2. Does this nubmer include Japan corporate investment in outsourced facilities? Or would such investment in e.g., China or Thailand be counted as investment in those countries?
3. Is this gross or net investment
4. Is the investment crowded in export industries, which are in good shape relative to the home market, especially vehicles (note the popularity of relatively new Japanese minivans and SUVs in the US market).
5. What percentage of these investments are construction/building/land development investments? This is a big deal in what I call the Japanese "public works spoils allotment system economy." That is, how much of these investments are meant to be counter-cyclical (or counter-stagnation or couner-whatever is going on in Japan).
6. Jan Carovan says that these investments are (may be?) new low-cost capacity. If so, this isn't so abnormal. In bad times, capitals often build new low-cost capacity or modernize old capacity to defend profits and also prepare for the coming expansion, if any. I call this "accumulation through crisis" and so did Marx (I think).
These and other questions pertaining to the type of investment, their location, the industry involved, and other factors I think need to be answered. The righteous call for concrete analysis of concrete capitalisms, which I agree with 100 percent, means looking at the composition of investments, etc., for clues as to not only what is different from the Anglophone capitalisms but also why what is different is different. One of the main things I learned during a lecture tour of Japan 10 years ago, courtesy of the U. of Kyoto economics dept.: (besides the fact that they love [rightly] Bill Tabb and his work-- Japanese economists tend to be either very regional economics oriented; public finanace in the context of regional economics; economic historians of Europe, etc; mathematical marxist economists...almost every one of the two dozen or so economists I met did one or the other of these methods/topics) -- the one thing I learned was that each Japanese economist has his/her own favorite theory of Japan's fast growth up to 1989-1990. Something like, individualism amock. Jim O'Connor