In the years after the Second World War, we have witnessed a succession of waves of societal development, in different parts of the world, some of which have been labelled “miracles”. There was the German miracle in the 1960s and 1970s, the East Asian miracle of the 1980s – the age of the little dragons, and more recently the miracle of China's emergence as the ‘workshop of the world’. But none of these took the world of business by storm as did the great Japanese miracle of the 1970s and 1980s. This was due to the growth of the Japanese economy to immense size, second in the world after the US, still a very long way ahead of any other rivals, and still four times greater than that of China. A related feature was that its starting point was one of almost complete devastation.

Adding to the sense of intrigued respect that gradually accumulated among the observers and competitors of the Japanese as they rose to control massive industrial power, was a sense that there was a mystique in how they did things. Not only were their firms managed in ways foreign to Western managers, but the relations among the major components of the society – government, owners, banks, workforces – were quite distinct. The political system itself seemed not to follow that of other democracies, and the complex web at the top of the structure became an object of fascination to outsiders.