Suchergebnisse

According to the author, the Japanese government is not responsible for most of the invisible barriers to imports from other countries. Dismal American performance in the Japanese marketplace. Japanese inclination to see the world bifurcated into "Japanese" and "outsiders". This attitude and the social ties that bind the Japanese together as very real, ubiquitous barriers to foreign participation in the Japanese economy. (DÜI-Sen)

Many Japanese companies train their new employees according to a philosophy of "spiritualism," a set of ideas about human psychology and character development that inspired much of the country's pre‐war education. "Spiritualism's" debts to the Zen, Confucian and samurai traditions are quite apparent. It emphasizes social cooperation and responsibility, an acceptance of reality, and perseverance. Its educational methods emphasize specially constructed training experiences. As a case study in the anthropology of education, Japanese company spiritual education points to the value of (1) studying educational processes outside formal school systems; (2) considering native concepts of psychology in analyzing educational processes; (3) finding relationships between educational techniques and techniques found in religious conversion, psychological therapy, and social initiation; and (4) discovering avenues of education that proceed by non‐verbal means.

Large firms are deemed to have powered Japan's growth through their real successes in generating output, raising productivity, absorbing and creating innovations through large-scale R&D, and creating and developing "the Japanese management system" of industrial relations, internal decisionmaking and close intragroup affiliations. Big business plays a highly visible, broad political and social role, financing political leaders and their factions, influencing national economic and other policy, serving as a role model, and preaching its business ideology. It is a system of male managerial elites dealing on equal footing in carefully developed formal and informal networks with counterpart elites -- central government bureaucrats, elite politicians, and others holding power at the top of the pyramid of Japan's hierarchical society. Some characterize big business as the brain of Japan's economy. If that is the case, then small enterprise is the heart and the backbone of the economic, political, and social realms in Japan. In particular small-scale family enterprises have long been and continue to be a large and dynamic element in the political economy of Japan -- in entrepreneurship, job creation, output and political clout. Small business makes up the bottom two-thirds (or more) of Japan's social and economic pyramid.