Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambition

Abstract

In this excellent monograph, Brad Glosserman, an experienced Japan specialist, explains from political, economic and social perspectives why Japan has since the 1990s lost direction and has been stagnating. In chapter one, the author describes how the successful recipes for success from the Meji period onwards led to the lost decades since the 1990s because of a lack of timely political, economic and social reforms to address national and international changes. He presents the analyses and prescriptions of several official and private studies (and more about them in the following chapter), showing that the problems and required countermeasures have been known for some considerable time but not implemented. Chapter two analyses how Japan was affected by the Lehman shock of 2007–2008 in a direct way which reinforced the inherent structural problems of Japan’s economy (public debt, grim demography, industrial excess capacity, deflation, hollowing out of the manufacturing sector). He presents a very convincing list of structural and attitudinal features which prevent and will continue to prevent Japan from reacting appropriately, including vested interests, what he calls “political morass”, i.e. lack of political leadership, the belief in having the right economic and social model (just look at the ever changing skyline of Tokyo!).