> You are unaware with how "predatory tariffs" aka dumping work.
I'm quite aware, thank you very much, but Japan Inc. did not follow the script written by Friedrich List. The keiretsu are not really about consumption, they're about production; consumption was driven during the post-WW II period by American military Keynesianism, and nowadays by global credit bubbles. Japan in 1950 was around one-tenth as rich as the USA; West Germany was only a third as wealthy as the US in 1960. So exports to the US were an obvious solution at that point. Nowadays, the situation is more complicated, because the keiretsu have become global production and trading networks, with facilities, plant and equipment across the planet, and the US, Japan and EU have become far more permeable to cross-investment than in any Manchester liberal's wildest dreams.
One could argue that the soga shosha, the big trading companies of the keiretsu, were essentially the keiretsu's version of a consumption policy -- which makes sense, since much of the literature I've seen on Japan says that their service sector is highly labor-intensive and inefficient; the soga shosha were thus the monopolistic middlepeople, who squeezed captive consumers for funds which are then the seed-capital for fresh investment. I hear this is changing, though, as Japanese consumers are turning to hyperstores and discounters.
-- Dennis