Prescription for resuscitating Japan

By Ali Wyne

The Washington Post | December 18, 2015 | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/prescription-for-resuscitating-japan/2015/12/18/53430e88-8197-11e5-8ba6-cec48b74b2a7_story.html

Ali Wyne is a contributing analyst at Wikistrat, a global fellow at the Project for the Study of the 21st Century, and a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is a coauthor of “Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World.”

Clyde Prestowitz’s new book is one of the more thought-provoking forays into Asian-Pacific geopolitics to have been published in recent years — at least as noteworthy for its messenger as for its message. Nearly three decades ago, after stepping down as a counselor to Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, Prestowitz wrote “Trading Places: How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan and How to Reclaim It” as a warning to U.S. policymakers. Scrutinizing Japan’s postwar industrial strategies that had made the country into an (apparent) economic juggernaut, he found that the United States assumed — or, worse, had persuaded itself to believe — that Japan was simply emulating America’s market-driven, consumer-oriented growth path. But, Prestowitz discovered, Japan had decided to make the government the driver of its economic recovery through the subsidization of its core industries. The “real challenge to American power is not the sinister one” from the Soviet Union, he declared, “but the friendly one from the Far East.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/prescription-for-resuscitating-japan/2015/12/18/53430e88-8197-11e5-8ba6-cec48b74b2a7_story.html