The Japan That Never Was

Explaining the Rise and Decline of a Misunderstood Country

Dick Beason, Dennis Patterson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780791460405, 9780791460399
• eBook ISBN: 9780791485293
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Economics

Contests conventional wisdom on Japan's postwar economic success and its economic and political problems in the 1990s, providing a new account of these conditions.

In this book, the authors address Japan's economic crisis of the 1990s. They argue that most attempts to reconcile Japan's past success with its current problems have been inadequate, primarily because scholars fail to fully understand how Japan's political-economic system was organized and how it operated in the past. Revealing that certain long-term political and economic trends suggested in subtle but unambiguous ways that the crisis of the 1990s was long in the making, the authors offer an alternative explanation for Japan's postwar political-economic trajectory and a better understanding of the challenges that Japan currently faces.

Table of contents

• THE JAPAN THAT NEVER WAS
• CONTENTS
• TABLES AND FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Part I. THE MISUNDERSTOOD COUNTRY
• Part II. POLITICAL ECONOMICS IN A CAPITALIST JAPAN
• Part III. POLITICS AND POLICY MAKING IN A DEMOCRATIC NATION
• Part IV. JAPAN IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX