In 2009, after half a century of nearly unbroken rule, the Liberal Democratic party was finally drummed out of office by a new force in Japanese politics. The Democratic Party of Japan, led by Yukio Hatoyama, promised a new contract with the Japanese public and a new relationship between elected officials and the powerful bureaucracy. Yet when Hatoyama went to Washington the following April, he was shunned.
在几乎未曾间断地执政半个世纪后，自民党(LDP)最终在2009年被日本政坛的新力量赶下台。由鸠山由纪夫(Yukio Hatoyama)领导的日本民主党(DPJ)，承诺与日本民众签订新契约，并在民选官员和势力强大的官僚体系之间建立新的关系。然而，当翌年4月鸠山访问华盛顿时，他遭遇了冷遇。
The ostensible reason was that Hatoyama had displeased Washington by reneging on a deal to build a new US Marine base on Okinawa. However, according to R Taggart Murphy, professor of international political economy at Tokyo’s Tsukuba university, Hatoyama was attempting much more than that: he wanted to regain the sovereignty that Japan had lost when it became a virtual “protectorate” of the US after 1945. “Japan cannot be an ally of the United States — or anyone else — until it is first a sovereign state,” Taggart Murphy writes. In this view, one shared by many on both the Japanese right and the left, Japan remains essentially an occupied nation, subject to a US-written constitution and honeycombed by US military bases. Rather like Hatoyama, he recommends Japan taking responsibility for its own defence and seeking a new accommodation with China.
表面上的原因是，鸠山拒绝履行冲绳美国海军基地新建协议，触怒了华盛顿。然而，东京筑波大学(University of Tsukuba)国际政治经济学教授塔R•塔格特•墨菲(R Taggart Murphy)认为，鸠山想要的比这多得多：他想收回日本1945年后成为美国事实上的“保护国”时所丧失的主权。墨菲写到：“在首先成为一个主权国家之前，日本无法做美国（或任何其他国家）的盟国。”这种观点（得到日本右翼和左翼的很多人认同）认为：日本本质上仍是一个被占领国，要遵守一部由美国制定的宪法，本土遍布美国军事基地。跟鸠山的观点相像，墨菲建议日本自己担负国防责任，并寻求与中国取得新的和解。

Taggart Murphy knows his Japanese history. His theories about Japan’s political economy — of which more later — shed interesting light on the country. They can, however, be taken to extreme. In the case of Hatoyama, the author contends that he was brought down by Washington. Certainly, the US was disturbed by Hatoyama, who casually announced in an essay that he wanted to recast Japan’s relationship with the US and China, omitting to mention this sea-change in foreign policy to his allies in the US. But while US diplomats may have schemed against him, to lay his demise squarely at Washington’s door is too much. (To be fair, as well as the Pentagon and Japan-handlers in Washington, the author also blames the LDP, the Japanese bureaucracy, Beijing, Pyongyang and the 2011 earthquake. Only the kitchen sink, it seems, was not in on the conspiracy.)
墨菲了解日本历史。他关于日本（当代）政治经济史的理论提供了一些有意思的观点，有助于我们了解这个国家。但是，有些观点可能有些过头。就鸠山来说，作者认为他是被华盛顿搞下台的。当然，美国被鸠山弄得心神不宁——他在一篇文章中漫不经心地地宣布，要重塑日本与美国以及中国的关系，但却没有向他在美国的盟友事先提及这一外交政策突变。虽然美国外交官可能曾密谋对付鸠山，但把他的下台完全归咎于华盛顿有点太过了。（平心而论，除五角大楼以及华盛顿负责处理日本事务者之外，作者还指责自民党、日本官僚体系、中国政府、朝鲜政府以及2011年那场地震应该为鸠山下台负责。看起来只有厨房里的水槽没有参与这场阴谋。）
The book’s intellectual foundations owe much to Karel van Wolferen, whose classic The Enigma of Japanese Power (1989) revolutionised the way people thought about Japan. In Taggart Murphy’s hands, the crux of the theory is that power relations have not properly evolved from the quasi-feudal system that operated for more than 250 years when Japan was an isolated shogunate. Then the nominal head of state was the emperor, though in reality he was little more than a figurehead. The Meiji Restoration of 1868, which overthrew the existing order in order to protect Japan from encroaching colonialism, supposedly restored the emperor to his rightful position. Unlike in Europe, this was not a bourgeois revolution mounted from below, but a putsch organised by a clique of samurai. Japan, in other words, has never properly destroyed the old order, a state of affairs perpetuated when the US occupation ducked its chance to topple the emperor.
