Economic overview of Japan (Paperback)

Scholarly Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Business economics - General, language: English, abstract: Sony, Toyota, Samurai and Kamikaze - these words don't seem to have a lot of similarity in common, but they all four symbolize the aggressive Japanese mentality with its urge for expanding the national economy and the nation's glory. "In the 1980s, Japan pioneered a new kind of superpower. Tokyo had no army to speak of, no puppet regimes to prop up, and no proxy wars to mind. Just an economy. What made Japan a superpower, more than just a wealthy country, was the way its great firms staked claim to a collective intellectual high ground that left competitors, even in the United States, scrambling to reverse-engineer Japanese successes. Seeking guidance on everything from "quality circles" to "just in time" inventory management, U.S. corporate executives bought stacks of books on Japanese management techniques. The key to Japan's economic ascendance was not ideology, at least not by Cold War standards; but it was a method, it drove the most dynamic economy of the era, and it was indisputably Japanese. " Douglas McGray explains it correctly. The continued success of the Japanese companies at the different world markets and especially at the markets in Europe was absolutely impressing and overwhelming and for some people even frightening. With extremely high growth rates, the country developed in only 30 years from a small and nearly unnoticed industrial nation to one of the few leading economic powers in the world. With this paper I want to give an overall view on Japan and try to investigate what exactly stands behind this "economic wonder."