Customer Reviews

Japan As (Anything But Number One)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is amazing to look back over the last decades: from a much-lauded position of being ready to take over the world, Japan is now seen as a beleaguered backwater in a perpetual crisis of weakness and poor management. But for anyone who lived in Japan, it is hardly surprising. There was so much ridiculous hype about Japanese management, science and technology policies and the like by ignorant academics and credulous reporters that it made foreign residents sick with boredom. Having been steeped in that laudatory literature as a student, I went to live in Japan to learn more, only to find that the Japan I read about simply didn't exist. For a while, I, like Woronoff before me, made my living debunking that hype.

Woronoff wrote this book as a corrective to the hype and mediocrity of such thinkers as Ezra Vogel, the title of whose book Woronoff mocks. It is excessively combative and personally bitter, as he felt that he was being ignored, but so much that he says resonates with truth for those is us who lived there. When he wrote it, not many readers wanted to hear it. Unfortunately, he presses his point so hard and so far that he essentially self destructs in the end, as even a sympathetic reader such as myself got tired of the tone.

Nonetheless, I got a great deal out of Woronoff, for there were things that he understood long before others did. For that, I must thank him.

This book is the antithesis to Ezra Vogel's _Japan As Number One_ (1979) and pays more attention to the shortcomings of the Japanese socio-economic system. Woronoff rates various policies with superior grades, above average grade, below average grades, and inferior grades. He also debunks a lot of the glowing praise from the western ivory-tower "Japan experts" by closely examining the consequences of some government policies and strategies. A definately powerful book.

Jon Woronoff saw, long before the then-numerous Japan-boosters did, that there was a great deal rotten behind the fabulous facade presented by "Japan, Inc." Far from being a showpiece for export-oriented protectionism and government-led industrial planning, Japan's export successes occurred in great measure *despite* the interference of bureaucrats, while the country's protected domestic sector was (and is) horrendously inefficient. All sorts of myths, like the universality and superiority of Japan's lifetime employment system, or the superiority of keiretsu capitalism over "Anglo-Saxon" style short-termism, get a thorough hiding.

What Woronoff had to say may seem far from shocking now, given the more than decade-long stagnation that has occurred since the publication of his book, but it is still valuable for the way in which it shows how the truth was there to see for those who were willing to go beyond the cliches and hysteria of the Bubble Economy era.