Afterward
October 1999
Four years have passed since writing this thesis, and the economies of many East Asian nations have slipped into economic recession or worse. The Japanese government so far has failed with its "big-bang" reforms to restructure the bureaucracy and aid the economy; and only three Japanese banks remain of a total of eight ranked in the top ten five years ago. Meanwhile, the economies of America and Britain have revived and are now leading the information-technology driven economy at the close of the twentieth century.
During this period of Asian recession and Anglo-American resurgence, I have worked with
Japanese primary and secondary school teachers, and college professors, and I have seen
their attitudes change accordingly. A primary school teacher exclaimed several months
ago that "the Japan as Number One age is over," and,
"America has won the battle again." Other teachers have asked me more frequently
about American schools' management methods, counseling and community volunteer programs.
Their concerns are related in part to the increasing number of "school refusers"
(students who refuse to go to school for months and years at a time). People throughout
the production-management spectrum seem to be losing faith in the traditional in-company
approach to everything.
Certainly many factors besides effective factory management determine the health of a
national economy. Poor management of financial institutions can ruin the most efficient
and concerted efforts of any factory. While cooperative, trusting relationships led
to continuous improvement (kaizen) in their world-famous Quality
Control (QC) circles on the factory floor, over-trusting
relationships, between upper-level managers, financiers, bureaucrats, contributed to bad
informal loans and lost capital reserves. "Asian crony capitalism," as it
has come to be called in the West recently, has helped to dispel the mystique of the
"Confucian capitalism" during the Japan as Number One
years, but the impact of post Second World War Japan on the west's popular views of
labor/management relations and production management remains significant.
Between a nearly two decade period between the late 1970s to the late 1990s, popular perceptions of Japanese management in Western countries led to campaigns by leaders of industry and government to incorporate aspects of Japanese-style methods into their management downsizing schemes. National awards rewarding companies implementing these techniques have led to international standards which require regular audits of western firms using of Japanese-inspired management methods. Most of the prominent awards and standards now even have sites on the internet. In North America, the corporate sponsored Shigeo Shingo Prize http://www.usu.edu/~shingo/; the Senate-sponsored Baldridge Award http://www.quality.nist.gov/tos.htm; related TQM sites at the Air Force http://www.afcqmi.randolph.af.mil/, the Army http://www.pica.army.mil/ardec/tqm/top.html, NASA http://cis-www.larc.nasa.gov/, the Federal Government http://www.opm.gov/quality/. In Europe, Britain's BS5750 standard and the most recent international agreement, the ISO9000 and ISO9001 is at http://www.isonet.com/informat.htm. Major car manufacturers in North America and Europe helped design these standards and are already requiring the auditing of their company subsidiaries.
This thesis sought to dig beneath the facade of the Japanization phenomena and see what sort of creative adaptive process was at work in Britain, a country farthest from Japan on the world historical time line since the industrial age. Numerous case studies, national surveys, and a look at management in the public schools in England and Japan during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries still reveal that Japanization in Britain entailed creative interpretation of Japanese management concepts. After decades of British labor-management dysfunction culminating in the popular notion that British institutions were 'diseased,' the British leadership and public was ready to use anything as an excuse for changing the system as it was. The Japanese "economic miracle" and related management concepts served the purpose. By 1996, the Japanese terms management terms kaizen and kanban had even found their way into the Oxford English dictionary. Certainly, the terms exude more of the British nuance than the original Japanese; but, nevertheless, they signify something new.
The Japanization episode represents a transition between an age of a nationally-directed world economics and the multi-national corporate driven Global Economy at the end of the twentieth century. It shows that the dimensions of change in the post-industrial age has become increasingly multifaceted and global. Two thousand years after Asian and European economies began interacting during the "Common Era" of the Roman and Han Chinese empires, almost full integration has taken place. The Japanization episode in the west, in light of recent events in Asian economies in the late 1990s, shows that change in the industrial age, to quote Ronald Dore, has been less a "Darwinian Contest" of competing systems than a creative evolution of a variety of models. At the end of the twentieth century, while factories in western nations still subscribe to Japanese-rooted models of production management in attempt to resolve labor-management problems, Japanese banks and their conglomerates are looking for Western models for financial reform and Japan is still the largest creditor nation in the world. Case studies of cross-cultural encounters and exchanges of ideas in the twentieth century Global Economy may at least contribute to progress in solving two-centuries old social-technological-institutional dilemmas. [186]
FOOTNOTES
[186] Two recently published works by David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and Gunder Frank, Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, (especially Frank's review of Landes' book), spawned one of the most lively debates among historians in recent years on the open forum of two H-Humanities list-serves, H-World and H-Asia. Nevertheless, the debate remained limited to the question of why Europe or Asia was more dominant or superior in world history. [back to text]