What ever happened to the MFP?
End of the ride on Japan's dream machine
"It is the image of a hill. At the top is standing the statue of Plato. In the middle of the hill there is the statue of Archimedes and at the foot of the hill are statues of Mercury and Bacchus."
No, not the ancient Athens town planner workshopping the Acropolis. Such was the image of the Multi-Function Polis (MFP) according to Naohiro Amaya, leader of the Japanese delegation, in a speech to the first MFP joint steering committee in September 1988.
"I must admit that this image is my idealistic dream", Amaya continue. "No doubt there is a gap between the reality and the dream>"
The gap was bigger than anyone imagined. The MFP was on shaky ground well before the yen bubble deflated earlier this year, and even before the swampy, polluted site outside Adelaide was chosen for the futuristic city.
In a more pragmatic moment, Amaya told Barry Jones, then Australia's minister for science, customs and small business, the MFP should be "a combination of Cote d'Azur, Geneva and Tsukuba", the latter a Japanese "technopolis" and prototype of the MFP plans.
Jones replied light-heartedly and betrayed Australia's uncertainty: "You mean a kind of Tsukuba with surf?" Amaya agreed. But his dream had already begun dissolving into irreconcilable differences between Japan and Australia over the purpose of the project.
Despite some %25 million of public money spent already and Prime Minister Paul Keating's pledge as late as February of another $40 million to get the project off the ground, the MFP has all but sunk.
The "basic concept" of Japan's Ministry of
International Trade and Industry (MITI) foresaw two main types of activities for the futuristic city: high-tech industries and research and "high-
touch" resort, convention and conference services.
Deciphering just what the MFP would do, and how, beyond that is difficult amidst the heady rhetoric that piled up as quickly as the bills. MITI and its opposite number here, the Commonwealth Department of Industry, Technology and Commerce (DITAC) did, however, agree that new materials and rare metals, biotechnology and computer software could be core products of the MFP.
This was a good start for Australia towards sophisticated manufacturing supported by service industries. A big hit of predominantly Japanese high technology would, in theory, raise our international profile and encourage more of such investment to better our export performance and create more jobs. In short, Japanese altruism would lift us off the sheep's back and into the information age.
But two years into discussions, the assistant secretary of DITAC's Japan branch, Rod Brown, candidly admitted in June 1989 that Japan's main objectives were to break down its isolation and expose prospective Japanese MFP residents to "new and different lifestyle alternatives".
The Japanese and Australian objectives were, conceded Brown, basically opposites. Industry investment and research were low on Japan's agenda partly because of its gloomy assessment of the manufacturing climate in Australia and partly because of the faster return from investments in Australian tourism and real estate. Japanese high-tech industries were concentrating almost exclusively on the European Community, the US and South-East Asia, making no move to set up shop in Australia.
Instead, it was Japan's resort and construction companies which showed great interest in the MFP. This was little wonder considering the project's
pre-feasibility study was conducted by the Leisure Development Unit of MITI.
MITI's "basic concept" paper spoke of the MFP as "as a place of providing, gathering and reproducing information of diverse aspects, strata and form, as well as for relaxation, comfort, surprise, joy, entertainment and intellectual stimulation" for up to 80,000 Japanese residents.
Australia's sights were on wholesale transformation of our industrial base. ANU Professor of Japanese History Gavan McCormack notes that Australian negotiators were "notably slow to warm to the high touch or resort elements of the Japanese vision".
But few seemed to realise that the MITI proposal was merely the head of steam on the Japanese land and construction boom, involving massive real estate investment here and in Japan. Japan's ideas for the MFP could not be easily redefined. In Australia, resorts were already a proven money spinner. Therefore, Japan was, in more ways than one, down in the dumps when the site near Adelaide was chosen over the sunny Gold Coast.
Australian technocrats did their best to disregard the conflicting interests. They argued that several core functions — in centres ranging from biomedical industries and health care to future technologies to international cultural environment and lifestyle — would rally a "critical mass" of research and industry potential. This might, at least, augment our comparative advantage in service and professional industries.
Meanwhile, think-tanks rallied under the auspices of MFP Australia Research. With a membership fee of $10,000, they were hardly grassroots organisations. They tried hard to fulfil both Japan's and Australia's economic needs, but their ideas were rarely attractive to Japan's resort, real estate and construction businesses. Neither would they transform Australia's industrial base.
Still, it seemed the dawn of a brave new world. One group suggested nuclear and chemical waste disposal for international clients. Another considered a monitoring and surveillance industry which, amongst other products, would develop surgically implanted monitoring devices for early release prisoners or people with dangerous diseases.
A slick public relations machine was set in motion "to control the consciousness of [Australian] public and related organisations very carefully", according to a minute translated by Professor McCormack from the second joint steering committee meeting in Tokyo in April 1989. "There will have to be ... a sense on the part of the Australian State, individuals and regions which will be affected by [the MFP] that it will be very beneficial to them", the minute continued.
