(1979). My study does not follow these earlier works in advocating the adoption of Japanese institutions outside of Japan. It does, however, try to lay out in their full complexity some of the main Japanese institutions in the economic field so that those who are interested in adopting them will have an idea of what they are buying in terms of the Japanese system's consequencesintended, unintended, and even unwanted.
A second and entirely different set of explanations of the Japanese miracle belongs to the socioeconomic school, or what I have sometimes called the 'anything-but-politics' approach to 'miracle' research. This broad school includes four major types of analysis that often overlap with each other but that are clearly isolable for purposes of identification, although they rarely appear in pure form. These are the 'national character-basic values-consensus' analysis favored by humanists in general and the anthropologically oriented in particular; the 'no-miracle-occurred'' analysis, chiefly the work of economists; the 'unique-structural-features' analysis promoted by students of labor relations, the savings ratio, corporate management, the banking system, the welfare system, general trading corporations, and other institutions of modern Japan; and the various forms of the 'free-ride' analysis, that is, the approach that stresses Japan's real but transitory advantages in launching high-speed growth in the postwar world.
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Before proceeding to sketch the qualities of these types of analysis, let me say that to a certain extent I can agree with all of them. My interest is not in disputing the facts that they have revealed nor in questioning their relevance to the miracle. However, I believe it can be shown that many of them should be reduced to more basic categories of analysis, particularly to the effects of state policy, and that they need to be weighed according to standards different from those used in the past, thereby giving greater weight to the state and its industrial policy.
The national-character explanation argues that the economic miracle occurred because the Japanese possess a unique, culturally derived capacity to cooperate with each other. This capacity to cooperate reveals itself in many wayslower crime rates than in other, less homogeneous societies; subordination of the individual to the group; intense group loyalties and patriotism; and, last but not least, economic performance. The most important contribution of the culture to economic life is said to be Japan's famous 'consensus,' meaning virtual agreement among government, ruling political party, leaders of industry, and people on the primacy of economic objectives for the society as a wholeand on the means to obtain those objectives. Some of the terms invented to refer to this cultural capability of the Japanese are 'rolling consensus,'
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''private collectivism,'
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'inbred collectivism,'
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'spiderless cobweb,'
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and 'Japan, Inc.'
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My reservations about the value of this explanation are basically that it is overgeneralized and tends to cut off rather than advance serious research. Consensus and group solidarity have been important in Japan's economic growth, but they are less likely to derive from the basic values of the Japanese than from what Ruth Benedict once called Japan's 'situational' motivations: late development, lack of resources, the need to trade, balance of payments constraints, and so forth.
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Positing some 'special capacity to cooperate' as an irreducible Japanese cultural trait leads inquiry away from the question of
Japanese cooperate when they do (they did not cooperate during almost half of the period under study here), and away from the probability that this cooperation can be, and on occasion has been, quite deliberately engineered by the government and others. David Titus's research into the use of the Imperial institution in prewar Japan to 'privatize' rather than to 'socialize' societal conflict is one creative way to look at this problem of consensus.
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Many instances to be discussed later in this study illustrate how the government has consciously induced cooperation among its clientswith much better results than during the Pacific War, when it sought to control them. In the final analysis it is indeed probable that Jap-
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anese basic values are different from those of the Western world, but this needs to be studied, not posited; and explanations of social behavior in terms of basic values should be reserved for the final analysis, that is, for the residue of behavior that cannot be explained in other more economical ways. Actually, the explanation of the Japanese economic miracle in terms of culture was more prevalent a few years ago, when the miracle had occurred only in Japan. Now that it is being duplicated or matched in the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singaporeand perhaps even in some non-East Asian nationsthe cultural explanation has lost much of its original interest.
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Exemplars of the 'no-miracle-occurred' school of analysis do not literally assert that nothing happened to Japan's economy, but they imply that what did happen was not miraculous but a normal out growth of market forces. They come from the realm of professional economic analyses of Japanese growth, and therefore in their own terms are generally impeccable, but they also regularly present extended conclusions that incorporate related matters that their authors have not studied but desperately want to exclude from their equations. Hugh Patrick argues, 'I am of the school which interprets Japanese economic performance as due primarily to the actions and efforts of private individuals and enterprises responding to the opportunities provided in quite free markets for commodities and labor. While the government has been supportive and indeed has done much to create the environment for growth, its role has often been exaggerated.'
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But there is a problem, he concedes. 'It is disturbing that the macro explanations of Japanese postwar economic performancein terms of increases in aggregate labor and capital inputs and in their more productive allocationleave 40 percent plus of out put growth and half of labor productivity growth unexplained.'
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