Introduction

This book is a sequel to the Marshall Lectures I delivered at Cambridge University in March 1981, under the title of Economy and Ideology. These lectures were published one year later, under the revised title of Why Has Japan ‘Succeeded’?(1982) (referred to as WHJS hereafter). At that time Japan was literally in the midst of success, and no doubt the readers of the book took the view that the revised title was a reflection of this fact. It was, in fact, associated with my statement in the Preface of the book that ‘Success in one respect is closely connected to failure in another, and success and failure are often achieved in conjunction with each other.’ Though this is put in a static or timeless relationship, it may represent a dynamic one with time lags, namely that failure at one point in time will lead to success at a subsequent point in time, or vice versa. Including the word succeeded in the title in inverted commas was aimed at highlighting the fact that even in the period up to 1981 success was already closely associated with failure. That is to say, the main theme of the book was to attempt to clarify that those respects in which Japan has been successful, are closely related with those in which she has met with failure, and to ask why this has been the case. However, the main thrust of the present book is not the fateful interaction of cases of success and failure, but the dynamic relationship between the overall success, which was the subject of the earlier volume and the subsequent overall failure, which I aim to consider in this one. To be more exact, what I am concerned with here is why the success of Japan, which continued for a short time after the publication of my book mentioned above, came to a standstill in the 1990s, and why we should take the view that it is unlikely to recover in the twenty-first century, and will instead gradually slide down into the depths.