On the National Interest and Navigating Decline

The UK and Japan both wear silk slippers, but some silk slippers are more silken than others

‘History is nothing but the pattern of silken slippers descending a staircase to the thunder of hobnailed boots coming upward from below.’

-Attributed to Voltaire

Britain and Japan are the two countries I know best in the world. I was born and raised in England, but I spent the period 2003-2011 living in Japan, speak the language fluently, and still visit for a month or so every year to spend time with family.

I often find myself, therefore, comparing the two countries. Both of them are developed nations with advanced economies and most of their serious problems are therefore those of affluence. They have ageing populations. They have declining birth rates. Their national debt piles grow bigger. They are mired in low economic growth. And their geopolitical status is similar: island nations, on the edge of big continents, who nowadays essentially serve to project US power in their respective regions. Their glory days, domestically and internationally, are long behind them.

They are both in other words societies who wear Voltaire’s silk slippers. They are comfortable, and probably too much so. They have grown flabby, and have forgotten what it means to really have to struggle. The result is that - as the ‘rules-based order’ fragments and the world splits into multipolar disorder - they find themselves threatened by those hobnailed boots rushing up at them from the basement.

Japan in many respects has more extreme problems than Britain. Its population is older (it has a median age of 49.1, versus Britain’s of 40.1); its birth rate is lower (1.3 per woman, whereas in Britain it is 1.6); it has a much bigger national debt (263% of GDP, versus 100.5%); and it is much more reliant on the USA for its security (Japan being constitutionally prohibited from developing the capacity to project force overseas - which Britain still to some extent has). In addition, one could add that Japan has vulnerabilities that Britain simply does not - ranging from natural disasters (a really big earthquake is long overdue to hit Tokyo) to aggressive neighbours (Britain has nothing like a North Korea sitting on its doorstep).

But with all of that said, I am more confident about the long-term prospects of Japan than I am of those of Britain. This is not because I think Japan is on the path to sunlit uplands. Far from it. Rather, it is because Japanese politicians and voters - while they don’t necessarily agree on much - do agree in some very important respects. First, they think that national survival is something that is important to attend to; second, they think the national interest is a genuine phenomenon that the government should take into account in its decision-making; and third, they think that the preservation of a settled way of life is something that is worth defending. None of these things are really true of the UK, and it bodes ill for the future.

Let me explain this through reference to something that will at first glance seem trivial. The photograph at the top of this entry is of a sign that greets arrivals at Haneda airport, in Tokyo, as they go through border control. I assume you can read the English text; the Chinese and Korean phrases underneath it say the same thing. But the Japanese text, on the left, says something different: okaeri nasai, which, roughly, means ‘welcome home’.

The semiotics of this sign are highly significant. Japanese, of course, has an expression for ‘welcome to Japan’ (日本へようこそ or nihon e youkoso). So the decision to use okaeri nasai or ‘welcome home’ is deliberate, and reflects two unstated assumptions. The first is ethnolinguistic: anyone who can read the Japanese text is almost certainly a Japanese national and/or ethnically Japanese, and very few people who can read it, aren’t. The second, much more important one, is aesthetic. ‘Okaeri nasai’ is what family members who are at home call out quasi-ritualistically in Japan whenever another family member returns home from work, school, shopping, etc. On stepping through the front door, the returning person shouts ‘Tadaima!’ (Literally ‘just now’, but short for ‘I’ve just now come back home.’) And then the response comes back a second or two later from their loved ones: ‘Okaeri nasai!’, usually shortened just to ‘Okaeri!’ Every single day of their lives, on several occasions, Japanese people have heard this very familiar and reassuring call-and-response.

Japan, to the Japanese, is, then, a home. And when Japanese people go back to Japan from an overseas trip, this is how they are conceived (at least in the worldview expressed in the sign at Haneda): they are returning home, and it is only a slight exaggeration to say that they are also being welcomed back into the bosom of the national family.

I spent almost a decade of my life living in Japan, and I still struggle to explain phenomenologically what it feels like to arrive back in the country after having been away for a period of time. The best way I can describe it is that it is like lowering oneself into a freshly prepared, perfectly hot bath after having been out in the cold. The bathroom is delicously steamy. The freshly fluffed towels are on hand. Everything is comfortable, everything is clean, everything is as it should be. And I’m not Japanese and didn’t grow up there. For the ordinary Japanese person, the feeling will be a hundred times more acute.

