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Gone are the days when Japan's achievements could be explained away by the litany of complaints that Western businessmen have been echoing since the early 1960s. No longer is Japan enjoying a competitive advantage from "modern" factories built in the early postwar years. True, new industrial facilities constructed on the ashes of bombed-out buildings gave Japan an advantage during the 1950s and early 1960s. But that was nearly 30 years ago. Japanese businesses in recent years have updated and improved their plants and factories and thus maintained their competitive advantage.
No longer does Japan win markets simply by holding down wages and exporting cheap products. Until the early 1960s, the country did have a low wage base, but today in Japan salaries are on a level with those of other leading industrial nations.
Critics are equally wrong when they charge that Japan succeeds only because it systematically blocks all competing foreign products from entering its domestic market. Such charges were undoubtedly true for at least a quarter century after World War II. The Japanese had a host of official and unofficial ways of holding down imports and promoting exports. Foreign businessmen faced high tariffs and found it difficult to market their goods through the country's very complicated distribution system. "Buy Japanese" was a strong, if unspoken, practice. American businessmen also accused the Japanese of "dumping," or selling their products at a loss just to expand their market shares. In 1979 the U.S. Treasury found that Japanese companies were, in fact, dumping color television sets. But the Japanese, under heavy pressure from the U.S., have generally ceased such practices, and reduced their tariffs and import quotas.
Nor is there much to the argument that Japan is getting a "free ride" on the coattails of U.S. defense spending. For many years that was true. By relying on the U.S. to provide for its protection Japan kept its armed forces small and saved billions of dollars annually in defense expenditures. The savings were spent on bolstering the growth of industry. But in the past decade, Japan's defense establishment has grown to the eighth largest on earth. Indeed, U.S. arms manufacturers and aerospace firms are beginning to worry that Japan could eventually emerge as a major competitor in export markets that the U.S. has so far had almost to itself.
As scholars of Japan's business and economic triumphs are now learning, much of that country's success traces back to cultural traits as old as Japan itself. They have helped it survive through a history marked at every turn by the need to function in a world of scarce resources. Those key national traits:
EMULATION. Few nations have so sought out and used the best from other societies as Japan. In a sense Japan has become "the best of all possible worlds." Examples abound of the copycat-Japan theme. In 1543 shipwrecked Portuguese mariners went ashore on the Japanese island of Tanegashima and traded a few firearms in return for food and water from the locals, who had never before encountered either Westerners or their weapons. Thirty years later one of the sailors returned to the island, and this time found the populace armed with 20,000 guns, each an exact replica of that original weapon.
In Japan's