Peter F. Drucker Boxed Set (8 Books) (The Drucker Library)

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 ...