occurred to me that in a sense this change in tactics was repeated in the larger arena of the government's foreign trade policy. Although I had long been aware — along with jus t about every foreign businessman and journalist — that Japan was a notorious foot-dragger in its economic and political relations with the rest of the world, I had vastly underrated the extent of the structural inability of the country's system of government to produce the policies necessary to keep these relations on the right track.

True, it was well known that Japanese leaders often resorted to equivocation as a tactic to gam time and advantage on competitors and adversaries. I had always believed that certain functionaries, when confronted with a problem or pressed for an answer, had a preference for evasion and procrastination. Japan's leaders, I had always felt, were fully capable of taking decisions, and if they did not, that was because they chose not to.