This book attempts a coherent portrait of the heart of Japan's economic and political decision making. It presents the men occupying the core positions in Japan's ruling party, the central ministries, and in big business and its organizations. Elite career patterns, social origins, upbringing, university education, cognitive orientations and ways of life are reviewed, as are the interactions in the exclusive world of Japan's increasingly hereditary and bureaucratic class of power holders in conservative politics and big business.
Japan is on the verge of a sea change. After more than fifty years of national pacifism and isolation including the "lost decade" of the 1990s, Japan is quietly, stealthily awakening. As Japan prepares to become a major player in the strategic struggles of the 21st century, critical questions arise about its motivations. What are the driving forces that influence how Japan will act in the international system? Are there recurrent patterns that will help explain how Japan will respond to the emerging environment of world politics? American understanding of Japanese character and purpose has been tenuous at best. We have repeatedly underestimated Japan in the realm of foreign policy. Now as Japan shows signs of vitality and international engagement, it is more important than ever that we understand the forces that drive Japan. In Japan Rising, renowned expert Kenneth Pyle identities the common threads that bind the divergent strategies of modern Japan, providing essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Japan arrived at this moment -- and what to expect in the future.
Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Politics - Region: Far East, grade: 2, University of Vienna (Institut for Political Sciences), language: English, abstract: In the following pages I will try to examine the nature of Japanese elite ́s. It interests me how they are composed, how they work and persist but also why they do the same. For that I will try to look into elite theory from Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, G. Lowell Field and John Higley, C. Wright Mills and Harold D. Lasswell. My aim is to take bricks of their theories out and apply it to the Japanese national elite system. Therefore I will recognize the Iran Triangle of the Political, Corporate and Ministry elite as Harold Kerbo and John A. McKinstry use it (Kerbo/McKinstry 1995). First of all I will define the terms that will be used in this work and then look into the theories of scientists I talked about above. In the next chapter I go right to Japan to get a small insight of the elite-structure there. After examining the Corporate, Ministry and Political Elite separately I look do the factors that hold them t ogether more closely. The education system, social clubs and business organizations as also the very important family connections. With some questions Lasswell asked for his work, I bring in further thoughts as the theory and fact go together. So my questions are what is the elite in Japan? Of what elements does it consists and how does it persist? What’s wrong with this democratic system organization, if there is something wrong with it. Is it going to change in the next years or is it likely to persist for a very long time, over generations? Is there a better system for Japan? And what would that be? I can see that this is not going to be a very sorrow study since the work is taking place in the frame of a student seminar but I take it as an opportunity to get at least some insight in the works of those scientists. The part of applying those theories to Japan, a country I studied only for a short time and never have been to, can only be done with the consciousness of labeling it as a students try. Still I hope that some valid thoughts will come out of the following pages and I hopefully will have time to further this study in the future, as it really sounds interesting to me. It took me some time to find the right theme for this seminar work, as I wanted to write on Japanese society but didn’t want to cover the exact same things as Prof. Harold Kerbo did in his books „Modern Japanese Society“ (Kerbo/McKinstry 1997) [...]
In 1895, the newly formed Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association (Dainippon Butokukai) held its first annual Martial Virtue Festival (butokusai) in the ancient capital of Kyoto. The Festival marked the arrival of a new iteration of modern Japan, as the Butokukai’s efforts to define and popularise Japanese martial arts became an important medium through which the bodies of millions of Japanese citizens would experience, draw on, and even shape the Japanese nation and state. This book shows how the notion and practice of Japanese martial arts in the late Meiji period brought Japanese bodies, Japanese nationalisms, and the Japanese state into sustained contact and dynamic engagement with one another. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, Denis Gainty shows how the metaphor of a national body and the cultural and historical meanings of martial arts were celebrated and appropriated by modern Japanese at all levels of society, allowing them to participate powerfully in shaping the modern Japanese nation and state. While recent works have cast modern Japanese and their bodies as subject to state domination and elite control, this book argues that having a body – being a body, and through that body experiencing and shaping social, political, and even cosmic realities – is an important and underexamined aspect of the late Meiji period. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan is an important contribution to debates in Japanese and Asian social sciences, theories of the body and its role in modern historiography, and related questions of power and agency by suggesting a new and dramatic role for human bodies in the shaping of modern states and societies. As such, it will be valuable to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese history, modern nations and nationalisms, and sport and leisure studies, as well as those interested in the body more broadly.
This work, written by an ex-Ambassador to Japan, is a first-hand account and observation of the various aspects of Japanese society ? political, historical, social and economic. It introduces themes such as Japanese religions and the political system, as well as describing and explaining many of the country's rich traditions. The author's personal experiences of Japan are interspersed with historical tales and factual details, providing an insight into Japanese behavior, thinking and way of life. This book will be immensely useful to those who wish to gain a deeper knowledge and understanding of the Japanese mind. It is the result of a four-year stay in Japan by the author, a Singaporean ex-Ambassador and politician.
This volume analyzes Japan’s industrial organization both from a historical perspective and by looking in details at specific industries such as iron, steel and the automotive industry. Big business, business groups and industrial policy are also discussed. The volume also provides a survey of the literature in Japanese which will help the reader in search of original sources.
This title was first published in 1980: This volume analyzes Japan's industrial organization both from a historical perspective and by looking in details at specific industries such as iron, steel and the automotive industry. Big business, business groups and industrial policy are also discussed. The volume also provides a survey of the literature in Japanese which will help the reader in search of original sources.
A look at the top 300 most powerful players in world capitalism, who are at the controls of our economic future. Who holds the purse strings to the majority of the world's wealth? There is a new global elite at the controls of our economic future, and here former Project Censored director and media monitoring sociologist Peter Phillips unveils for the general reader just who these players are. The book includes such power players as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, and Warren Buffett. As the number of men with as much wealth as half the world fell from sixty-two to just eight between January 2016 and January 2017, according to Oxfam International, fewer than 200 super-connected asset managers at only 17 asset management firms—each with well over a trillion dollars in assets under management—now represent the financial core of the world's transnational capitalist class. Members of the global power elite are the management—the facilitators—of world capitalism, the firewall protecting the capital investment, growth, and debt collection that keeps the status quo from changing. Each chapter in Giants identifies by name the members of this international club of multi-millionaires, their 17 global financial companies—and including NGOs such as the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission—and their transnational military protectors, so the reader, for the first time anywhere, can identify who constitutes this network of influence, where the wealth is concentrated, how it suppresses social movements, and how it can be redistributed for maximum systemic change.