It genuinely does feel like one is coming back to an actual home. But homes are not just places of comfort. What one is struck by, again and again, when living in Japan is that the Japanese are implicitly engaged in a common project - keeping Japanese society afloat. One shouldn’t overegg the pudding and say that they all think of themselves as one big happy family and that there are never any disputes; that would be absurd. But there is an underlying, tacit awareness within Japanese society that being a member of it requires an ongoing commitment. This awareness is the same type of awareness that makes for good family life and a good family home: not grand utopian dreams or political struggle, but simply the shared understanding that there are constantly jobs to be done to stop things sliding downhill. The dishes must be washed, the hoovering must be done, the cracks in the plaster must be filled, the futons must be beaten. Entropy and chaos always lurk; the family home is maintained against those forces.

That basic idea, writ large, is what Japan is like. And it is appropriate to describe it as something approaching a national philosophy. It’s why the country is so neat and so orderly, and people are so polite and considerate. It’s because Japan is a home and the Japanese are committed to it in that sense. They guard their home against entropy.

The corollary, of course, is that Japan is markedly exclusionary. Guests are welcome in a home, but only at the sufferance of the homeowner. And Japan is notoriously strict about who it allows to stay within its borders on a permanent basis. To become a naturalised Japanese citizen one must be able to speak Japanese (though this is technically not a legal requirement), to support oneself financially, and to show an unblemished criminal record and a history of having paid taxes; and one must also renounce whatever citizenship one otherwise held. There is no choice but to integrate on an all-or-nothing basis.

And since almost no foreign residents of Japan are actually citizens, they know, no matter how long they have lived in the country, that deportation is always a realistic option if they do not abide by the rules. If a foreign resident commits a crime, there is a very high likelihood they will have their visa revoked and will be sent packing, especially if the offence is related in any way to drug possession or trafficking. Moreover, almost all visas are contingent on employment; if one loses one’s employment, one does not get access to public funds, and one must leave the country when one’s visa expires (unless one can find another employer to act as a sponsor, pronto).

And foreign residents are subtly but continually made aware that their presence in the country is contingent on their good behaviour and on contributing to the economy. Foreign residents must carry around an ID card (in my day this was referred to in English somewhat amusingly as a ‘Certificate of Alien Registration’) and report any change of address to the local government office, where one’s details are kept. One’s fingerprints are also taken when going to and from the country (a requirement for which Japanese nationals are exempt), and one will readily be denied entry for refusing to provide them. And this is not simply the law as it exists on paper; I personally knew two foreign people during my time in Japan who were deported, one for a drug-related offence that in the UK would have recieved a mere slap on the wrist at best, and one for staying beyond the terms of his visa.¹

Japan, in other words, works vigorously not just to maintain its home in the physical sense, but the cultural. This has its obvious downsides. As a foreign resident one is always aware that one’s presence in the country is tolerated, maybe welcomed, but is not guaranteed by right. And for some ‘foreigners’ - notably Japan’s not-insignificant Korean minority, whose members descend from those who ended up living in the country after having been taken there as slave labourers during the days of the Empire - the effects can fairly be labelled structurally racist. There is a trade-off, and it has its ugly side. But successive Japanese governments - often under intense pressure from outside - have tended to think that trade-off to be one worth making.

All of this is why, for all that Japan faces great difficulties in the medium-term, and for all that I may have some misgivings about this or that policy decision that Japanese governments might make, I am confident about Japanese civilisation’s ongoing survival. The Japanese live lives of extraordinary comfort that to the external observer can seem almost decadent (the standard of living in the average city in Britain is shockingly worse in comparison to a Japanese equivalent, for all that on paper the two countries’ per capita GDP is roughly equal). But by and large they recognise that keeping Japanese society going is an important task, requiring constant effort, and doesn’t simply happen because they are nice. While a lot of economic pain is probably in store for Japan, given its circumstances, in the long-term, Japanese civilisation will endure in something like the form we know it today.

Japan is a country, in summary, in which ‘the national interest’ is not a concept that is sniggered at or expressed with embarrassment, and where it is associated with survival as an ongoing concern rather than utopian dreams. The Japanese are aware that they wear silk slippers, and that there are people wearing hobnailed boots out there who do not necessarily wish them well.

I cannot make the same observations about the UK. It is becoming trite to be pessimistic about the country’s future, and one therefore feels some trepidation about contributing to the general atmosphere of grumpiness and resignation that now permeates the national psyche. But it is important sometimes to try to be clear sighted, rather than searching for fresh or novel observations that are not justified. The fact of the matter is that the country is in serious physical, economic, and moral decay, as almost everyone recognises. And central to this picture of decay is the stark difference in attitudes between what I earlier described as the Japanese emphasis on preserving the home against the forces of entropy, and and the wholesale abandonment of such a project among Britain's governing class.

