Think Global, Campaign Local

The meeting was held downtown in a large municipal auditorium. Ohmae stood on a huge stage in front of a banner that read, "Now is the Time to Act." Without notes, or breaking to take a drink of water, or pausing in any manner, he spoke in an even monotone for an hour and 40 minutes.

For all the words he poured forth, nothing was more revealing than what Ohmae didn't say. The principal force generating interest in Ohmae's organization is public disgust with the corruption of Japanese politics. But Ohmae was more than an hour into his speech before he raised the subject of political reform. (Electoral reform by itself, he told me later, "is bullshit...it's not even worth talking about.") His real target was more ambitious: to argue that the basic structures of Japanese society are obsolete under the new rules of global competition.

This is an argument Ohmae has honed for years in books like The Borderless World. He contends that centralized governments are losing not only their ability but also their need to direct national economies. In a world of global capital, where surging flows of trade and investment are creating dense regional economies that transcend national borders, it is folly to think that the center can steer an entire nation. Only an open door to the corporations and innovators who spread prosperity can guarantee long-term economic vitality - and security.

In other tongues, as expressed by other thinkers, these ideas are entering the bloodstream of countries around the globe. But Japan - Ohmae's home base - has been almost entirely immune to them. The national government's direct authority over business may have diminished in the past two decades, but the ministries in Tokyo still subtly guide corporate decisions, maintain thickets of obstruction to foreign products, and leave little freedom for local officials even to locate a bus stop.

"Success is its own enemy," he told me. "Once you succeed, you want to keep repeating. But the world has changed. Japanese success was as a developing country, centrally controlled, no waste, everyone obeys. That is a fantastic system as a developing country. But it is one hell of a problem for the world. These guys [running the country] don't listen to the world. They don't even see it."

Applying his analysis to the dense grid of Japan, Ohmae produces an agenda that is the political equivalent of reengineering a corporation. Under his plan, almost all of the power now held by the central government would be dispersed to 11 new semi-autonomous regional governments. MITI and the Ministry of Finance, the most powerful arms of the central bureaucracy, would be boarded up. The latticework of protection that disadvantages foreign products would be dismantled. The ban on imported rice would be lifted, and the rice farms that now incongruously consume large chunks of land on the edges of land-starved Tokyo would be paved over for new housing.

Because Kenichi Ohmae's ideas would cause thousands of painful dislocations in existing patterns of Japanese life, most politicians dismiss his quest as quixotic. Many of them dismiss Ohmae himself as arrogant and dogmatic, not to mention a bit of a coward for not running for office. I mentioned Ohmae's name to a senior LDP member considered sympathetic to reform, and he responded with a withering blast of disdain. "Ohmae is approaching politics as a typical consultant, wanting to remain on the sidelines and tell others what to do rather than taking on the hard tasks himself. If it goes wrong, he could say that the CEO, or in this case the politicians, didn't follow his brilliant advice."

That criticism seems to me overwrought. Just by starting his group, Ohmae has opened an important new political front in Japan - and perhaps beyond.

Indeed, for the United States, Ohmae's agenda would spell an end to the drowsy continuity of the past three decades. Like many Japanese reformers, Ohmae takes a nationalistic "don't tread on me" line. He labels the Clinton cabinet second-rate, dismisses US concerns about the trade deficit as "an illusion," and notes with disdain how quickly American politicians scapegoat Japan. He wants to "become an equal partner with America. We will no longer be in a situation where we are told, `You do this, you do that.'"

There is an irony to Ohmae's bristling, of course. Though critical of America, Ohmae and the reformers he has influenced are urging on Japanese society many of the same changes the United States has proposed. A Japan shaped by Ohmae's ideas would be less deferential in expressing its disagreements with the United States. But in the long run, it would probably have fewer disagreements to express.

Ronald Brownstein, national political correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, recently completed three months in Japan as a Japan Society US-Japan Leadership Fellow.