This book reveals that the manipulation of culture was of more importance than the character of the original cultural stock in explaining Japan's modern industrialization. Thus the features of private enterprise culture that are so often isolated as keys to the nation's historical competitiveness may have been only temporary reflections of this wider process of cultural engineering: a necessary input into the program of technology transfer and late development. This book provides a highly reliable guide to the industrial economy and history and covers a wide ground; it will be of great interest to those involved in Asian studies, Japanese studies, plus economists and professionals in business and enterprise culture.
The focus of this book is on the Japanese economic bureaucracy, particularly on the famous Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), as the leading state actor in the economy. Although MITI was not the only important agent affecting the economy, nor was the state as a whole always predominant, I do not want to be overly modest about the importance of this subject. The particular speed, form, and consequences of Japanese economic growth are not intelligible without reference to the contributions of MITI. Collaboration between the state and big business has long been acknowledged as the defining characteristic of the Japanese economic system, but for too long the state's role in this collaboration has been either condemned as overweening or dismissed as merely supportive, without anyone's ever analyzing the matter. The history of MITI is central to the economic and political history of modern Japan. Equally important, however, the methods and achievements of the Japanese economic bureaucracy are central to the continuing debate between advocates of the communist-type command economies and advocates of the Western-type mixed market economies. The fully bureaucratized command economies misallocate resources and stifle initiative; in order to function at all, they must lock up their populations behind iron curtains or other more or less impermeable barriers. The mixed market economies struggle to find ways to intrude politically determined priorities into their market systems without catching a bad case of the "English disease" or being frustrated by the American-type legal sprawl. The Japanese, of course, do not have all the answers. But given the fact that virtually all solutions to any of the critical problems of the late twentieth century--energy supply, environmental protection, technological innovation, and so forth--involve an expansion of official bureaucracy, the particular Japanese priorities and procedures are instructive. At the very least they should forewarn a foreign observer that the Japanese achievements were not won without a price being paid.
For three years, seventeen university researchers worked with representatives of thirty-four corporations to analyze the present state of Japanese manufacturing and to identify the challenges Japan will face in the twenty-first century. The result of their study is Made in Japan. Winner of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize for 1999In 1989 the MIT Press published Made in America, a landmark study by The MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity, an interdisciplinary group of MIT faculty members. The study analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of American industry and set forth a strategic plan for revitalizing American productivity. Inspired by the MIT study, the Japan Techno-Economics Society formed the Japan Commission on Industrial Performance (JCIP). For three years, seventeen university researchers worked with representatives of thirty-four corporations to analyze the present state of Japanese manufacturing and to identify the challenges Japan will face in the twenty-first century. The result of their study is Made in Japan. Made in Japan has a broader perspective than its American model, whose focus was limited to issues of productivity. The book is divided into three parts. Part I is a general overview. Part II is an in-depth analysis of seven industries: industrial electronics, consumer electronics, automobiles, metal products, industrial machinery, chemicals, and textiles. Part III identifies common problems and makes recommendations for industrial policy. The topics covered in the study are grounded in such fundamental issues as global environmental problems, competitiveness, and the free market economy system.
. . . the book reviewed here will trigger a further interest in this area of research, and will invite more researchers to seek empirical evidence in the study of post-war industrial growth in Japan. Hiroshi Ohashi, Journal of the Japanese and International Economies This book provides a theoretically informed and empirically illustrative account of modern Japanese industrialization. Ozawa s translation of classical political economy to the Japanese context is both original and accessible and is a welcome addition to the literature on the Japanese variety of capitalism. Tim Reiffenstein, Pacific Affairs Ozawa succeeds in extending, building up, and joining the Akamatsu Kojima lineage of this unique Japan-born theory of economic development from a fresh, unconventional, and discerning perspective. From the foreword by Kiyoshi Kojima Terutomo Ozawa examines Japan s once celebrated post-war economic success from a new perspective. He applies a flying geese model of industrial upgrading in a country that is still catching-up, to explore the rise, fall and rebound of Japanese industry with its evolving institutions and policies. The book brings together and expands upon theories developed in the author's work over many years, using them as building blocks for his flying geese model. Concepts explored include: economics of hierarchical concatenation, increasing factor incongruity, comparative advantage (or market) recycling the Ricardo Hicksian trap of industrial production, Smithian growth elan, triumvirate pro-trade structural transformation knowledge creation versus knowledge diversion, the price-knowledge/industry-flow mechanism a la David Hume the syndrome of institutional incongruity, and socially justifiable moral hazard versus degenerative moral hazard. The dynamic process of industrial upgrading is analysed in detail, and important lessons for both developing and transition economies are highlighted. This fascinating book will attract a wide-ranging readership, encompassing practitioners and academics interested in international business, economic development, trade, and political science. In addition, sociologists focussing on business and industry, and researchers on, and policymakers in, developing and transition economies will also find this book of immense interest.
Japan achieved it's present economic position by rejecting free trade theory and instead mastering neomercantilist policies which target strategic industries for development with a range of government sponsored cartels, subsidies, import barriers and export incentives. These policies stimulated an economic growth rate which averaged ten percent before 1973, and five percent since, rates four and two times greater than America's during the same periods. This book analyzes the policy making process, implementation, successes, occasional shortcomings, and challenges posed by Tokyo's neomercantilist policies toward its trade rivals.