This is not really a question of policy, or which government is in charge, but a much deeper rot: a loss of a sense that Britain is distinctive, that it has or ever had a settled way of life, and that maintaining that settled way of life requires a project of active maintenance. We don't in other words see entropy as a threat, or even really recognise its existence; we are not serious about social stability or security; and we do not seem to have any conception of ourselves and our culture as a going concern which must be carefully managed and supervised rather than left to its own devices. In our worst moments, indeed, we seem to welcome its collapse. Less dramatically, we take precisely the opposite view of the Japanese to the concept of ‘national interest’: where we think about it at all we tend to snigger or shuffle our feet in embarrassment - or else associate it with trascendant and universal utopian concepts such as ‘progress’, ‘liberal democracy’, ‘tolerance’ and so on.

Two news stories from the past two weeks brought home to me the extent to which this is true.

The first, widely reported, is the astonishing - but, on reflection, not really very astonishing - revelation that Muhammad Qassem Sawalha, who according to the Times for years 'ran [Hamas's] terrorist operations in the West Bank', was not only able to obtain British citizenship in 'the early noughties', but also in 2021 was given a £112,000 discount to buy the council house in which he was living in a leafy suburb of London. Not incidentally, in 2019 he also went as part of an official Hamas delegation to Moscow - a year after, it is worth remembering, the Russian state had carried out two chemical weapon attacks against British citizens on UK soil.

No doubt there is some explanation for all of this that one could uncover - some facially plausible justification why immigration officers and the security services concluded that strictly speaking the legal position had to be that Sawalha could come to and remain in the country and get citizenship, and some reason why the local council thought it appropriate to give him a discount when buying his house.

But this, in many respects, is not really the point. The point is that, to anyone familiar with life in the UK in the 21st century, the real explanation - the root cause, let’s put it - is the simple fact that the country is institutionally (one could even say constitutionally) incapable of even thinking coherently about matters concerning immigration, let alone having a proper immigration policy or clear immigration rules that are rigorously enforced. The simple fact is that the minute one mentions the word ‘immigration’ in polite company in modern Britain people immediately begin to clutch their foreheads as if in the throes of incipient aneurysm, or else become wild-eyed and start mouthing phrases such as ‘dog whistle’, ‘problematic’, and ‘far right’.

It is not so much, you understand, that the chattering classes are in favour of mass immigration. That would suggest they actually think about the subject in a coherent way. It is that they don’t even want to think that immigration might be something that should concern the State, let alone that it might be something about which policy might be formulated or that the national interest might be concerned with it. And they adopt this attitude chiefly because they find the topic uncomfortable to discuss.

How exactly it is that the Sawalha story unfolded, in other words, in an important sense does not matter. What matters is that the British State did not have the wherewithal to ensure first that this man never set foot in the country; second that he did not settle here; and third that he should leave. (As far as I know, he is still here.) And this derives from a complete unwillingness to even conceive that there could be such a thing as the ‘national interest’, let alone to assess whether Sawalha’s presence here goes against it - an unwillingness that permeates every aspect of the immigration ‘debate’ (I use the word loosely) in country. Is it in the national interest that a man who runs a wing of a proscribed terrorist organisation should be allowed to settle in the country and take advantage of public funds? Japan knows the anwer to that question. Britain doesn’t want to think about it, and therefore defaults to: ‘Yes’.

And this segues nicely into the second of these stories, which is the front cover of the 23rd October 2023 issue of the i, one of Britain’s daily national papers:

For overseas readers, the so-called ‘Rwanda plan’ is a scheme drawn up by Conservative Party politicians to attempt to deter illegal immigration into the UK. The basic concept is fairly simply stated: under the plan, illegal immigrants and asylum seekers who arrive in the country will be flown to Rwanda for processing and resettlement. The idea is not to actually do this for massive numbers of people, but just to cut the number of people who seek to enter the country illegally by making it undesirable to do so (the number detected doing this in the 12 months to June 2023 was around 50,000; obviously the real figure is much higher).

