In recent years, Japan's economy has gone from model of success to object lesson in failure. William W. Grimes offers a richly detailed insider's view of the key macroeconomic policies and events in contemporary Japan, as well as a close examination of the causes and effects of these upheavals. A new preface sets the book's findings in the context of the continuing intensification of Japan's financial woes.It is difficult to believe that the "Bubble Economy" of the late 1980s and the failed attempts at economic stimulation in the following decade both arose from the same policies. In Unmaking the Japanese Miracle, Grimes shows that this is precisely what happened. Focusing less on what went wrong than on why it went wrong, Grimes finds that mistaken macroeconomic policies--loose money in the late 1980s, excessively tight money until 1992, and only grudging use of expansionary fiscal policy until 1998--largely caused Japan's economic problems. Based on scores of interviews with Japanese policymakers, his is the first political explanation of why these catastrophic policies were carried out by the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Japan, and the Diet. Various economic shocks were met, Grimes says, with a consistent and often inappropriate pattern of responses. This pattern has fundamentally altered because of changes within the three policymaking institutions since 1998.

In the last fifteen years, Japan's economy has gone from model of success to object lesson in failure. William W. Grimes offers a richly detailed, insider's view of the key macroeconomic policies and events in contemporary Japan, as well as a close examination of the causes and effects of these upheavals. It is difficult to believe that the "Bubble Economy" of the late 1980s and the failed attempts at economic stimulation in the following decade both arose from the same policies. In Unmaking the Japanese Miracle, Grimes shows that this is precisely what happened. Focusing less on what went wrong than on why it went wrong, Grimes finds that mistaken macroeconomic policies—loose money in the late 1980s, excessively tight money until 1992, and only grudging use of expansionary fiscal policy until 1998—largely caused Japan's economic problems. Based on scores of interviews with Japanese policymakers, his is the first political explanation of why these catastrophic policies were carried out by the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Japan, and the Diet. Various economic shocks were met, Grimes says, with a consistent and often inappropriate pattern of responses. This pattern has fundamentally altered because of changes within the three policymaking institutions since 1998.

The papers assembled here share the dual conviction that (1) understanding the lineaments of Japanese modernity entails an appreciation of the specific forms of distinctions, discriminations and exclusions constitutive of it; (2) that the socio-economic-political fractures increasingly visible under conditions of late modernity reveal the precarious nature of the making of modernity in Japan. Bringing together a group of critical intellectuals, mostly based in Japan with long-standing political commitments to groups emblematic of modern Japan’s constitutive outside - inorities, migrants, foreigners, victims of the Fukushima disaster, welfare recipients among others this collection of essays aims to draw attention to processes of ‘making and unmaking’ that constellate Japanese modernity. Unlike previous attempts, however, devoted to destabilizing positivist/culturalist approaches to a post-war ‘miracle’ Japan via a critical post-structural theoretical vocabulary and episteme, the essays gathered here aim principally to examine traces of the making of modern Japan in the fissures and displacements visible at sites of modernity’s unmaking. Deploying a range of theoretical approaches, rather than a commitment to any single framework, the essays that follow aim to locate contemporary Japan and the ravages of its modernity within a wider critical discourse of modernity.

Controversially, this book argues that the Japan that emerges from its manifold problems of the 1990s may be stronger than before.

September 2001 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the San Francisco Treaty, formally ending the Second World War. In signing this treaty, Japan fundamentally transformed its position on the world stage. It established itself in the vanguard of the burgeoning cold war bulwark against the Soviet Union and its communist satellites, and wed itself to the United States through economic, political, and security ties that persist today. The half century since the establishment of the San Francisco system has seen highs and lows in the relations between the two countries, continuing even into the current war on terrorism. This new book evaluates the changing relationship between the two great powers, providing in-depth analysis on a variety of topics. It scrutinizes the historical context, providing the reader with predictive tools for understanding events as they unfold. Instead of looking at the U.S.-Japan relationship one issue at a time, this book examines specific trends and then analyzes how these trends affect the relationship as a whole. This innovative approach allows the reader to view several perspectives simultaneously, and it compels the contributors to assemble clear causal arguments that detail what each factor can and cannot explain. The result is a cogent and convincing appraisal of the status and future of U.S.-Japan relations after fifty years of peaceful coexistence.

This volume, stemming from the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, observes that for Japan to 'rise again' would mean recovery not only from the triple disaster—the March, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown—but from 20-plus years of economic stagnation, political fumbling, and deterioration in Japan's regional and global influence.

