The former prime minister James Callaghan once remarked of his successor that the further one went from Britain, the higher the esteem in which Margaret Thatcher was held. Having recently returned from Japan, I can vouch for the truth of this barbed compliment. Wherever I went in Tokyo, politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen volunteered profound admiration for the lady.
Among other things, this enthusiasm is a symptom of decline of Japan Inc-the model of egalitarian corporate capitalism in which the Japanese entrusted the management of the country to a bureaucratic and business elite while working furiously in pursuit of economic growth. Today the bureaucrats are blamed for the disastrous economic bubble of the late 1980s and for the subsequent recession which has left a lingering banking crisis. Incompetence has been accompanied by allegations of corruption, encompassing even the super-mandarins at the ministry of finance.
One indication of the breakdown of trust between the business community and bureaucrats is that amakudari, the "descent from heaven" whereby some 300 bureaucrats a year used to join big business on retirement at 55, is petering out. Nobody wants them any more. Another is that businessmen rejoice in market forces. They claim to want labour practices that allow individuals to fulfil themselves, take responsibility and meet challenges.
As always in Japan, these statements mean both more and less than appears at first sight. Jiri Nemoto, boss of the employers' federation, enthuses about labour flexibility and Margaret Thatcher. But he is appalled by the escalating salaries in American and British boardrooms and shocked at the degree of inequality in the two countries.
Other leading businessmen told me they recognised the need to raise the return on capital to internationally acceptable levels. But maintaining employment and satisfying other stakeholders would continue to be overwhelming priorities. None saw merit in the US culture of constant improvement whereby companies continued to fire people even when they were highly profitable.
Japan Inc has often been over-idealised in the west. Lifetime employment was confined to large companies. The whole system depended on an army of less privileged workers in smaller firms that were ruthlessly squeezed by their corporate customers; also on compliant wives, without whose support longterm commitments in the workplace would not have been possible.
The risk now is that the enduring merits of the Japanese model will be too easily disregarded. A system which asserts the primacy of human beings over finance is not to be despised. And enough of the cohesive Japanese culture survives to permit tourists to walk the streets of Tokyo at night without fear of being mugged. You can even wander into the ministry of finance, as I did, without being stopped, questioned or required to sign in. Japan Inc may have ceased to generate manufacturing jobs. But the remnants of the model should not be written off lightly.
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the conservatives tell us that Britain is booming. Labour complains of the slowest average growth rate over the past 18 years of any period since the war. Both statements are true, but misleading.
For a start, Labour's point about growth could be made of most other developed countries. It reflects the general slowdown since the mid-1970s. In western Europe, for example, growth in per capita GDP fell from 3.9 per cent in 1950-73 to 1.8 per cent in 1973-92.
The more telling statistics are those which show that Britain's rate of growth since 1970 has converged with those of its main competitors. So on this and other yardsticks the economy is doing rather well. The interesting question is why the electorate gives no credit to the Tories. One answer is that the British have an equal and opposite problem to the Japanese. A surfeit of Thatcherite individualism, reflected in excessive greed in the boardroom, has damaged the legitimacy of the Anglo-Saxon model.
Boardroom pay continues to increase faster than the general rate of inflation. Share incentive schemes provide large rewards that bear little relation to performance. City fund managers and dealers routinely blackmail their employers into paying them extortionate sums on the threat of moving elsewhere. Anything goes that is legal.
But it does not play well with the electorate. Not because of envy, but because the British sense of fairness is offended. Labour's proposed windfall tax on the utilities is the first sign of the inevitable backlash. In the absence of greater self-restraint in the boardroom, there will be more to come.
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one area in which the models of Japanese collectivism and Anglo-Saxon individualism appear to be converging concerns the use of brown envelopes stuffed with cash. The Thatcher era may have been tolerant of the likes of Mohamed Al Fayed and his client MPs. But in Blairite times, the British public will surely dub them guilty until proved as innocent as OJ Simpson.
