ABSTRACT
The first full phase of Japan’s postwar economic ‘miracle’ was shaped by the immediate postwar recovery and rapid growth of the 1950s and 1960s, making the country an economic power of consequence. This phase ended with the oil crisis of 1973. Paradoxically, the second phase occurred during – and was even made possible by – the global recession in the latter half of the 1970s, when the world economy was subject to multiple strains; and Japan, possibly the most vulnerable of the industrial economies, appeared to present itself as ‘a fragile blossom.’
