ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the new material that reflects both the direction of research in Japanese economic history and its shifting frame of reference within the study of global and comparative development. It explains the approaches of development theorists and those of economic historians. In development studies, what had once been seen as the Japanese model of catch-up industrialisation increasingly came to be treated as the basis for Japan's lead role in the wider success story of late twentieth-century east Asia. The Japanese model had metamorphosed into what economic historians were to label the labour-intensive path, held to explain the eventual diffusion of industrialisation through much of the region and beyond. The tools of non-Marxist analysis of development had been substantially refined and it was these that were utilised to construct the Japanese model of economic development.
