A sort of in-bred deference to authority enabled Tokyo bureaucrats to implement policies without concern with second guesses, or debate, from those they regulated. Their high savings rate is one result. Patient, knowing the firm continues even after an individual dies, Japanese managers can wait a decade or more to recover investments in new plants, machines and technologies. Interesting, maybe, and worth an embarrassingly sophomoric book and movie from Michael Crichton. But none of this explains anything.
Culture is obviously an important factor in influencing individuals' behavior in society.
Return to Top of page. The appeal of Japan's special-ness diminished in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with the performance of the domestic economy. Although Neff differentiated revisionists from an academic and political policy establishment which considered Japan a maturing liberal democracy on course to become exactly like the US and other Western countries, it seemed to take on another meaning, too. Revisionism, though, applied mostly to matters of Western governmental policy. The underlying assumption that Japan represented something special remained, even as the appeal of imitating it faded.