Hunter, Janet () (The London School of Economics and Political Science)
Abstract
The substantial institutional and organisational changes in Japan that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868 have often gone down in history as an unmitigated success story. The objective of this paper is to analyse the course of the Meiji reform process to indicate how far it might offer any lessons for institutional and organisational reform in Japan at the start of the twenty-first century. I argue that the reality of the Meiji transformation was invariably more problematic than the successful image often portrayed. Analysis of the Meiji experience of three key areas at the heart of current debates in Japan financial institutions, business enterprise and the labour market suggests that in all three cases the process of institutional and organisational change before the First World War was slow and sporadic. The transformation was stimulated by a sense of national urgency and driven by political will. I suggest that great caution needs to be exercised in drawing any lessons for contemporary Japan from the Meiji experience, but that the analysis suggests firstly that it is unrealistic to expect fundamental institutional change within a very short time span, and secondly that the relative merits of importing new institutions and modifying existing ones are rarely clear cut. A further key difference between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries is also the nature of the global economy, and Japan’s radically different position within it.
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by The European Institute of Japanese Studies in its series EIJS Working Paper Series with number
203.
Length: 21 pages Date of creation: 11 Oct 2004 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:hhs:eijswp:0203
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Find related papers by JEL classification: N15 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Growth and Fluctuations - - - Asia including Middle East P16 - Economic Systems - - Capitalist Systems - - - Political Economy of Capitalism
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