Japanese-style management and industrial policy are shown to serve as a source of industrial dynamism and are used as a way to illminate what is wrong with the American system. Japanese labor practices-specifically extra hours of unpaid work-are seen as a form of insurance fee that the worker pays in exchange for job security.
recently asked the Japanese media to avoid belligerent terminology -expressions like 'beef war,' 'attack' and 'counterattack' -in reporting bilateral trade issues. 'Search for some new metaphors,' he said.It is going too far to say that with the Cold War over, Japan and the United States are now engaged in World War IV, as well-known business consultant and author Kenichi Omae wrote in a January magazine article. Nevertheless, the two countries are undeniably at loggerheads.Despite the yen's appreciation against the dollar since October 1985 and several rounds of negotiations, the annual U.S. trade deficit with Japan threatens to remain at the $50 billion level.Japanese corporations, loaded with excess cash thanks to a booming economy, have stirred antagonism in America with purchases of trophy real estate, Columbia Pictures and famous works of art.Sony chairman Akio Morita and politician Shintaro Ishihara, co-authors of 'The Japan that Can Say No,' have championed Japan's cause. Ishihara and his allies argue vigorously that U.S. shortsightedness and self-indulgence are mainly responsible for the trade imbalance.The American side is represented by the so-called revisionists -political scientist Chalmers Johnson of the University of California at San Diego, former Commerce Department official Clyde Prestowitz and journalists James Fallows and Karel van Wolfern, who is Dutch. They claim that Japan's political and economic systems are fundamentally dissimilar from those of the United States, and Tokyo must be treated differently from other industrialized countries.I belong to neither camp, nor do I think that friction is inevitable as the two economies grow more lOS Press Human Systems Management 9 (1990) 199-200
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.