The MFP, says McCormack, began to take on the questionable virtues of a cargo cult, a modern millenarian movement with a vision of "a 21st century unalienated community, transcending contradictions of race and class and full of joy and creativity".
PR videos flashed outlines of high speed monorails weaving through glass-covered pyramids, metallic domes and iridescent spheres. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, associate professor of economic history at the University of New England, notes the powerful subliminal message: "Technology is a ... superhuman force which is about to descend into our society and in some unexplained way, redeem the Australian economy".
But to the MITI philosophers, redemption would come rather by synthesising the strengths of each era of history in a "City of the Fifth Sphere." The previous four spheres ran in a spurious time line from the middle ages to the present. Says Paul James, editor of the book Technocratic Dreaming, the MFP rhetoric moved "uneasily between nostalgia for prior [societal] forms and technocratic dreaming of a high tech Tomorrow Land". Renaissance cities were invoked
because they "encouraged human discourse and encounter". The pertinent point, says James is that "intellectual work is privileged over manual". The Greek polis remembered by Amaya and others was a small city where the luxury of free time and philosophy for the few was made possible by an ocean of slaves.
The Japanese vision was also informed by a free and easy, last-frontier image of Australia — the same image that Australian MFP lobbyists were desperately trying to shed. It was an image that translated readily into dollars and cents. MITI's MFP paper noted that "acquisition of extensive land is relatively easy due to the scarcity of regulations on development projects ... and extremely low prices".
Highly paid joint consultants Anderson-Kinhill were hired to firm up what was meant to be a commercially driven project but what, on latest estimates, would cost business and the public $2 billion before it reached its uncertain potential.
Using the consultants' own calculations, Ed Kaptein and K.D. Thomas, from La Trobe University's economics faculty, estimate that the MFP would more likely worsen Australia's balance of payments than improve it. But the euphoria continued.
Anderson-Kinhill portrayed the project as an "articulate environment", "exhibiting the formal qualities of Vitality, Responsiveness and Intelligence". They attempted to reconcile the Japanese and Australian perspectives by introducing the concept of the biosphere, which in MFP-speak meant the integration and sensitive use of the environment for profit, pleasure and protection research. This became central to the Adelaide plans, despite the state of the biosphere at the chosen site.
The biosphere focus reduced the prospects for wholesale Japanese tourism and real estate development. But it also further reduced the prospects for Australia's manufacturing revolution. At one point, Commonwealth,
State and Territory officials considered dismissing Arthur Anderson and Company because their ideas lacked focus on hard-cash industries.
The similarities in the consultants' plans to "Green City", "Intelligent City" and "Sunshine City", already dotting the Japanese landscape, are no coincidence. McCormack says these cities, also planned for beauty, love and happiness, embody a myth of transcendent social harmony that runs deep in modern Japanese history.
Utopian exaltations of Japan's virtuous and single-minded "family state", blessed with a millenarian mission to further harmonious Asian co-prosperity, are common. Says McCormack: "The current wave of utopianism in Japan draws on both these traditional forms, projecting them ... into various schemes for linking hands across the Pacific to create a harmonious hi-tech 21st century; within such a scheme the MFP occupies a strategic location". Its geographic location, originally mooted for the Gold Coast, in fact meant a high-touch rather than high-tech focus was more appropriate. But, says McCormack, such is Japan's search for "identity, meaning and mission", fed by an unprecedented concentration of wealth and technical resources.
The myths and the mission mask a reality of social injustice, corruption, Pacific aggression up to the end of World War II and ongoing environmental destruction, according to McCormack. While only 44% of Japanese households are connected to sewer systems, Japanese captains of industry plan to dam the Congo River to create artificial lakes in Central Africa, amongst other massive infrastructure projects at home and abroad. The MFP is no passing phase.
McCormack says the construction industry has played a role in postwar Japanese political economy analogous with the military-industrial sector in the USA as a major employer and outlet for capital investment. In fact, many local critics of Japanese development refer to their country as the "construction state".
Allegations of corruption in the real estate and construction business are rife. The generic term "gumi", as in Kumagai Gumi, by which construction companies are known today, is also the term for gangster syndicates.
Japan now has 26 designated technopolises, 19 of which have been built or are under construction. They spring from a similar logic to the MFP plans here — Japan's need in the early 1980s to develop an advanced and diversified technology base.
But, says Tessa Morris-Suzuki, the idea that Japan's technological dynamism is the result of such government priming is overestimated and overlooks historical developments that precede the first technopolis by decades. Further, these super cities were showing signs of failing to fulfil their promise and were being questioned by Japanese and overseas observers just as the Australian government began to embrace the concept as the solution to Australia's economic woes.
