Japan's emergence as an economic superpower - one whose trade surplus with the rest of the world stood in 1993 at $140 billion - has been neither sudden nor entirely economically driven. Rather it is the result of a centuries-old process. Japan's understanding of the wider world, of trade and of other relationships has expanded in stages, each determined by both internal and external factors.

The balancing of competing interests and goals will have momentous consequences for Japan—and the United States—in their quest for economic growth, social harmony, and international clout. Japan and the United States face difficult choices in charting their paths ahead as trading nations. Tokyo has long aimed for greater decisiveness, which would allow it to move away from a fragmented policymaking system favoring the status quo in order to enable meaningful internal reforms and acquire a larger voice in trade negotiations. And Washington confronts an uphill battle in rebuilding a fraying domestic consensus in favor of internationalism essential to sustain its leadership role as a champion of free trade. In Dilemmas of a Trading Nation, Mireya Solís describes how accomplishing these tasks will require the skillful navigation of vexing tradeoffs that emerge from pursuing desirable, but to some extent contradictory goals: economic competitiveness, social legitimacy, and political viability. Trade policy has catapulted front and center to the national conversations taking place in each country about their desired future direction—economic renewal, a relaunched social compact, and projected international influence. Dilemmas of a Trading Nation underscores the global consequences of these defining trade dilemmas for Japan and the United States: decisiveness, reform, internationalism. At stake is the ability of these leading economies to upgrade international economic rules and create incentives for emerging economies to converge toward these higher standards. At play is the reaffirmation of a rules-based international order that has been a source of postwar stability, the deepening of a bilateral alliance at the core of America's diplomacy in Asia, and the ability to reassure friends and rivals of the staying power of the United States. In the execution of trade policy today, we are witnessing an international leadership test dominated by domestic governance dilemmas.

This book examines, in rigorous, quantitative detail, the structure of trade between Japan and the United States, tracing the evolution of trade interdependence and the causes of its increasing intensity. It also looks at sectoral differences in interdependence--at the patterns behind changes in the composition of trade and the complex factors that determine how individual sectors of each economy respond to economic change in all the others. In the first part, the author designs and estimates a multicountry, multisectoral general equilibrium model. The model is operationalized with careful estimates of the parameters that govern demand, production, and trade in both economies. In the second part, the model is employed to explore various aspects of interdependence and commercial policy. Peter Petri's findings indicate, among other things, that the American and Japanese economies are more closely related than one might judge from the size of their trade. As a result of differences in the structures of the two economies, their interdependence is sharply asymmetric, with economic events in the United States having a greater impact on Japan than vice versa. The study also shows that the roots of bilateral conflict can be traced to structural causes, and suggests that recent structural changes may have increased the incentives for protectionism.

This book explains compellingly that, despite common belief, in the early modern period, the intra-East Asian commercial network still functioned sustainably, and within that network, the Sino-Japanese trade can be seen as the most significant part which not only connected the Chinese and Japanese domestic markets but also was linked to the global economy. It is commonly thought that East Asian countries like China and Japan maintained a stance of so-called national isolation during the period from the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. It is true that diplomatic relations between Qing China and Tokugawa Japan could have not been established for reasons such as guarantees of security; however, every year merchants in junks voyaged to Nagasaki and carried out transactions with Japanese merchants or business agents. How this kind of trade relation was maintained stably without any diplomatic guarantees and in which way the governments of the two sides edged into the trade and accommodated the trade conflicts and institutional frictions are essential but seldom-emphasized topics. This book aims to shed light on these issues and thereby examine the character of the unique trade order in early modern East Asia as well, by analyzing a large quantity of the seldom-used and unpublished Chinese and Japanese primary and secondary sources.

This bibliography, first published in 1988, consists of annotated entries of monographs and journal articles published in English that discuss socio-economic aspects of Japanese society as well as the general and economic dynamics of United States-Japan trade relations. Emphasis is on the Japanese perspective.

With all the rapid economic success in Japan, it is easy to forget just how insular the nation has been, and how strikingly different its trading patterns remain from those of other industrialized nations. Japan is moving into an era of greater interaction with the world, but Lincoln contends that this does not mean the United States and other nations can end their pressure on Japan to continue opening its markets. "Now is the time to bring Japan into the fold," Lincoln writes in his introduction. Lincoln focuses on the question of access to Japanese markets, Japan's pattern of trade on imports, and the consequences of large trade and current-account imbalances. He argues against the United States abandoning its free-trade ideal and offers suggestions for applying pressure to encourage greater real access to Japanese markets.

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.