But the recently released Examining Japan's Lost Decades is brain food for those involved in Japanese business.
Only every few decades does a seminal work on Japan appear.
Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in 1946 must surely be one of them. Ezra Vogel’s Japan as No 1 written in 1979 is another. But the recently released Examining Japan’s Lost Decades is brain food for those involved in Japanese business.
Launched in Australia last week as part of the State of the Nation: Japan series hosted by Asialink Business and AJBCC member company PwC, this analysis is edited by Yoichi Funabashi, Chairman of the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation and a former editor-in-chief of the Asahi newspaper, together with Barak Kushner, Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Although there are many interesting chapters, the discussion about:
- Japan’s working elderly: a success story, in the chapter by Seike Atsushi, Japan’s demographic collapse
- Toyama Kuzuhiko’s chapter, The curse of “Japan Inc” and Japan’s microeconomic competitiveness
- Kariya Takehiko’s, The two lost decades in education
are all areas which have potential opportunities or implications for Australian Japan business.
In an especially incisive chapter Funabashi’s Something has been ‘lost’ from our future summarises what he sees as the five features of the lost decades.