Japanese Workplaces in Transition

Japanese companies and Japanese styles of management attracted attention from business leaders and scholars and even the general public around the world when, after Japan achieved an “economic miracle,” the then Harvard University sociology professor Ezra F. Vogel (1979) extoled the nation in the late 1970s by using the expression: “Japan as number one.” The Japanese economy rose from the ashes after World War II and enjoyed high growth throughout the 1960s, achieving an average annual growth in gross domestic product (GDP)—the value of all goods and services a nation generates—of about 10 percent. During the same period, Japanese companies gained a large share of the global market for products such as automobiles, motorcycles, electrical appliances, precision instruments, textiles, steel, and shipbuilding. The nation expanded sufficiently to become the world’s second largest economy after the United States in 1968. During the 1970s, the US’s trade imbalance with Japan approached 10 billion dollars a year. The term “Japanese economic miracle” was coined in reference to the nation’s spectacular postwar economic growth.