Summary

After World War II, Japan reinvented itself as a shipbuilding powerhouse and began its rapid ascent in the global economy. Its expansion strategy integrated raw material procurement, the redesign of global transportation infrastructure, and domestic industrialization. In this authoritative and engaging study, Stephen G. Bunker and Paul S. Ciccantell identify the key factors in Japan's economic growth and the effects this growth had on the reorganization of significant sectors of the global economy.

Bunker and Ciccantell discuss what drove Japan's economic expansion, how Japan globalized the work economy to support it, and why this spectacular growth came to a dramatic halt in the 1990s. Drawing on studies of ore mining, steel making, corporate sector reorganization, and port/rail development, they provide valuable insight into technical processes as well as specific patterns of corporate investment.

East Asia and the Global Economy introduces a theory of "new historical materialism" that explains the success of Japan and other world industrial powers. Here, the authors assert that the pattern of Japan's ascent is essential for understanding China's recent path of economic growth and dominance and anticipating what the future may hold.

Choice Review

Bunker (d. 2005; formerly, sociology, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison) and Ciccantell (sociology, Western Michigan Univ.) use a paradigm defined as new historical materialism to explain the dynamics of Japan's economic ascent. They argue that, within a Japancentric economic structure, infrastructural development and successful procurement of foreign extractive and raw materials industries were essential to that ascent. Pursuing a line of argument reminiscent of that of Chalmers Johnson and Daniel Okimoto, they contend that state intervention and industrial policy, combined with a special relationship with the US, were critical to Japan's development, both in terms of domestic industrialization and the related capture of foreign mining and raw materials enterprises. Explicitly linking their argument to that of the world systems school, they argue that the creation of the aforementioned Japancentric global economic structure resulted in value shifts away from primary producers in less industrialized nations to Japanese businesses, adding to a dynamic of rapid capital accumulation in Japan. While focusing primarily on Japan's period of rapid economic growth and subsequent stagnation, the authors also briefly discuss parallel cases of economic ascent and then finish with a timely application of their methodology to the rapid growth currently underway in China. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. S. J. Gabriel Mount Holyoke College