The Japan That Never Was: Explaining the Rise and Decline of a Misunderstood Country - Softcover

Beason, Dick; Patterson, Dennis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791460401 ISBN 13: 9780791460405

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2006

Synopsis

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.

"Extremely well written and accessible, this book provides a nice review of the literature, and the authors do a good job of showing why the 1990s have perplexed so many scholars and analysts who had previously predicted the rise of Japanese economic hegemony (and the end of United States hegemony)." — Kenji Hayao, author of The Japanese Prime Minister and Public Policy

About this title

About the Author

Dick Beason is Professor of Economics at the University of Alberta and the coauthor (with Jason James) of The Political Economy of Japanese Financial Markets: Myths versus Reality. Dennis Patterson is Professor of Political Science at Texas Tech University.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791460401
• ISBN 13: 9780791460405
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 226