ABSTRACT
A growing number of recent studies in English and in Japanese have focused on how, since the early 1970s, the Japanese labor movement has been “incorporated” into the policy networks that generate public policy in Japan and how, in the process, the Japanese labor movement has metamorphosed from an excluded opposition group into an increasingly important insider. As a direct consequence of these studies, the earlier image of Japan as a system of “corporatism without labor” appears on the verge of being replaced by one that—if not “corporatist” per se—is either increasingly taking on the attributes of corporatism or constitutes a functional equivalent thereof. 1
