ABSTRACT
The contributions to this Symposium on Japan present varied analytical perspectives that capture different economic realities during the past two decades and thus point to different prognoses for the economy. Implicit to each perspective is that the actors in question, whether government, business elites, or company managers, to some degree are part of the reason for the onset of the economic downturn, and each can play a role in helping the economy recover its vigor. In this sense, then, the key to understanding the significance of the lost decade is the appreciation of not only the constituent parts of the whole but what these parts mean when considered together.
