‘Beyond the Galapagos Syndrome’: Mapping the Future of UK-Japan Economic Cooperation Luke Cavanaugh (ed.), Olivia Bisbee, Owain Cooke, Kezzie Florin-Sefton, Elizabeth Steel
There was, however, a brief hiatus in the opening up of Japan during the late 1970s and 1980s, where a form of Japanese isolationism, and a belief in its inherent uniqueness re-emerged within its foreign and economic policy.8 Such a belief has been expressed in the term Nihonjinron, that is, (as described by David Pilling) ‘a treatise on what makes Japan separate’. 9 This doctrine suggests that there is a pure Japanese essence that cannot and should not be distilled by interacting with other nations. The peak in the Japanese economy that had been felt during the post war boom was, as Laura Hein puts it, a ‘validating feature of national culture’ which promoted the idea of Japanese uniqueness. 10 However, during the economic downturn felt in the 1990s, this belief lost credibility. Cultural nationalism associated with the Nihonjinron doctrine became mainly confined to books, performative displays and military outlooks, whilst economic policy shifted more towards neoliberal models adopted by other parts of the world. All the way until the beginning of the 1990s, most Japanese companies operated under a system known as ‘zaibatsu’ whereby a company sticks to the same contractors that they have previously used, even if they could not match the prices offered by current competition.11 Cross-mutual shareholding was also effectively phased out in Japan during the 1990s. 12 Such a transition within their economy meant Japan was now operating on a much more similar plane to Britain. Yoshio Sugimoto summarises this transition in the last decade of the 20th century, emphasising that there was a realisation within Japan that ‘the representation of Japanese society as one with an impenetrable mystique backfired and proved counter-productive’; the isolationism that had served
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Laura Hein, The Cultural Career of the Japanese Economy, (2008) Third World Quarterly, Vol 29, Issue 3 David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (Penguin 2014) 10 Laura Hein, The Cultural Career of the Japanese Economy, (2008) Third World Quarterly, Vol 29, Issue 3 11 Alan McFarlane, Japan Through the Looking Glass, (Profile Books 2008) 12 Hideaki Miyajima, The Unwinding of Cross-Shareholding in Japan: Causes, Effects and Implications, (SSRN< 2005) 9
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