The political economy of Japan; Financial politics in Contemporary Japan; Law and social change in Postwar Japan

When I volunteered to review these three books, I had a vague notion that despite the books' different subjects, considered together they might reveal the state of our knowledge about Japanese political economy. I assumed that the Yamamura/Yasuba edition would offer an objective, neoclassical interpretation of the political economy of Japan. Frances Rosenbluth's Financial Politics in Contemporary Japan, I thought, would open up the guts of the cooperative workings between state and private capital. And Frank Upham's Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan would disclose how the legal structure legitimated the more tawdry social effects of Japan's capitalist system. Now, having ploughed through the user-unfriendly terrain of Yamamura/Yasuba and Rosenbluth, a variation of Alice in Wonderland's rhetorical question, “How do you know what you want to read until you read it?” comes readily to mind. Upham's work, however, vindicates one of my three assumptions

Economics · Economy · Interpretation (philosophy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rhetorical question · Sociology · State (computer science · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Political Economy and Marxism