Why does Japan, with its efficiency-oriented technocracy, periodically adopt welfare-oriented, economically inefficient domestic policies? In answering this question Kent Calder shows that Japanese policymakers respond to threats to the ruling party's preeminence by extending income compensation, entitlements, and subsidies, with market-oriented retrenchment coming as crisis subsides. "Quite simply the most ambitious and strongly argued interpretation of a key dimension of Japanese political life to appear in English this decade."--David Williams, Japan Times "Historically dense and conceptually rich.... [Forces] readers' attention to the domestic underpinnings of Japanese foreign policy."--Donald S. Zagoria, Foreign Affairs "Punctures the myth of Japan Inc. as a cool, rational monolith...."--Kathleen Newland, Millennium "A bold reinterpretation of Japanese politics that will force us to rethink many of our current assumptions and will influence our research agenda."--Steven R. Reed, Journal of Japanese Studies

An analysis of nonindustrial domestic policies in post-war Japan.

Japan grew explosively and consistently for more than a century, from the Meiji Restoration until the collapse of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. Since then, it has been unable to restart its economic engine and respond to globalization. How could the same political–economic system produce such strongly contrasting outcomes? This book identifies the crucial variables as classic Japanese forms of socio-political organization: the "circles of compensation." These cooperative groupings of economic, political, and bureaucratic interests dictate corporate and individual responses to such critical issues as investment and innovation; at the micro level, they explain why individuals can be decidedly cautious on their own, yet prone to risk-taking as a collective. Kent E. Calder examines how these circles operate in seven concrete areas, from food supply to consumer electronics, and deals in special detail with the influence of Japan's changing financial system. The result is a comprehensive overview of Japan's circles of compensation as they stand today, and a road map for broadening them in the future.

"I have created for each of you a fate, one tailored specifically for your needs and desires. Each of you has a defining moment--not before, not after--when a wrong turn or decision led to the disastrous outcome that you and I mourn. To isolate that malignant moment is an exacting, exhaustive process, which only the most well-trained and competent professionals, armed with the most sophisticated of predictive models and processing power, can accomplish. You can put your trust in me, as you would in an expert surgeon, a surgeon of the soul." On a distant planet overlooking Earth, the nameless protagonist of The Compensation Bureau is one of a team of Actuaries at work on the innovative Lazarus Project. Conceived in response to the shocking violence observed in humankind, the project identifies people who have wrongfully died at the hands of others--whether victims of war, hate crimes, or random brutality--and attempts to compensate for the cruelty and pain they faced in life and death. But balancing the accounts for the sufferings and wrongdoings of humanity proves hardly a clinical exercise. The Actuary soon finds himself personally invested in the project's mission, and the goals of the project itself are complicated as the fate of Earth's inhabitants becomes more uncertain. The Compensation Bureau explores the power of individual and collective action, from a writer hailed by The Washington Post as "a world-novelist of the first category."