Japan wasn’t exactly an emerging economy after World War II, but it’s reemergence as a world economic power starting in the 1950s has an emerging market aspect to it, in that it focused on rebuilding via a strategy of exporting well-made low-priced goods to the rest of the world. There are two general preconditions for this strategy to work: keeping the currency undervalued and a generation of workers willing to sacrifice their own economic well-being in order that their children will have a better life.
In Japan’s case, there were two other important characteristics of its economic advance:
–it was controlled by the zaibatsu, the all-male samurai-era conglomerates that were officially banned after the war, but which essentially just renamed themselves keiretsu and carried on business as usual. There was the occasional Sony (which btw seems to me to be at least as samurai today as any keiretsu member) or Nintendo, but technology transfer wasn’t the biggest feature of Japan’s recovery, and
–when it came time for the next-generation better life, the keiretsu decided to double down on feathering their own male-only, samurai-only, anti-immigration, older is smarter than younger ethos–keeping the lion’s share of the wealth created by the sacrifice of the post-war generation for themselves.
The result has been what one might easily have predicted–a generation of economic stagnation.
This is old news.
What I find interesting, though, is that over the past half-year or so I’ve been hearing lots of stories of smart young people in Japan leaving the keiretsu–or declining keiretsu job offers after college–and going to create or work for startups instead. Hard to know how this will develop–but there may end up being interesting smaller companies in Japan for the first time since the endaka (high yen) era of the 1980s..