Japan As Number One: Lessons for America (Japanese Edition)

Japan as Number One: Lessons for America Next year (2009) marks the nearly thirty year anniversary of Ezra Vogel's overview of the differences between Japanese and American industry. The book holds up very well and a first time reader will walk away with good insights into a still undiscovered and little known country, Japan. Vogel must have taken an enormous risk writing the book. He really broke all the rules, he spoke about an enemy, studied them in detail and then tried to tell his own country, to reflect and change. It is important to note the setting in which the book was written. According to Vogel, "In gross national product per person, Japan passed the United States in 1977 or 1978", page 21. Finding a situation like this must have been dire and an immediate investigation must have been called for. In my opinion Vogel did a good job at explaining, what happened, why and what to do. In hindsight it is disappointing that even after thirty years since its first publication; few of his insights have been further studied by western countries. For example: "the Shinkansen bullet trains are a model of passenger transportation that may yet influence American patterns as energy problems affect passenger car travel", p80 It is easy to label his work too positive toward all things Japanese, but it must be remembered that when one truly discovers through detailed study and observation a unique Japanese technique. It can be hard not to be in awe of it, as it may be something so simple but yet very powerful. That doesn't match anything in western logic and thinking. He could have focused on negative aspects of the culture but that was not the aim of the book. It was aimed at making the reader consider that Japan could overtake America as the number one economic power. As an American he saw what was happening to America and dared to share his insights by observing a key competitor, Japan. His positive view can be seen more as a worried observer wanting changing after discovering insights of a serious competitor, rather than coming across as loving all things Japanese. One must also put into perspective that Vogel's work is significant in that he put himself in a position to study the culture and tried to explain it to a western audience. Added to this one must also consider just how difficult it is for westerners to truly enter Japanese society. Vogel's lifetime of study, can hardly be compared in the same breath as a short term expat experience in the modern era. Yes, Japan has changed over the past thirty years and the current economic situation is vastly different. Will Japan prosper in the future, who knows? I personally don't agree with all his observations but I do credit his detail and insight. If one looks at the key premises of the book, it is not the systems that makes Japan unique and of interest, but the stability of the culture to adapt and keep changing. A key point that keeps recurring throughout the book is just how formidable

Next year (2009) marks the nearly thirty year anniversary of Ezra Vogel's overview of the differences between Japanese and American industry. The book holds up very well and a first time reader will walk away with good insights into a still undiscovered and little known country, Japan. Vogel must have taken an enormous risk writing the book. He really broke all the rules, he spoke about an enemy, studied them in detail and then tried to tell his own country, to reflect and change. It is important to note the setting in which the book was written. According to Vogel, "In gross national product per person, Japan passed the United States in 1977 or 1978", page 21. Finding a situation like this must have been dire and an immediate investigation must have been called for. In my opinion Vogel did a good job at explaining, what happened, why and what to do. In hindsight it is disappointing that even after thirty years since its first publication; few of his insights have been further studied by western countries. For example: "the Shinkansen bullet trains are a model of passenger transportation that may yet influence American patterns as energy problems affect passenger car travel", p80 It is easy to label his work too positive toward all things Japanese, but it must be remembered that when one truly discovers through detailed study and observation a unique Japanese technique. It can be hard not to be in awe of it, as it may be something so simple but yet very powerful that doesn't match anything in western logic and thinking. He could have focused on negative aspects of the culture but that was not the aim of the book. It was aimed at making the reader consider that Japan could overtake America as the number one economic power. As an American he saw what was happening to America and dared to share his insights by observing a key competitor, Japan. His positive view can be seen more as a worried observer wanting changing after discovering insights of a serious competitor, rather than coming across as loving all things Japanese. One must also put into perspective that Vogel's work is significant in that he put himself in a position to study the culture and tried to explain it to a western audience. Added to this one must also consider just how difficult it is for westerners to truly enter Japanese society. Vogel's lifetime of study, can hardly be compared in the same breath as a short term expat experience in the modern era. Yes, Japan has changed over the past thirty years and the current economic situation is vastly different. Will Japan prosper in the future, who knows? I personally don't agree with all his observations but I do credit his detail and insight. If one looks at the key premises of the book, it is not the systems that makes Japan unique and of interest, but the stability of the culture to adapt and keep changing. A key point that keeps recurring throughout the book is just how formidable the Japanese are as competitors, "very flex

I have just finished Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One and I found it a surprisingly good book. I say surprisingly good because I had some preconceived notions about the book without having even read it. I thought that it was full of cliches, that it was too positive about Japan and that it ignored the bad aspects of Japanese economy and society, that it wasn't based on serious research and that one could only learn distorted lessons from it. And in a way all these criticisms proved to be true: the cliches in the book are those generalizations that Japanese love to repeat about themselves, especially in the presence of foreigners; painting a rosy picture was all too natural for a country that had experienced more than two decades of unprecedented growth and overcome the first oil shock; most of the structural weaknesses of the Japanese economy were not already visible (although the book does pinpoint social weaknesses), Western scholars who had studied contemporary Japan were only a handful, and the knowledge base was very thin; and the book proved too pessimistic in its depiction of American ills that it thought could be cured by drawing lessons from the Japanese model. So what makes it a good book? First, one has to consider the date when it was published: 1979. At that time, an academic pretending that Japan was a number one nation may only have invited incredulity and bewilderment. Americans knew very little about Japan or, if they did, were mostly attracted to the traditional aspects of its culture and national character. But here was a book that was telling the general public that "Japan has dealt more successfully with more of the basic problems of postindustrial society than any other country", and that "Japanese success had less to do with traditional character traits than with specific organizational structures, policy programs, and conscious planning" that America would do well to imitate. One can barely imagine how new and provocative these statements were at that time. But the book came to define the zeitgeist of the following decade, when learning from Japan was all the rage. Second, at a time when little was known about Japan, the book gathered an impressive array of knowledge spanning all aspects of Japanese economy and society. This knowledge formed the conventional wisdom about Japan that was to be echoed and amplified in numerous publications, seminars, and everyday conversations. Most of this conventional wisdom is no longer true, and some wasn't even accurate at the time the book was published, but these generalizations inherited from the past still influence the beliefs that foreigners entertain about Japan or the image that Japanese hold about themselves. People who specialize in contemporary Japan will only ignore them at their peril. Third, although the lessons for America that Vogel identified some thirty years ago may no longer hold, the idea that Japan has lessons for other countries is still as true today as when

Written in 1979 before the world new just how big that little country on the edge of Asia was going to be, this book prefigured the realisation if not the reality of Japan's rise to economic power by a decade. In that decade many more 'Japan Hype' books came out, and a decade or two later the "Japanese miracle" is seen as a debacle. But Japanese economy remains the second largest in the world and there are still lessons to be learned from the Japanese in various areas such as education (still doing far better than the US despite the lack of inter-school competition), public safety (still way up at the top of the OECD tables), and manufacturing technology and management. Japan has its problems, and so does the US, but who would have thought, when this book was written, that the Japanese economy and Japanese way, would compare almost on a par with that of the USA some thirty years later? Which economy will turn out to be 'number one' is still open to debate, but as a book that started the debate, it deserves to be read for its insight. Furthermore, despite the initial postwar success of the Japanese economy the Japanese have and continue to import Western economic, educational and management systems wholesale, with decreasing sucess. Who knows, perhaps if this book had been read *more* in Japan, and the Japanese had more confidence in their own convictions, the Japanese way might even still be flourishing. The Japanese themselves, increasingly nationalist and increasingly self-confident, are starting to think so.