The Japanese Economy: Trade, Industry, and Government.

• Author: Bronfenbrenner, Martin

Professor Ryutaro Komiya of the University of Tokyo (Emeritus)(1) is the "elder statesman" of modern, which is to say non-Marxian, economics in Japan. His position might be analogous to the hypothetical role Alvin Hansen plus Jacob Viner might have played a generation ago in the United States. His specialties reflected in the present volume are international and industrial economics; in this respect, an American analogue might be Professor Richard Caves of Harvard. A Harvard Ph.D. himself, Komiya is among the small minority of Japanese economists able and willing to express himself fluently in English both oral and written. He is likewise among the small minority able and willing to combine a prestigious academic career with almost continuous high level consultancies in one or another agency of his government.

The Japanese Economy is not the textbook I had expected from its short title. It is a collection of nine longish essays dating from the 1980s, three apiece on international economics, industrial economics, and government-business relations in post-Occupation Japan (1952-1990). The collection unfortunately could not include either the land-and-securities "bubble" of the late 80s or the "anti-bubble" of the early 90s. All nine essays have appeared elsewhere, some of them in English, but extensions and revisions have been made for this volume.

"Komiya on Trade" is at once a free-trader and a MITI protagonist--positions difficult to combine. Perhaps he might even agree with this reviewer on how much Japan owes to freedom of trade. (Had the Europe and particularly the America of the 50s and 60s been infected with the "Japan-bashing" of 20 years later, the "Japanese miracle" could never, I maintain, have got off the ground!) Furthermore, the major peril to the present world trading system is, in Komiya's view, nothing more or less than American protectionism--which he treats as quite independent of anything Japan has done or failed to do. (Closing of particular Japanese markets by particular Japanese industries and their genkyoku spokesmen within the Japanese government seem to him little if any worse than similar imperfections elsewhere.) Komiya's treatment would also, in my view, have gained considerably by more attention to the why of current American protectionism, and Japan's involuntary role in fostering it--all without much danger (again in my view) to his general pro-Japanese and anti-American conclusions.

Rather than maximizing...