Japan's Interventionist State gives a detailed examination of Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and its role in promoting, protecting and preserving the regime of agricultural support and protection. This account is integral to the author's extended and multidimensional explanation for why Japan continues to provide high levels of assistance to its farmers and why it continues to block market access concessions in the WTO and other agricultural trade talks.

Japan's regional geoeconomic strategy -- Foreign economic policy, domestic institutions and regional governance -- Geoeconomics of the Asia-Pacific -- Transformation in the Japanese political economy -- Trade and investment : a gradual path -- Money and finance : an uneven path -- Development and foreign aid : a hybrid path.

Developmental state, n.: the government, motivated by desire for economic advancement, intervenes in industrial affairs. The notion of the developmental state has come under attack in recent years. Critics charge that Japan's success in putting this notion into practice has not been replicated elsewhere, that the concept threatens the purity of freemarket economics, and that its shortcomings have led to financial turmoil in Asia. In this informative and thought-provoking book, a team of distinguished scholars revisits this notion to assess its continuing utility and establish a common vocabulary for debates on these issues. Drawing on new political and economic theories and emphasizing recent events, the authors examine the East Asian experience to show how the developmental state involves a combination of political, bureaucratic, and moneyed influences that shape economic life in the region. Taking as its point of departure Chalmers Johnson's account of the Japanese developmental state, the book explores the interplay of forces that have determined the structure of opportunity in the region. The authors critically address the argument for centralized political involvement in industrial development (with a new contribution by Johnson), describe the historical impact of colonialism and the Cold War, consider new ideas in economics, and compare the experiences of East Asian countries with those of France, Brazil, Mexico, and India.

The first complete narrative of Japan's Siberian Intervention in either Japanese or English placing the intervention in the context of the evolution of Japanese imperialism and of its domestic politics. It represents a missing link in the larger narrative of Japan's quest for modernity through empire and the ambivalent relationship of the Japanese with their imperial mission.

A 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Japan's challenges and opportunities in a new era of uncertainty Henry Kissinger wrote a few years ago that Japan has been for seven decades “an important anchor of Asian stability and global peace and prosperity.” However, Japan has only played this anchoring role within an American-led liberal international order built from the ashes of World War II. Now that order itself is under siege, not just from illiberal forces such as China and Russia but from its very core, the United States under Donald Trump. The already evident damage to that order, and even its possible collapse, pose particular challenges for Japan, as explored in this book. Noted experts survey the difficult position that Japan finds itself in, both abroad and at home. The weakening of the rules-based order threatens the very basis of Japan's trade-based prosperity, with the unreliability of U.S. protection leaving Japan vulnerable to an economic and technological superpower in China and at heightened risk from a nuclear North Korea. Japan's response to such challenges are complicated by controversies over constitutional revision and the dark aspects of its history that remain a source of tension with its neighbors. The absence of virulent strains of populism have helped to provide Japan with a stable platform from which to pursue its international agenda. Yet with a rapidly aging population, widening intergenerational inequality, and high levels of public debt, the sources of Japan's stability—its welfare state and immigration policies—are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Each of the book's chapters is written by a specialist in the field, and the book benefits from interviews with more than 40 Japanese policymakers and experts, as well as a public opinion survey. The book outlines today's challenges to the liberal international order, proposes a role for Japan to uphold, reform and shape the order, and examines Japan's assets as well as constraints as it seeks to play the role of a proactive stabilizer in the Asia-Pacific.

The focus of this book is on the Japanese economic bureaucracy, particularly on the famous Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), as the leading state actor in the economy. Although MITI was not the only important agent affecting the economy, nor was the state as a whole always predominant, I do not want to be overly modest about the importance of this subject. The particular speed, form, and consequences of Japanese economic growth are not intelligible without reference to the contributions of MITI. Collaboration between the state and big business has long been acknowledged as the defining characteristic of the Japanese economic system, but for too long the state's role in this collaboration has been either condemned as overweening or dismissed as merely supportive, without anyone's ever analyzing the matter. The history of MITI is central to the economic and political history of modern Japan. Equally important, however, the methods and achievements of the Japanese economic bureaucracy are central to the continuing debate between advocates of the communist-type command economies and advocates of the Western-type mixed market economies. The fully bureaucratized command economies misallocate resources and stifle initiative; in order to function at all, they must lock up their populations behind iron curtains or other more or less impermeable barriers. The mixed market economies struggle to find ways to intrude politically determined priorities into their market systems without catching a bad case of the "English disease" or being frustrated by the American-type legal sprawl. The Japanese, of course, do not have all the answers. But given the fact that virtually all solutions to any of the critical problems of the late twentieth century--energy supply, environmental protection, technological innovation, and so forth--involve an expansion of official bureaucracy, the particular Japanese priorities and procedures are instructive. At the very least they should forewarn a foreign observer that the Japanese achievements were not won without a price being paid.

Over the postwar period, the scope of industrial policy has expanded markedly. Governments in virtually all advanced industrial countries have extended the visible hand of the state in assisting specific industries or individual companies. Although greater government involvement in some countries has lessened the dislocations brought about by slower growth rates, industrial policy has also caused or exacerbated a number of other problems, including distortions in the allocation of capital and labor and trade conflicts that undermine the postwar system of free trade. Only Japan is widely cited as an unambiguous success story. The effectiveness of its industrial policy is revealed in the successful emergence of one government-targeted industry after another as world-class competitors: for example, steel, automobiles, and semiconductors. Foreign countries fear that a number of still-developing industries—like biotechnology, telecommunications, and information processing—will follow the same pattern. But is industrial policy the main reason for Japan's economic achievements? The author asserts that the reasons for Japan's spectacular track record go well beyond the realm of industrial policy into broad areas of the political economy as a whole. In this book, the author attempts to identify the reasons for the comparative effectiveness of Japanese industrial policy for high technology by answering the following questions: What is the attitude of Japanese leaders toward state intervention in the marketplace? What is the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) doing to promote the development of high technology? How has the organization of the private sector contributed to MITI's capacity to intervene effectively? What elements in Japan's political system help insulate industrial policymaking from the demands of interest-group politics?