Where do you get 28% from? According to the 1995-6 OECD survey of Japan quoted in Brenner's NLR article, investment as a percent of GDP in Japan fell to 14% by 1994. And a glance at the charts of public and business investment on p. 3 and p. 9 of http://www.boj.or.jp/en/down/siryo/data/ar0002.pdf show that absolute levels of investment in yen were the same in 1999 as 1994. Whence 28%?
>If so, the Nikkei would be at 30,000 and Japanese investment would be at
>15%. But the Nikkei is at 13,000 and rates of national investment are 28%.
>Amsden, Wade, Gerlach et. al. have shown pretty convincingly that East
>Asian keiretsu capitalism is organized differently, has different
>priorities, and thinks differently from Wall Street. The concept of the
>total system doesn't mean that everything is the same; it means there are
>global equivalences, which are unstable, they can emerge out of nowhere
>and also fall apart (markets, currencies, firms, etc.). South Korean
>elites invest in Korea, and not in Swiss real estate; NEC is getting into
>the systems-on-a-chip biz, not stock punting; VIA is eating up Intel's
>marketshare in mobos, etc. This needs explanation, not comforting thoughts
>that, anyway, the whole world is like the US. It's not, and that's why the
>US has a huge military machine and deploys it as regularly as it does.
This is from "THE USE AND ABUSE OF JAPAN AS A PROGRESSIVE MODEL" by Paul Burkett and Martin Hart-Landsberg http://www.yorku.ca/socreg/burkett-landsberg96.txt
The Japanese Investment Regime
"The left-liberal consensus also considers Japanese capitalism more progressive than U.S. capitalism insofar as Japanese capital is or has been relatively patient and planned, and relatively less speculative and anarchic than U.S. capital. Here, the assumption is that Japanese capital's greater patience and more `efficient' planning has little to with the fact that both the goals and the process of accumulation and industrial policy formulation (including the planning operations of government agencies like the Ministry of International Trade and Industry) are undemocratically determined. It assumes, in other words, that even if the basic priorities to be served by accumulation and the planning process were democratically determined, capital would (or could, presumably given the right constellation of political forces) be just as patient. By contrast, it seems more likely to us that the relative patience of Japanese capital was based firmly on the relative weakness of the Japanese working-class, i.e., on the strictly subordinate status of workers' priorities in the Japanese political economy. Indeed, Steven (1990: pp.12-3) suggests that the nationalist- industrialist form and ideology of the post-World War II Japanese state were based on Japanese capital's complete domination of the Japanese working class, which allowed the state to focus on external competitiveness and the management of inter-imperialist rivalry more so than in any other developed capitalist country.5"
and also:
"It is also necessary to briefly comment on the argument that Japanese capitalism has gained a progressive-competitive edge over the U.S. because it is less dependent on military power. We believe that the recovery of Japanese imperialism in the post-World War II era occurred symbiotically with the evolution of U.S. imperialism, as the U.S., in order to redistribute the costs of its own hegemonic activities, encouraged and supported Japanese efforts to reconstitute its sphere of influence in East Asia. This symbiotic development occurred interactively with, but was by no means reducible to, the post-World War II boom of the Japanese economy generated by U.S. military spending associated with the Korean and Vietnam Wars (Halliday and McCormack, 1973; Sweezy, 1980; Tsuru, 1993). One could even say that Japan enjoyed many of the benefits, but none of the drawbacks, of the powerful U.S. military-industrial complex and global-imperialist network. This history challenges the misguided notion (or wishful thinking along the lines of the pre-World War I Kautsky) that military power has been eclipsed by some kind of militarily-unconnected economic power.13"
Jonathan