ABSTRACT
The capitalist world system consists of three structural positions: core, semi-periphery, and periphery. The concentration of wealth in the core allowed the core countries to function as centers of global capital accumulation and maintain internal social peace without compromising capitalist profits. Despite their important functions for the global capitalist economy, few semi-peripheral countries have ever succeeded in eventually “graduating” into the core. The new East Asian order under the US hegemony also created favorable geopolitical conditions for Japan’s capitalist accumulation. By the 1970s, Japan had completed the spectacular transition from the semi-periphery to the core. The combination of cheap labor and strong state support helped Japan to become one of the world’s leading cotton textile manufacturers in the early twentieth century. Japan’s machinery industry was equipped with the latest machine tools that were younger than those in Britain or the United States.
