For many in the West, the emergence of Japan as an economic superpower has been as surprising as it has been sudden. After its defeat in World War II, Japan hardly appeared a candidate to lead industrialized nations in productivity and technological innovation, and the "Japanese miracle" is often explained as the result of U.S. aid and protection in the postwar years. In The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy, Christopher Howe locates the sources of Japan's current commercial and financial strength in events tnat occurred well before 1945. In this revisionist account, Howe traces the history of Japanese trade over four centuries to show that the Japanese mastery of trade with the outside world began as long ago as the sixteenth century, with Japan's first contact with European trading partners. Although profitable, this early contact was so destabilizing that the Japanese leadership soon restricted foreign trade mainly to Asian partners. From the early seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, Japan developed in relative isolation. Though secluded from the scientific and economic revolutions in the West, Japan proved adept at finding novel solutions to its own problems, and its economy grew in size, diversity, and technological and institutional sophistication. By the nineteenth century, when contacts with the West were reestablished. Japan had developed a remarkable capacity to absorb foreign technologies and to adapt and create new institutions, while retaining significant elements of its traditional system of values. Most importantly, Japan's long-standing reliance on its own ingenuity to solve problems continued to flourish. This tradition, born of necessity, is the most important foundation for Japan's current position as a world economic power.

This 2003 book offers a distinctive overview of the internal and external pressures responsible for the emergence of modern Japan.

The Japanese Economy, 4th Edition is for anyone curious about economics, for it is impossible to appreciate economics without vivid examples of its application. This book is also for anyone broadly interested in Japan, for it is impossible to fully understand Japan without learning what basic economics has to say about it, which is much. To know Japan - or any country for that matter - is more than an ability to recite a litany of facts about its history, geography, institutions, and culture. Disciplined thinking is needed to organize the disparate facts into a coherent system that can be grasped whole. Modern economics is the academic discipline underlying this book. The book uses economics and explains it, but without presuming the reader has any prior knowledge of it. The main object of interest is Japan. It starts with Japan's economic history since the late sixteenth century through the twentieth century. It then addresses contemporary topics in Japan's economy, beginning with ones that require an economy - wide perspective - economic growth and the business cycle, exchange rates, and the balance of trade. The discussion then moves on to sectors of the economy: the public sector, industry and trade, the financial system, the labor market, and more. The chapters can be read in any order, but four threads run through all the chapters and link them: Japan's economic growth and development, Japan's integration with the world economy, government policies and their effects, and peculiar economic institutions and practices.

In this book, Aaron Forsberg presents an arresting account of Japan's postwar economic resurgence in a world polarized by the Cold War. His fresh interpretation highlights the many connections between Japan's economic revival and changes that occurred in the wider world during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of recently released American, British, and Japanese archival records, Forsberg demonstrates that American Cold War strategy and the U.S. commitment to liberal trade played a central role in promoting Japanese economic welfare and in forging the economic relationship between Japan and the United States. The price of economic opportunity and interdependence, however, was a strong undercurrent of mutual frustration, as patterns of conflict and compromise over trade, investment, and relations with China continued to characterize the postwar U.S.-Japanese relationship. Forsberg's emphasis on the dynamic interaction of Cold War strategy, the business environment, and Japanese development challenges "revisionist" interpretations of Japan's success. In exploring the complex origins of the U.S.-led international economy that has outlasted the Cold War, Forsberg refutes the claim that the U.S. government sacrificed American commercial interests in favor of its military partnership with Japan.

This volume of twelve essays with useful bibliographies, in the fields of history, art, religion, literature, anthropology, political science, and law, documents the history of United States scholarship on Japan since 1945.

This volume of twelve essays with useful bibliographies, in the fields of history, art, religion, literature, anthropology, political science, and law, documents the history of United States scholarship on Japan since 1945.

Looks at management attitudes in China since the recent economic reforms, and what China can learn from Japan.

Spanning the earliest attempts to brew beer to the recent popularity of local craft brews, Brewed in Japan presents the first English-language exploration of beer's steady rise to become the "beverage of the masses." Alexander underscores the highly receptive nature of Japanese consumers, who adopted and domesticated beer in just a few generations, despite its entirely foreign origins. He also sheds light on the various social, cultural, and financial influences that combined to make beer Japan's leading alcoholic beverage by the 1960s. Japan's beer market is now among the most complex on earth, and it continues to evolve. Visit the author's website at www.brewedinjapan.com.

From being the last country in the world to open its doors to global trade in the 1850s to becoming the second industrialized nation in the 1960s, Japan has experienced impressive economic and social development over the last two centuries. In the last three decades, however, it became entrenched in a long phase of economic stagnation, dropping from second to third place in the global economy, having been overtaken by China in 2010. Inspired by the recent works on the history of capitalism, this history of business shows that the Japanese company was not the product of a unique national culture. Japanese capitalism was largely shaped by a political, economic, and institutional environment, which offered a variety of new opportunities to entrepreneurs, who also played a central role in the process of change. Rural capitalism that formed during the period of national seclusion shifted to industrial capitalism after the opening of the nation to global trade: this form of capitalism was close to those observed in other late industrializing countries, and was characterized by the monopolistic domination of large business groups or zaibatsu during the interwar years. The Second World War saw the emergence of wartime capitalism with the central government as the dominant actor in the economy, and, after 1945, the need to reconstruct the country and catch-up with advanced Western economies gave birth to a new form of capitalism based on a cooperative relationship between business and the state: communitarian capitalism, more broadly known as the Japanese Business System. The liberalization and deregulation brought new changes in the business system, marked by the emergence of financial capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s.

'Clements has a knack for writing suspenseful sure-footed conflict scenes: His recounting of the Korean invasion led by samurai and daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi reads like a thriller. If you're looking for a samurai primer, Clements' guide will keep you on the hook' Japan Times, reviewed as part of an Essential Reading for Japanophiles series From a leading expert in Japanese history, this is one of the first full histories of the art and culture of the Samurai warrior. The Samurai emerged as a warrior caste in Medieval Japan and would have a powerful influence on the history and culture of the country from the next 500 years. Clements also looks at the Samurai wars that tore Japan apart in the 17th and 18th centuries and how the caste was finally demolished in the advent of the mechanized world.