Japan's Technological Challenge to the West

Japan's postwar economic expansion has been admired as an economic miracle and praised for the phenomenal growth rates it engendered, a phenomenon that has enabled Japan's economy to become the world's third largest. Yet Japan's national income statistics, though quantitatively impressive, do not fully convey the true power of its economic vitality. What the Japanese strove to attain was not so much the growth of output per se as an improved content and mix of output. They have struggled to cast off the old stigma of being shoddy producers and to achieve a world-wide reputation as high-quality manufacturers. Indeed, the Japanese have long been, and still are, obsessed with an incessant desire to catch up with and eventually to surpass the West in industrial performance. If there is anything that can be identified as the elan vital of the Japanese economy, it is this obsessive drive to compete with the West.1 This peculiar social trait stems from the century-old inferiority complex that has motivated Japan since it was forced open for commerce under unequal treaties with the West in the 1850s. As a way to prove to the world that they were a civilized people, the Japanese tried feverishly to learn Western ways. The Westernization efforts they made in those days are best described by G. B. Sansom

Economic history · Political science · History · Japanese History and Culture