No, I don't doubt that. But the culture isn't in question. The meaning of their numbers is.
> Pick up and read Business Week sometime. They complain often about the way
> Japanese companies refuse to get serious about cost cutting - which is a
> Western euphemism for firing lots of people.
Thanks for the reading syllabus. I'm familiar with Anglo American criticisms of Japanese economic organization. That they are reactionary doesn't make Japanese business culture or political economy good, liberal reverse-orientalism notwithstanding. As Chalmers Johnson has repeatedly admitted, Japan is deeply cronyist, whatever its other virtues. In the end, I can't see what's good about being put to meaningless work, especially if on the aggregate level, the point of this way of handling downturns--namely, sustaining aggregate demand--has been utterly missed.
>
> If Japan undertook a campaign of radical restructuring then unemployment
> might rise to the level that one would expect if a Western nation was to
> spend 10 years in recession.
>
No one is cheering for unemployment. But what has been gained by a decade of official foot-dragging and resistance to dealing with the consequences of the bubble--a bubble largely effected by the financial life of the much vaunted keiretsu?
Christian