CHAPTER TEN
Misinterpreting Japan and the Japanese
FOR 40 YEARS I’VE been trying to explain to my American friends that they misinterpret Japan. I haven’t made much progress. The first challenge is explaining what any Japanese civil servant understands perfectly well: despite the country’s economic miracle since World War II, Japan has not had an economic policy; it has had a social policy.
When I first started to work with the Japanese government and Japanese businesses in the early 1950s, Japan was not only a war-ravaged country, but an incredibly fragile society. Half the people lived on the land, and there was an exceedingly high number of ...
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