Mark Metzler

Introduction: Japan at an inflection point

Japan, inadvertently, has become the outstanding forerunner in a new set of global developments that can be described under the three headings of deflation, downsizing, and demography. New ‘lessons from Japan’ are to be discovered here, and these are not only admonitory ones. Far from it, for recent Japanese practice exemplifies the new ‘choose and focus’ strategies that can make an era of general, quantitative business slowdown into one of remarkable sectoral and qualitative development. The implications touch upon wide domains of activity, particularly strategic planning and finance. This introduction surveys some relevant and under-appreciated features of this recent history, in order to understand and project a few main lines of present and near-future developments in connection with the contributions that make up this special issue.

Partisan Policy Swings in Japan, 1913–1932

Abstract This essay develops a temporal and conceptual framework for analyzing some core processes in the political economy of Japan and in the political economy of two-party systems in general. It takes as a case study the era of “Taishō democracy”. The two-party politics of the era, originating out of the Taishō political crisis of 1912–13, were shaped by an opposition between the so-called positive policy of fiscal-monetary expansion and the so-called negative policy of retrenchment. The “positive-negative” divide structured a wide range of policy domains, including fiscal policy, monetary and foreign-exchange policy, diplomatic policy, military policy, social policy, and industrial policy. This essay constructs a chronology of this policy dialectic across multiple policy domains and contributes to theoretical discussion of policy fields, polarities, and regimes. It concludes by making a cross-temporal comparison to policy swings in the 1990s.

The Japanese Consumer: An Alternative Economic History of Modern Japan (review)

“For the world beyond the original sites of the industrial revolution,” Penelope Francks explains at the beginning of her book, consumerism is thought to be “something that arrives as part and parcel of the imported industrialization that brings modern goods to domestic markets” (p. 7). This is a misunderstanding, as she explains, and will not take one very far in thinking about the Japanese experience. By extension, an account of the Japanese experience will help people working from other locales to better evaluate the big questions of consumption, modernity, and how they are connected. Francks’s book is a synthesis of a booming but still new literature. In 1931, in a public call for stimulating consumer demand, Ishibashi Tanzan complained about the way that consumption was ignored and treated as something outside economics. In fact, economists outside Japan had actively discussed the place of the consumer since the 1890s—Alfred Marshall among others addressed the issue then. Historians ignored the subject for much longer, and the modern surge of interest dates back only to the latter part of the 1970s. Pioneering works by Stuart Ewen (1976) and Joan Thirsk (1978) considered the sources of consumer culture in the United States and Britain. Francks points to Neil McKendrick’s 1982 essay on the consumer revolution in eighteenth-century England as a starting point. Historians’ interest in consumption surged in the late 1980s and 1990s as they realized that it was an issue of gender as well and took in infl uences such as the work of the Frankfurt School and the new cultural studies. Scholars of Japanese history, with their strongly culturalist orientation, also actively took up the subject.

The Road to the Dollar Standard

This essay describes the evolution of Japans modern currency standard, from its premodern origins, to the age of the classical gold standard, to the establishment of the classical dollar standard after World War II. Relatively little has been written in English describing this long-run evolution, and much of the existing work is relatively fragmentary; what follows is intended to provide a chronological framework and to provide some pointers to the literature on the subject.1