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The Last SamuraiAuthor(s): Gerald CurtisSource: Foreign Policy, No. 151 (Nov. - Dec., 2005), pp. 9-10Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30048198 .

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the Netherlands really did lead to a slippery slope. And they have decided that it is a reform they should have for themselves.

The Last Samurai Shintaro Ishihara's essay ("Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Japanese Passivity," September/October 2005) is something of a surprise. The surprise is not that he once

again repeats his worry that the

Japanese economy is being plun- dered by American capitalists. Nor are his calls for sanctions against North Korea or for using military force, if necessary, to defend Japanese territorial claims against China anything new. He has long been harping on these themes. What is surprising is that Ishihara does not display the confidence he once had that the Japanese public agrees with him. He says that Japan "has forsaken inde-

pendent thinking, and has become

spineless." But he does not claim that it is about to change. He believes the United States has become something of a paper tiger, but all he can do is bemoan

Japan's dependence on it for sur- vival. He concludes rather wist-

fully that Japan may emerge from its futile passivity, but his line about Japan's, not China's, being the sleeping lion of East Asia is

clearly borne more from hope than expectation. So Ishihara, it turns out, is a better observer of

Japanese reality than a lot of peo- ple assume. The Japanese public does not share his foreign-policy views, and he knows it.

Ishihara's major concern both as a novelist and as a politician has never been Japanese foreign policy, but Japanese identity, some- thing he thinks was lost after Japan's defeat in World War II. His main concern is not how to

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Letters

make Japan secure in a dangerous world, but how to make Japan proud. That makes for an inter-

esting and appealing writer, and Ishihara is after all these years still more of a novelist who is in politics than a politician who writes novels. But the Japanese public concluded a

long time ago that he should not lead the country. What Ishihara is saying in this essay is that he understands that better than anyone.

- GERALD CURTIS Burgess Professor of Political Science

Columbia University New York, N. Y

Baby Talk

Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew is rightly alarmed that today's developed countries no longer produce enough children to avoid depopulation. ("Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Laissez-Faire Procre- ation," September/October 2005). But the evidence of history suggests that it is very difficult for govern- ments to coerce or bribe their citizens into accepting the burdens of par- enthood. The first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, tried to overcome the reluctance of Roman nobles to reproduce by enacting stiff bachelor taxes and offering special privileges to married men with three or more children. Yet even that couldn't per- suade the Roman aristocracy to reproduce. More recently, Sweden's pronatal policies, though successful in persuading some people to have their children earlier than they oth- erwise would have, have failed to boost fertility rates to anywhere near replacement levels.

That does not, however, mean that governments are impotent in the face of demographic decline. But bold new approaches are needed. For example, one of the prime rea- sons people historically invested in large families was to secure provision

10 FOREIGN POLICY

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