'Recent events have rendered Japan's lost decades all the more relevant to the rest of us. Rick Garside, in this wide-ranging and accessible account, explores the political economy of Japan's great stagnation with an eye toward describing how other advanced economies can avoid going down the same path.' – Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley, US 'Professor Garside's timely book transcends the national preoccupation suggested by its title. From one viewpoint this is a case study (admittedly on a grand scale) of the experience of one country in one historical period. But in analyzing the dynamic relationship between Japan's post-war economic miracle and its chronic stagnation from the 1990's he offers a penetrating insight into the links between profound and embedded institutional and ideological influences, global upheaval, and almost disastrous national economic performance. Hence, Japan's Great Stagnation – the unfolding story of that country's declining experience from masterful economic power to seeming economic paralysis – provides us with an all-too familiar scenario with which to approach the contemporaneous ills of the world's developed economies. The interaction between banking crises, unwieldy institutions (especially, but not only, financial institutions), policy frailties, and stagnating demand – all conspired to create crisis and then handicap or prevent recovery. And the familiarity of the story is aggravated by the global financial crisis which now threatens to engulf us. History never fully repeats itself, but Professor Garside's illuminating examination of Japan's recent experiences must surely provide important points of relevance for the world's current malaise. He is to be congratulated on the depth and scope of what he has achieved – and for its relevance to what we are experiencing.' – Barry Supple, University of Cambridge, UK This timely book presents a critical examination of the developmental premises of Japan's high-growth success and its subsequent drift into recession, stagnation and piecemeal reform. The country, which within a few decades of wartime defeat mounted a serious challenge to American hegemony, appeared incapable of fully adjusting to shifting economic circumstance once the impulses of catch-up growth and the good fortune of an accommodating international environment faded. The banking crises, spiralling government debt, and stagnant growth experienced by major industrialized nations in recent years have evoked renewed interest in Japan's economic denouement since the 1990s. To many, Japan's drift into recession and financial crisis during the early 1990s, and later into stagnation and prolonged deflation, demonstrated precisely what not to do when fashioning remedial policy. This book details the legacies of Japan's high-growth success and how they affected Japan's capacity to cope with shifting national and international circumstance from the 1980s. It reviews the contentious debates over the causes and consequences of the 'bubble economy' and the 'lost decade', and assesses the extent to which reforms since 1997 have been compromised by lingering attachments to Japan's distinctive post-war political economy. Providing an analytical overview of both the high growth and recessionary periods and of subsequent reform agendas, this timely book will appeal to students, academics and researchers of economic history, development and politics, particularly those with an interest in Japan and Asian studies more generally.

Bolder economic policy could have addressed the persistent bouts of deflation in post-bubble Japan, write Gene Park, Saori N. Katada, Giacomo Chiozza, and Yoshiko Kojo in Taming Japan's Deflation. Despite warnings from economists, intense political pressure, and well-articulated unconventional policy options to address this problem, Japan's central bank, the Bank of Japan (BOJ), resisted taking the bold actions that the authors believe would have significantly helped. With Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's return to power, Japan finally shifted course at the start of 2013 with the launch of Abenomics—an economic agenda to reflate the economy—and Abe's appointment of new leadership at the BOJ. As Taming Japan's Deflation shows, the BOJ's resistance to experimenting with bolder policy stemmed from entrenched policy ideas that were hostile to activist monetary policy. The authors explain how these policy ideas evolved over the course of the BOJ's long history and gained dominance because of the closed nature of the broader policy network. The explanatory power of policy ideas and networks suggests a basic inadequacy in the dominant framework for analysis of the politics of monetary policy derived from the literature on central bank independence. This approach privileges the interaction between political principals and their supposed agents, central bankers; but Taming Japan's Deflation shows clearly that central bankers' views, shaped by ideas and institutions, can be decisive in determining monetary policy. Through a combination of institutional analysis, quantitative empirical tests, in-depth case studies, and structured comparison of Japan with other countries, the authors show that, ultimately, the decision to adopt aggressive monetary policy depends largely on the bankers' established policy ideas and policy network.

Beyond the Cubicle looks at the hidden ramifications of job insecurity upon workers' intimate lives, personal relationships, and crises of identity and self-worth. The broad and wide-ranging essays explore how changes in work have altered our emotions, reworked the interplay of gender, race and class, and contributed to a contemporary radical individualism in variety of contexts.

This is a multi-generational political history of the Hatoyamas, a family that has participated at the highest levels of Japan's parliamentary government from its inception in the late 1800s. The Hatoyama family is one of the most prominent political families in modern Japanese government. It has produced six members of the Diet, Japan's parliament, many of whom have served as cabinet members and party leaders. Due to the family's political legacy, they have often been likened to the Kennedy family in American politics (though they have been spared the tragedy and scandal visited upon the Kennedys). Despite the significance of the Hatoyamas to modern Japanese politics, this is the first comprehensive study available in English. In tracing the rising political fortunes of this family, it is also possible to study the role of hereditary politicians in Japan, the growth and evolution of Japanese political parties, and, perhaps most importantly, the way political leadership functions in Japan, a society known more for consensus-building than strong leaders.