Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a historical tour of Japan's socio-economic changes over the last few centuries paying particular attention to industrialization. Materials contained in the book were originally made available to master-level students who took my course, Economic Development of Japan, from 1999 at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), Tokyo. The book contains no original research or new primary data. It is just a careful rearrangement of facts and analyses extracted from a large amount of existing literature mostly written in Japanese. But this can be the strength of the book. History proceeds as endless interaction between domestic factors and foreign influences, with the relative strength of each changing over time. Another feature of the book is ample discussion of the socio-political elements behind economic growth.