ABSTRACT
During the 1970s and 1980s, the continued success of the economy encouraged the view that specific, perhaps unique, cultural and social forces were at work in Japan, encouraging thrift, hard work, loyalty to business enterprises, and responsiveness to the guidelines laid down by a growth-centred political system. With the slowing down of Japanese growth in the 1990s this sort of perspective faded, to be replaced by assertions concerning the failure of Japanese society to support a more mature, complex capitalist system. On one hand it was argued that the social characteristics of Japan are not of the sort that will sustain further expansions in the economy and in social welfare in the coming century. On the other hand, it was also suggested that economic growth has occurred too fast, at the cost of retardation in social and psychic welfare, that capitalist success has kept Japanese democracy at bay, and that Japan is a powerful example of the problems of aggressive capitalism – socially divisive and environmentally disastrous.
