Japan's Capitalism: Creative Defeat and Beyond.

• Author: Bronfenbrenner, Martin

Professor Tsuru "mattered" at the highest levels for his country's economic policymaking as a young man in his middle 30s, during the "New Deal" phase of the American Occupation and especially during the Katayama (Socialist) cabinet of 1947-48. As Director of the Economic Stabilization Board and as President of Hitotsubashi University he was by all odds the single most important Japanese economist in Japan, thanks to his mastery of Marxian and Keynesian economics, his command of English, an American education culminating in a Harvard doctorate, and his record of opposition to Japanese militarism and imperialism. With the subsequent "reverse course" and eventual ending of the Occupation followed by an unbroken succession of conservative cabinets in post-Occupation Japan, Tsuru continues to matter, but to matter somewhat less than he once did. He is a--but seldom the--spokesman for the Japanese Left Opposition in economic matters. (Professor Mark Perlman of Pittsburgh provides a biographical introduction to Tsuru and his work at pp. 267-70 of Japan's Capitalism.) Japan's Capitalism is the product of at least five years of Tsuru's later life, thought, and study, beginning in 1986 and ending apparently in 1991. Despite its title, it is concerned hardly at all with the nature and significance of the various similarities and differences between capitalism in Japan and capitalism in other countries. Instead, it gives the impression of combining two shorter books into a single longer one. Chapters 1-4 form an excellent if seldom "neutral" account of Japan's postwar economic history, from the Surrender of 1945 through recovery and "economic miracle" to its apogee in 1971. Chapters 6-8 provide diagnoses of and prescriptions for Japan's contemporary economic problems as Tsuru sees them: environmental pollution and the quality of life; the use of Japan's corporate surpluses; the planning of a welfare-maximizing convergence between market capitalism and socialist planning. Chapter 5, primarily on the oil shocks of the 1970s, is a bridge between the four earlier chapters and the three later ones.

Where many other writers would exaggerate their own originalities, Tsuru prides himself on his intellectual debts. His principal creditors are clearly Marx, Keynes, and Schumpeter; somewhat less significant are Boulding, Leontief, Kaldor, Sweezy, and Tinbergen. (This octet does not harmonize easily!) Had Tsuru been an Italian rather than a Japanese, had he been...