ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s there appeared a genre of books which suggested a close connection between Japanese culture and Japan's postwar economic miracle. It says much about the thirst of the outside world for the secrets of this economic success that several of these books could be found on book stands at airports. Until the 1980s, much of the western world had either refused to take Japan's seemingly inexorable economic growth seriously or else had explained it away in terms of unfair trading and 'dumping', both of which practices the western world could outlaw, thereby returning Japan to the fold of developing economies.