这本书的知识基础大大得益于卡雷尔•范沃尔夫伦(Karel Van Wolferen)，后者关于日本的经典著作《日本：权力结构之谜》(The Enigma of Japanese Power,1989）彻底改变了人们对日本的认识。在墨菲笔下，这一理论的核心是，权力关系还没有真正超越半封建体制，这一体制在日本还是个孤立的幕府国家期间运转了超过250年。那时，名义上的国家元首是天皇，尽管实际上他不过是一个傀儡。1868年的明治维新 (Meiji Restoration)为保护日本免受殖民主义入侵而推翻了原有秩序，据信恢复了天皇应有的地位。与欧洲不同，这不是一场自下而上的资产阶级革命，而是由武士集团组织的一场政变。换句话说，日本从来没有完全摧毁其旧秩序，而美国在占领期间放弃废除天皇的机会，使这一状态得以永久化。
There is much useful rumination here. The section on the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1868) is particularly well done, and there are also many colourful, often acerbic, observations about modern Japan — a foreigner working for a Japanese company, for example, is likened to a rap artist joining a string quartet. The tragedy of Japan, says the author, stems from the fact it merely grafted the trappings of a modern state on to its existing system. To this day, he contends, there continues to be a “yawning gap between the political reality in Japan and the fictions with which that reality” is understood.
本书中有很多有益的思考。关于德川幕府时代(Tokugawa shogunate,1600-1868)的章节写得格外好，书中对现代日本也有许多生动（往往也很尖刻）的评论——例如，书中将一个效力于日本企业的外国人比作加入了弦乐四重奏的说唱歌手。作者说，日本的悲剧源于它只是把现代国家的外表嫁接到了原有的体制之上。他说，时至今日，“日本政治现实与人们对这种现实的臆想之间仍存在巨大差距”。
For the author, this gap explains more or less everything. It is why, for example, there are endless debates in parliament about matters that have long been decided upon behind closed doors. It is why it took a foreigner, unfamiliar with honour codes, to blow the whistle on the fictional accounts at Olympus. It is also why the salaryman can believe he is “a soldier for a cause” but can also recognise that ultimately he is an “exploited cog in a faceless, industrial machine”.
在作者看来，这种差距几乎可以解释一切。例如，它解释了为什么议会要对早已秘密决定的事情进行无休止的辩论。它也解释了为什么举报奥林巴斯(Olympus)账目造假的是一个不熟悉日本荣誉守则的外国人，以及为什么一个工薪族既可以相信自己是“献身事业的士兵”，也可以承认自己最终是“千篇一律的工业机器上一颗被剥削的螺丝钉”。
This latter example reveals the author’s propensity to see in every facet of modern Japan the ghosts of an unreconstructed past. The alienation of labour he describes could apply equally to almost anywhere. Similarly, many other features of the country, from teenage fashion to sexual relations, are shoehorned into an overarching theory with sometimes illuminating or far-fetched consequences.
后面那个例子显示出，作者倾向于认为，那段未得到重建的历史的幽灵存在于现代日本的方方面面。他所描述的劳动异化(alienation of labour)可能同样适用于几乎任何地方。类似地，这个国家的许多其他特征（从青少年时尚到两性关系）都被硬塞进一个包罗一切的理论中，得出的结论有时发人深省，有时有些牵强。
Shinzo Abe, the nationalist prime minister, becomes yet another throwback — one of the “vampires” from the darkest period of Japan’s history, in Taggart Murphy’s description. For this sorry state of affairs, the author concludes, Washington has only itself to blame. It “cavalierly” destroyed Japan’s best hope of revamping its political system and of repairing poisonous relations with China. Yet this is to credit the Democratic Party of Japan with a revolutionary agenda that it simply did not possess. It is also to depict modern Japan, for all its many faults, in too unrelentingly gloomy a light.
日本的民族主义首相安倍晋三(Shinzo Abe)则成为另一大倒退的象征——用墨菲的话来说，他是来自日本历史中最黑暗时期的“吸血鬼”之一。对于这种糟糕的状态，作者认为，华盛顿只能怪它自己：美国“傲慢地”摧毁了日本改造其政治体制以及修复糟糕的日中关系的最好机会。然而，作者这样说相当于认为日本民主党有一份革命议程，但实际上它根本没有。此外，尽管现代日本存在种种缺陷，但作者这样说也未免过于无情和悲观，没有公允地反映现代日本的真实面貌。
Japan and the Shackles of the Past, by R Taggart, Murphy OUP USA RRP£20/RRP$29.95, 472 pages
《日本及其历史枷锁》(Japan and the Shackles of the Past)，R•塔格特•墨菲著，牛津大学出版社美国部(OUP USA)出版，建议零售价20英镑或29.95美元，472页
David Pilling is the FT’s Asia editor and author of ‘Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival’ (Allen Lane)
注：戴维•皮林(David Pilling)是英国《金融时报》亚洲版主编，著有《弯折逆境：日本与生存艺术》(Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival)，由艾伦莱恩出版社(Allen Lane)出版。