Most Japanese technopolises impose a massive burden on local government finances to develop the sites, while returns from taxes are often minimal. Kunamoto, often singled out as a technopolis success story, attracted only eight high tech companies, offering 350 jobs, from 1984 to 1987.
The other main motive for the technopolis was social damage control: to ease pressure on Japan's overcrowded cities and overworked labour force. Property speculation in Japan has forced central city real estate prices out of reach of all but big corporations and their wealthy tenants. An average new apartment in central Tokyo costs 17 times the average annual salary; the average size of a new rental unit had fallen below 50 square metres by the mid-1980s. Workers are commuting further and further to work. The technopolis plan was meant to decentralise on a massive scale.
But the new cities threw up their own problems. A particular form of stress brought on by boredom and alienation became known as the Tsukuba Syndrome.
Tsukuba, the technopolis, recently had the highest suicide rate in Japan.
Says Morris-Suzuki: "All the evidence suggests that the main demands of Japanese consumers today are not for further gadgetry ... but rather for increased leisure and living space".
Relief was then offered in the form of resorts. Yet this trend too had its roots in the Japanese land boom, in construction and control of development and wealth in the hands of a few.
Following the Resort Law passed in 1987, more of Japan's land is to be devoted to resorts than to agriculture, says McCormack. Whereas Japan had 100 golf courses in 1955, when the 2085 in existence or under construction are completed, it will have 170,000 hectares, or 0.54% of its land devoted to golf.
The Australian MFP plans grew from the same ideological roots and development pattern as that in Japan. It was sold in similar terms and was to be funded by the same real estate capital. Indeed, it would generate more of this capital. The bulk of Japanese investment now in Australia is in property.
Though the heat is down slightly since the recent Japan share market shake-out, by 1988 Japanese investment in hotel projects alone, concentrated in Sydney and Queensland, had reached $5 billion. In January 1989 Japanese interests offered, unsuccessfully, to buy all the private golf courses in the Sydney area.
By the mid-1980s Japan had become the third largest foreign investor in Australia with $21 billion, after the USA with $31 billion and the UK with $29 billion.
Whereas previously Japanese investment was in resources and manufacturing, the big increase in the past decade has been in real estate. By 1991, Japanese investment was 90% in real estate and tourism and only 2.8% in manufacturing. US and UK investment were
both around 60% in manufacturing, according to McCormack.
Masayuki Sasaki, associate professor of economics at Kanazawa University, says Japanese big business came to see Australia "as a place that tourism, resort capital, real estate and construction business could 'mow over' with land buy-ups, speculation and resort development".
Says Yoshio Sugimoto, professor of sociology at La Trobe University: "For the construction industry, the tourism industry and the financial institutions of Japan, Australia provides attractive opportunities, and the MFP in particular would guarantee the consolidation and expansion of Japan's mega-corporations in Australia".
Professor Morris-Suzuki believes "the whole MFP project has been inspired by a misreading and misapplication of the Japanese model of technological development". To Professor Sasaki, it "was carried forward with notions of 'high tech' and 'resort' not only remaining parallel but actually in basic contradiction."
Never questioned was why any corporation, Japanese or otherwise, would want to pass its secrets to competitors in a high-tech transfer free-for-all.
Shinobu Ohe, professor of social history at Ibaraki University in Japan, says categorically: "MITI dislikes the transfer of Japan's high technology to other countries ... the Japanese government has no conception of the MFP as a high-technology research city."
"What it amounted to", says Sasaki, "was a non-residential city which Japanese people would visit in a leisure mood to engage in research and development or recurrent education".
Pure naivety sometimes seems the only way to explain Australian errors of judgment over the MFP. But
the secretive planning and decision-making exemplified by the MFP Australia Research think-tanks also served to protect the project from wide-ranging debate.
If secrecy was meant to minimise the anti-Asian backlash, it backfired. It left the issues of technology and Japan "surrounded by a dense fog of myth, mistrust and misunderstanding", says Morris-Suzuki. Most Australians still have no perception what was to be their super city.
While the businesses and technocrats in on discussions mystified the MFP to sci-fi proportions, the Australian public seized on the prospect of a Japanese enclave. The opposition leader at the time, Andrew Peacock, declared his absolute opposition to the project on these grounds during the 1990 election campaign, and only later couched his objections in terms of economic unviability.
The fear-mongering overlooked the fact that there are not 80,000 people in Japan wanting to migrate to Australia, according to Morris-Suzuki, and that a more substantial problem might be the creation of an elitist enclave, producing little of benefit to the bulk of Australians while soaking up much needed resources.
While the Federal Government this year committed new funding to the MFP, a report arising from a Japanese investment mission here said the project "remains at the stage of dream". In the understatement of the year, the mission believed the swampy Adelaide site holds little attraction for investors.
[Many of the quotations in this article are taken from Professor McCormack's book Bonsai Australia Banzai.]