MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 7

tionists, one major category among modern explorers of the Japanese economic miracle. These are writers who project onto the Japanese case Westernchiefly Anglo-Americanconcepts, problems, and norms of economic behavior. Whatever the value of such studies for the countries in which they were written, they need not detain us long here. This type of work is not so much aimed at explaining the Japanese case (although it may abstract a few principles of Japanese political economy) as it is at revealing home-country failings in light of Japan's achievements, or at issuing warnings about the possible effects of Japan's growth on other parts of the world. Even the

Economist

's brilliant little tract of 1962 might better have been called

Consider Britain in Light of What the Japanese Are Doing

, which was in any case its true purpose. Successors to the

Economist

include Ralph Hewins,

The Japanese Miracle Men

(1967), P. B. Stone,

Japan Surges Ahead: The Story of an Economic Miracle

(1969), Robert Guillain,

The Japanese Challenge

(1970), Herman Kahn,

The Emerging Japanese Superstate

(1970), and Hakan Hedberg,

Japan's Revenge

(1972). Perhaps the most prominent work in this genre, because it is so clearly hortatory about what Americans might learn from Japan rather than analytical about what has caused the phenomenal Japanese growth, is Ezra Vogel's

Japan as Number One: Lessons for Americans

(1979). My study does not follow these earlier works in advocating the adoption of Japanese institutions outside of Japan. It does, however, try to lay out in their full complexity some of the main Japanese institutions in the economic field so that those who are interested in adopting them will have an idea of what they are buying in terms of the Japanese system's consequencesintended, unintended, and even unwanted.

A second and entirely different set of explanations of the Japanese miracle belongs to the socioeconomic school, or what I have sometimes called the "anything-but-politics" approach to "miracle" research. This broad school includes four major types of analysis that often overlap with each other but that are clearly isolable for purposes of identification, although they rarely appear in pure form. These are the "national character-basic values-consensus" analysis favored by humanists in general and the anthropologically oriented in particular; the "no-miracle-occurred'' analysis, chiefly the work of economists; the "unique-structural-features" analysis promoted by students of labor relations, the savings ratio, corporate management, the banking system, the welfare system, general trading corporations, and other institutions of modern Japan; and the various forms of the "free-ride" analysis, that is, the approach that stresses Japan's real but transitory advantages in launching high-speed growth in the postwar world.