Digital transformation and demographic change are usually seen as two separate but equally threatening events that foreshadow job replacement, industrial decline, and social bifurcation. Because Japan is the world's frontrunner in demographic change with an ageing and shrinking society, it is facing these two disruptions at the exact same time. This creates a 'lucky moment,' as it presents an opportunity to employ one as a solution for the problems caused by the other. For example, Japan's traditional sectors are replaced by digital systems that demand fewer people while offering new jobs. Emerging technologies are opening fresh opportunities for Japanese companies to compete globally. The twin disruptions are also upending Japan's political economy. As companies reinvent business strategies and employees reskill to pursue individual careers, the state is reorganizing to find a new role in balancing the unfolding demands of the digital economy.

Explores the politics and economics of the Abe government and evaluates major policies, such as Abenomics policy reforms.

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.

Since World War II, Japan has become not only a model producer of high-tech consumer goods, but also-despite minimal spending on defense-a leader in innovative technology with both military and civilian uses. In the United States, nearly one in every three scientists and engineers was engaged in defense-related research and development at the end of the Cold War, but the relative strength of the American economy has declined in recent years. What is the relationship between what has happened in the two countries? And where did Japan's technological excellence come from? In an economic history that will arouse controversy on both sides of the Pacific, Richard J. Samuels finds a key to Japan's success in an ideology of technological development that advances national interests. From 1868 until 1945, the Japanese economy was fired by the development of technology to enhance national security; the rallying cry "Rich Nation, Strong Army" accompanied the expanded military spending and aggressive foreign policy that led to the disasters of the War in the Pacific. Postwar economic planners reversed the assumptions that had driven Japan's industrialization, Samuels shows, promoting instead the development of commercial technology and infrastructure. By valuing process improvements as much as product innovation, the modern Japanese system has built up the national capacity to innovate while ensuring that technological advances have been diffused broadly through industries such as aerospace that have both civilian and military applications. Struggling with the uncertainties of a post-Cold War economy, the United States has important lessons to learn from the way Japan has subordinated defense production yet emerged as one of the most technologically sophisticated nations in the world. The Japanese, like the Venetians and the Dutch before them, show us that butter is just as likely as guns to make a nation strong, but that nations cannot hope to be strong without an ideology of technological development that nourishes the entire national economy.

For students of international political economy, it is hard to ignore the growth, dynamism, and global impact of East Asia. Japan and China are two of the largest economies in the world, in a region now accounting for almost 30 percent more trade than the United States, Canada, and Mexico combined. What explains this increasing wealth and burgeoning power? In his new text, Ming Wan illustrates the diverse ways that the domestic politics and policies of countries within East Asia affect the region’s production, trade, exchange rates, and development, and are in turn affected by global market forces and international institutions. Unlike most other texts on East Asian political economy that are essentially comparisons of major individual countries, Wan effectively integrates key thematic issues and country-specific examples to present a comprehensive overview of East Asia’s role in the world economy. The text first takes a comparative look at the region’s economic systems and institutions to explore their evolution—a rich and complex story that looks beyond the response to Western pressures. Later chapters are organized around close examination of production, trade, finance, and monetary relations. While featuring extended discussion of China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, Wan is inclusive in his analysis, with coverage including Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. The text is richly illustrated with more than fifty tables, figures, and maps that present the latest economic and political data to help students better visualize trends and demographics. Each chapter ends with extensive lists of suggested readings.

Mired in national crises since the early 1990s, Japan has had to respond to a rapid population decline; the Asian and global financial crises; the 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown; the COVID-19 pandemic; China’s economic rise; threats from North Korea; and massive public debt. In Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State, established specialists in a variety of areas use a coherent set of methodologies, aligning their sociological, public policy, and political science and international relations perspectives, to account for discrepancies between official rhetoric and policy practice and actual perceptions of decline and crisis in contemporary Japan. Each chapter focuses on a distinct policy field to gauge the effectiveness and the implications of political responses through an analysis of how crises are narrated and used to justify policy interventions. Transcending boundaries between issue areas and domestic and international politics, these essays paint a dynamic picture of the contested but changing nature of social, economic, and, ultimately political institutions as they constitute the transforming Japanese state.

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.