Download E-books Why Has Japan 'Succeeded'?: Western Technology and the Japanese Ethos PDF

By Michio Morishima
This publication, through a unique eastern economist now resident within the West, bargains a brand new interpretation of the present good fortune of the japanese economic system. by means of putting the increase of Japan within the context of its old improvement, Michio Morishima indicates how a strongly-held nationwide ethos has interacted with non secular, social and technological principles imported from somewhere else to provide hugely special cultural qualities. whereas Professor Morishima strains the roots of contemporary Japan again so far as the advent of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism from China within the 6th century, he concentrates his observations at the final a hundred and twenty years in which Japan has had huge contacts with the West. He describes the speedy upward push of Japan to the prestige of a chief strength following the Meiji Revolution after 1867, during which Japan broke with an extended background of isolationism, and which prepared the ground for the adoption of Western expertise and the production of a latest Western-style kingdom nation; and a equally meteoric upward thrust from the devastation of the second one international struggle to Japan's current place. quite a number elements in Japan's monetary luck are analysed: her attribute dualistic social constitution - reminiscent of the divide among huge and medium/small firms - the kin of presidency and massive enterprise, the terrible reception of liberalism and individualism, and the power of the japanese nationalism. all through, Professor Morishima emphasises the significance of the position performed within the production of jap capitalism via moral doctrines as reworked lower than eastern stipulations, in particular the japanese Confucian culture of entire loyalty to the enterprise and to the kingdom. This account, which makes transparent the level to which the commercial upward push of Japan is because of components exact to its historic traditions, might be of curiosity to a large normal readership in addition to to scholars of Japan and its background.