If we ask simply whether Japanese business has changed, our answer must be an unequivocal yes and this is answered with a primary focus on technology, the traditional source of Japan's strong competitiveness. But if we ask whether Japanese firms have also changed in any substantive ways we must accept a less sanguine conclusion.

After two decades of reinvention, Japanese companies are re-emerging as major players in the new digital economy. They have responded to the rise of China and new global competition by moving upstream into critical deep-tech inputs and advanced materials and components. This new "aggregate niche strategy" has made Japan the technology anchor for many global supply chains. Although the end products do not carry a "Japan Inside" label, Japan plays a pivotal role in our everyday lives across many critical industries. This book is an in-depth exploration of current Japanese business strategies that make Japan the world's third-largest economy and an economic leader in Asia. To accomplish their reinvention, Japan's largest companies are building new processes of breakthrough innovation. Central to this book is how they are addressing the necessary changes in organizational design, internal management processes, employment, and corporate governance. Because Japan values social stability and economic equality, this reinvention is happening slowly and methodically, and has gone largely unnoticed by Western observers. Yet, Japan's more balanced model of "caring capitalism" is both competitive and transformative, and more socially responsible than the unbridled growth approach of the United States.

Between 2002 and 2008, Japan's economy saw constant expansion, a record among the world's advanced economies and Japan's longest period of economic growth since World War II. This remarkable achievement came about because of a transformation of Japanese business practices. This transformation was guided by strategies that enabled Japan's leading corporations, previously diversified to an exceptionally high degree, to become leaner, more nimble, and more competitive at home and in the global economy. In Choose and Focus, the first in-depth account of this strategic inflection point in Japanese business, Ulrike Schaede argues that the emerging practices and attitudes have created a New Japan. Drawing on profiles of several corporations, including Panasonic, Takeda and Astellas, Softbank, kakaku.com, and SBI E*Trade, Schaede explains how the fundamental principles of Japan's economy have been overturned. "Choose and focus" strategies, whereby corporations concentrate on core areas and spin off unrelated businesses, have completely altered the strategic logic of Japan's previous industrial architecture. These surprisingly aggressive moves, Schaede finds, have created new market opportunities for start-up enterprises and foreign investors, as well as a wave of mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers that have shaken Japanese companies out of complacency. Unlike the advances made by Japanese firms in the 1970s and 1980s, the current transformation is taking root in component and materials industries rather than in consumer products. Because of the relative obscurity of the changes and the overshadowing story of China's ascent, the Japanese corporate revolution has gone largely unnoticed among Western observers. Choose and Focus is required reading for anyone doing business in Japan or trying to understand how contemporary Japanese business works and how Japanese corporations have reinvented themselves to face the challenges—and realize the opportunities—of the 21st century.

The period of economic decline during the 1990s produced a wave of studies focusing on the failure of Japanese management according to western criteria. Yet Japanese manufacturing firms have continued to hold competitive power in the world market. This book identifies the institutional specificity of Japanese Management and the reasons behind its continued competitiveness. Through an exploration of the strategy and structure of Japanese manufacturing corporations the authors discover the essential features and strength of Japanese management systems, their problems and new trends, and consider how management strategies have been developed for future success. This new, sophisticated analysis of Japanese manufacturing corporations, based on data from over two hundred corporations, will enable the reader to better understand Japanese management systems and their potential to lay a foundation for successful management systems throughout the world.

This book examines corporate reform in Japan by focusing on corporate governance and the employment system. Contrary to a prevailing assertion of radical change, it is revealed that actual change is gradual, and a new type of Japanese firm is generated by reform with gradual change. Throughout the book, Japanese firms are seen to be evolving through gradual institutional change. Chapter 1 discusses how Japanese corporate governance changed incrementally and cumulatively to rebuild management and restore corporate performance. Chapter 2 focuses on reform in work organization and discusses how performance-related pay was introduced in tandem with corporate governance reform. It is shown that the practice of long-term employment has been maintained despite the prolonged depression and mounting pressure to shift to shareholder-oriented corporate governance. Chapter 3 investigates how Japanese firms are diversified into four types, based on whether performance-related pay is introduced and whether long-term employment is maintained. The author demonstrates that major Japanese firms reconstruct their organization as hybrid structures based on a combination of long-term employment and performance-related pay. Chapter 4 investigates how performance-related pay actually operates. It is analyzed by distinguishing the three main objectives to be attained by performance pay: succeeding in individual performance, contributing to overall organization performance, and meeting the challenge of new tasks. Finally, Chapter 5 investigates how employees react to changes in corporate governance. Using survey data, the book shows that Japanese employees approve of increasing shareholder value, regarding it as corporate value. They not only approve the monitoring of management by shareholders, but also demand a part in the monitoring. Employees seek to be engaged in corporate governance—a true challenge for a Japanese corporation.

The perspectives of technologists, economists, and policymakers are brought together in this volume. It includes chapters dealing with approaches to assessment of technology leadership in the United States and Japan, an evaluation of future impacts of eroding U.S. technological preeminence, an analysis of the changing nature of technology-based global competition, and a discussion of policy options for the United States.

The crises--and failures--of modernization in Japan, as seen up close by a resident expert Japan is a nation in crisis, and the crisis goes far beyond its well-known economic plight. In Dogs and Demons, Alex Kerr chronicles the crisis on a broad scale, from the failure of Japan's banks and pension funds to the decline of its once magnificent modern cinema. The book takes up for the first time in the Western press subjects such as the nation's endangered environment--its seashores lined with concrete, its roads leading to nowhere in the mountains. It describes Japan's "monument frenzy," the destruction of old cities such as Kyoto and construction of drab new cities, and the attendant collapse of the tourist industry. All these unhealthy developments are, Kerr argues, the devastating boomerang effect of an educational and bureaucratic system designed to produce manufactured goods--and little else. A mere upturn in economic growth will not quickly remedy these severe internal problems, which Kerr calls a "failure of modernism." He assails the foreign experts who, often dependent on Japanese government and business support, fail to address these issues. Meanwhile, what of the Japanese people themselves? Kerr, a resident of Japan for thirty-five years, writes of them with humor and passion, for "passion," he says, "is part of the story. Millions of Japanese feel as heartbroken at what is going on as I do. My Japanese friends tell me, 'Please write this--for us.'"