Again, though, it is not so much the details of the Rwanda plan that matter, here (or even whether it is justified) but rather the way in which the issue is framed. Last year, I wrote something about the forced resignation of Dominic Raab, the former Minister of Justice, who was taken down by allegations of ‘bullying’. The allegations were absurdly flimsy, but, as I observed then, the robustness of the allegations wasn’t the point. The point was that his department didn’t like what he was doing and found a way to get rid of him - not conspiratorially, but almost as a kind of biological urge. He wanted to make it easier to deport what the law refers to as ‘foreign criminals’, and the immune system of the civil service, detecting this, therefore vomited him out. The form that this took was bullying allegations; it could just as well have been something else.

We see here something similar going on with the Rwanda plan. The simple fact is that civil servants in the Home Office, whose job it is to implement the plan, don’t want to do it. The ‘law’ (they are referring here I think to the Illegal Migration Act 2023) is ‘stupid’ and the scheme is ‘absurd’. And, like Roger the Dodger, they have figured out that the best way to not have to do something one does not want to do is to drag one’s heels and fail to implement it effectively, and then blame the one in charge. Hence, everything is in ‘chaos’ and ‘delay’, and this is all the Home Secretary’s fault rather than that of the people who’s job it is to make the scheme work in practice. It is an open question as to how explicitly conceived this tactic is - one gets the feeling that it is somewhat inchoately volitional, in the same sense that a six year old’s strategy for avoiding helping with housework is deliberate while not exactly being fully conscious. But the effect is the same regardless.

What is particularly noticeable about the quotes on the i’s cover, however, is what they indicate about the way in which mid-ranking and senior civil servants (all fully paid up members of Britain’s ‘new elite’) conceive of the national interest. Note the way the matter is personalised. ‘Braverman’, the speaker says, ‘is running the risk of being unable to fulfil a duty she sought for herself…she made her own bed.’ The implication is that, in the eyes of this civil servant, whenever anybody takes public office in the UK, they do so on the basis of personal political preferences, which they seek to then implement.

But this is not actually the way things are supposed to work. Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, is not in carrying out the Rwanda plan fulfilling a duty she sought for herself. She is fulfilling a duty which she was given by the electorate when, on the basis of the Conservative Party’s manifesto commitment of 2019 to reduce immigration, they voted to have a Conservative government. She is not a tyrant arbitrarily imposing her will. She is a democratically elected politician seeking to effect a mandate that was given to her by voters.

The fact that our civil servants see things in such personal terms speaks volumes about the way in which they think of their own role: not to give effect to what the elected representatives of the people decide, but what they personally think is best. More importantly, though, it gives an insight into what they think about Britain itself. Earlier in this article, I made the point that the family home is defined not by ‘utopian dreams or political struggle’, but by ‘the shared understanding that there are constantly jobs to be done to stop things sliding downhill’. Home life is not in other words political; it is first and foremost about achieving stability.

Our civil servants, it is apparent, rather see British society, and their role within it, as being fundamentally a matter of political conflict - a Manichean struggle between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction. And this suggests therefore that they simply do not really think of the country as a home. They think of it instead as a political vessel. And the implication is that they therefore do not really prize stability, but change. They are not interested in protecting and preserving a settled way of life, because that simply is not how they see the country they inhabit. Where they think about the national interest at all, in other words, they think of it in terms of the political values it represents - and certainly not security and stability as such. What interests them are what they see as transcendent values, rather than the quotidian matter of keeping the show on the road.

Neither Japan nor Britain has a bright future, in my view. In both societies things are going to get materially worse, and I think it will happen relatively soon, and quickly. But the crucial distinction is that Japanese society at least has the wherewithal to grapple with the question of national survival - an issue that is going to have vastly increased salience in future years. My aim in writing this post, therefore, I wish to make clear in closing, is not to argue that immigration should or should not be curtailed (except insofar as the electorate have consistently voted for its curtailment), or is broadly speaking a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing. I have lived overseas as an immigrant and I have family members who are immigrants, so it would be hypocritical of me in the extreme to deny that I have benefited personally from the relative ease of living and working in different countries that modern life affords. My aim is rather to draw attention to this much more elementary issue: how it is that societies equip themselves to navigate decline and ultimately to endure. Japan has some of the conceptual tools to do this. But Britain does not. And this makes me pessimistic about its prospects as decline really begins to bite.

1. It is probably worth mentioning that nobody in my wide circle of expat friends thought it in any way illegitimate that immigration law in Japan should be so strict. We recognised and respected the Japanese State’s commitment to the security of its population and social stability. I suspect law-abiding immigrants living in the UK (I happen to be related to a few of them) would see things the same way if immigration law was more strictly enforced here too.