Japanese Capitalism and Entrepreneurship: A History of Business from the Tokugawa Era to the Present

From being the last country in the world to open its doors to global trade in the 1850s to becoming the second industrialized nation in the 1960s, Japan has experienced impressive economic and social development over the last two centuries. In the last three decades, however, it became entrenched in a long phase of economic stagnation, dropping from second to third place in the global economy, having been overtaken by China in 2010.

Inspired by the recent works on the history of capitalism, this history of business shows that the Japanese company was not the product of a unique national culture. Japanese capitalism was largely shaped by a political, economic, and institutional environment, which offered a variety of new opportunities to entrepreneurs, who also played a central role in the process of change. Rural capitalism that formed during the period of national seclusion shifted to industrial capitalism after the opening of the nation to global trade: this form of capitalism was close to those observed in other late industrializing countries, and was characterized by the monopolistic domination of large business groups or zaibatsu during the interwar years. The Second World War saw the emergence of wartime capitalism with the central government as the dominant actor in the economy, and, after 1945, the need to reconstruct the country and catch-up with advanced Western economies gave birth to a new form of capitalism based on a cooperative relationship between business and the state: communitarian capitalism, more broadly known as the Japanese Business System. The liberalization and deregulation brought new changes in the business system, marked by the emergence of financial capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s.

Pierre-Yves DonzÃ(c), Professor of Business History, Osaka University, Julia S. Yongue, Professor, Faculty of Economics, Hosei University

Pierre-Yves DonzÃ(c) is a Professor of Business History at Osaka University (Japan), and a Visiting Professor at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and at EM Normandie Business School (France). He is a member of the council of the European Business History Association and a co-editor of Business History. His research focuses on the history of the dynamics of global competition in a broad range of industries, from luxury and fashion to healthcare and food. He has published numerous articles in international journals of business history, international business, and history.

Julia S. Yongue is a Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Hosei University in Tokyo, Japan, where she teaches courses on Japanese capitalism, entrepreneurship, society, and the environment. Her current research intersects the history of business and medicine, and focuses on how health policy has influenced the development of the Japanese pharmaceutical industry since the late nineteenth century.