ABSTRACT
Each society has a distinct process of development. Post-war Japan has been, in many ways, one of the fastest moving societies in the world. The development of Japanese society is unique among other industrial nations in that it progressed from an agricultural society to a technologically-advanced industrial one in a relatively short period of time. From 1955 to the first oil crisis in 1973, the Japanese economy enjoyed an average annual growth of 10%, a rate unparalleled in the Western world (Berggren and Nomura, 1997). The national goal in the 1960s was explicitly high-speed economic growth with the slogan, loubei ni, oitsuke, oikose ’ [catch up and overtake Europe and America],
Despite the recession in the early 1970s, the Japanese economy recovered quickly and entered a second period of prosperity in the 1980s with successful industrial restructuring. In the second half of the 1980s, Japan enjoyed a new period of high economic growth, peaking at 5.6% in the fiscal year 1990 - this period is known as the ‘bubble-economy’.1 Since the steep decline in the stock market, and the bursting of the speculative real estate bubble in the early 1990s, Japan has been suffering its most serious recession since the Second World War (https://www.jinjapan.org/insight/ html/, 28 May 1998). For the first time since 1974, Japan’s economy shrank by 0.7% during the fiscal year 1997 (BBC News, 12 June 1998).
