Japanese-style management and the interest in Japanese at work

Over the last twenty years, a huge literature has emerged about work in Japan. The interest in Japan has followed that country's success as a national economy. Although economists had been aware of Japan's steady rise to economic prominence over the hundred years following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, from around 1970 Japan's large balance-of-payments surpluses drew wider attention to “the Japanese miracle.” A number of books appeared to suggest that Japan had overnight become a new economic superstate that would challenge or even threaten Western economic supremacy. Their titles were often couched in ethnocentric terms that connoted not only warnings, but also condescending surprise, that a non-Western nation so severely beaten in 1945 could achieve so much within twenty-five years.

To explain Japan's sudden emergence as an economic superstate, many writers, including the futurologist Herman Kahn (1970), attached great importance to the Japanese mindset. They alleged that cultural remnants or feudalistic values – such as group loyalty, a motivation to achieve based on duty and the fear of shame or losing face, and Confucian frugality – and a special sense of community or national consensus were the wellsprings of Japan's economic success. Two underlying concerns marked much of that literature. One was a resentment of Japan's success in selling manufactured goods in the markets of the advanced industrialized economies. Many writers sought to assess the likelihood that Japan's success would be shortlived and not result in a long-term “threat.