Japanese Resistance to American Financial Hegemony

Japanese Resistance to American Financial Hegemony
Author: Fumihito Gotoh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000672816

This book investigates why the convergence of Japan’s bank-centered financial system to an American-style capital market-based model has lost steam since the mid-2000s, despite financial deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s. Examining the ideational conflict within Japanese elites between the market liberalization and anti-free market camps, it scrutinizes the American and Japanese credit rating agencies operating in Tokyo and explores the differences between the two major industrial associations, Keidanren and Doyukai, which have played a key role as "ideational platforms" for Japanese corporate society. The book emphasizes the concept of "systemic support", whose broadened definition incorporates dominant elites’ support and protection of subordinates in exchange for the latter’s obedience and loyalty. It argues that Japanese society’s anti-liberal, anti-free market norms centered on systemic support are a form of counter-hegemony, and this has resisted American financial hegemony, promoting international capital mobility and capital markets, and prevented capitalist dominance from severing long-term social ties such as management-labor cooperation and corporate group alliances. Yet this resistance has generated growing problems for Japan. With a focus on social norms, bureaucracy, credit rating agencies, industrial associations and corporate governance, this book will provide useful insights for scholars and students of international political economy, sociology, cultural studies, and business studies.

Bankrupting the Enemy

Bankrupting the Enemy
Author: Edward Miller
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2012-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 161251118X

Award-winning author Edward S. Miller contends in this new work that the United States forced Japan into international bankruptcy to deter its aggression. While researching newly declassified records of the Treasury and Federal Reserve, Miller, a retired chief financial executive of a Fortune 500 resources corporation, uncovered just how much money mattered. Washington experts confidently predicted that the war in China would bankrupt Japan, not knowing that the Japanese government had a huge cache of dollars fraudulently hidden in New York. Once discovered, Japan scrambled to extract the money. But, Miller explains, in July 1941 President Roosevelt invoked a long-forgotten clause of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to freeze Japan s dollars and forbade it to sell its hoard of gold to the U.S. Treasury, the only open gold market after 1939. Roosevelt s temporary gambit to bring Japan to its senses, not its knees, was thwarted, however, by opportunistic bureaucrats. Dean Acheson, his handpicked administrator, slyly maneuvered to deny Japan the dollars needed to buy oil and other resources for war and for economic survival. Miller's lucid writing and thorough understanding of the complexities of international finance enable readers unfamiliar with financial concepts and terminology to grasp his explanation of the impact of U.S. economic policies on Japan. His review of thirty-seven studies of Japan's resource deficiencies begs the question of why no U.S. agency calculated the impact of the freeze on Japan's overall economy. His analysis of a massive OSS-State Department study of prewar Japan clearly demonstrates that the deprivations facing the Japanese people were the country to remain in financial limbo buttressed its choice of war at Pearl Harbor. Such a well-documented study is certain to be recognized for its significant contributions to the historiography of the origins of the Pacific War.

U.S.- Japan Relations

U.S.- Japan Relations
Author: Richard B. Finn
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 256
Release:
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781412840705

Japan's Financial Crisis

Japan's Financial Crisis
Author: Jennifer Amyx
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400849632

At the beginning of the 1990s, a massive speculative asset bubble burst in Japan, leaving the nation's banks with an enormous burden of nonperforming loans. Banking crises have become increasingly common across the globe, but what was distinctive about the Japanese case was the unusually long delay before the government intervened to aggressively address the bad debt problem. The postponed response by Japanese authorities to the nation's banking crisis has had enormous political and economic consequences for Japan as well as for the rest of the world. This book helps us understand the nature of the Japanese government's response while also providing important insights into why Japan seems unable to get its financial system back on track 13 years later. The book focuses on the role of policy networks in Japanese finance, showing with nuance and detail how Japan's Finance Ministry was embedded within the political and financial worlds, how that structure was similar to and different from that of its counterparts in other countries, and how the distinctive nature of Japan's institutional arrangements affected the capacity of the government to manage change. The book focuses in particular on two intervening variables that bring about a functional shift in the Finance Ministry's policy networks: domestic political change under coalition government and a dramatic rise in information requirements for effective regulation. As a result of change in these variables, networks that once enhanced policymaking capacity in Japanese finance became "paralyzing networks"--with disastrous results.

Japan's Financial Crisis and Its Parallels to U.S. Experience

Japan's Financial Crisis and Its Parallels to U.S. Experience
Author: Ryōichi Mikitani
Publisher: Peterson Institute
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780881322897

Japan is only one of many industrialized economies to suffer a financial crisis in the past 15 years, but it has suffered the most from its crisis--as measured in lost output and investment opportunities, and in the direct costs of clean-up. Comparing the response of Japanese policy in the 1990s to that of US monetary and financial policy to the American Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s sheds light on the reasons for this outcome. This volume was created by bringing together several leading academics from the United States and Japan--plus former senior policymakers from both countries--to discuss the challenges to Japanese financial and monetary policy in the 1990s. The papers address in turn both the monetary and financial aspects of the crisis, and the discussants bring together broad themes across the two countries' experiences. As the papers in this Special Report demonstrate, while the Japanese government's policy response to its banking crisis in the 1990s was slow in comparison to that of the US government a decade earlier, the underlying dynamics were similar. A combination of mismanaged partial deregulation and regulatory forebearance gave rise to the crisis and allowed it to deepen, and only the closure of some banks and injection of new capital into others began the resolution. The Bank of Japan's monetary policy from the late 1980s onward, however, was increasingly out of step with US or other developed country norms. In particular, the Bank of Japan's limited response to deflation after being granted independence in 1998 stands out as a dangerous and unusual stance.

Japan’s Decision For War In 1941: Some Enduring Lessons

Japan’s Decision For War In 1941: Some Enduring Lessons
Author: Dr. Jeffrey Record
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 105
Release: 2015-11-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786252961

Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decision-makers.

Japan's Financial Slump

Japan's Financial Slump
Author: Yasushi Suzuki
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2011-04-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0230307701

This book evaluates the salient features of Japanese relation-based banking, particularly in the post war period, and Anglo-American mode of banking to explain the nature and extent of transition failure that caused prolonged financial and economic slump in Japan.

United States-Japan Economic Relations

United States-Japan Economic Relations
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs. Subcommittee on International Finance, Trade, and Monetary Policy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 140
Release: 1987
Genre: Balance of trade
ISBN:

Yen!

Yen!
Author: Daniel Burstein
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1990
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

A single Japanese company, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, is worth more than IBM, AT&T, General Motors and G.E. combined. All of the world's largest banks are Japanese. These and other fascinating facts detail a subject vital to America.