How Modern Japan Is Described in Textbooks around the World
(Select a Country to review excerpts)
Europe ……………
Austria,
France,
Germany,
Switzerland,
UK
Asia ……………… China,
India,
Indonesia,
Korea,
Malaysia,
Russia,
Singapore,
Vietnam
North America ……
Mexico,
USA
South America ……
Brazil
LATIN AMERICA
Brazil
Title:
Geography 8
Pages: 208-213
Publisher: Quinteto Editorial Ltda., São Paulo, Brazil, 2001
Excerpt:
Chapter: China, Asian Tigers, Japan and Oceania
Japan Today
The fluctuations in the Japanese economy are quite dynamic, with recent areas of growth and other areas that have shrunk. Japan has invested in the tertiary sector, such as tourism and commerce, principally in the capital, Tokyo, which forms an articulated urban network together with large urban centers like Nagoya, Osaka and Kitakyushu. Cities with high-tech centers are spread throughout virtually the entire country.
Japanese society is highly disciplined as a result of the strict standards of its patriarchal structure. Although women are active in the job market, some customs of traditional culture still remain as a model, principally those that dictate relationships between younger people and older people and between women and men.
Japanese industries currently invest in Europe and the United States, and, in certain sectors, also in Southeast Asia and Latin America. In the mining sector, for example, with the process of privatization and the opening of diversified companies, such as in the Brazilian project Carajas, Japan holds 50% of the project’s shares.
After the boom of the 1980’s, the subsequent years were marked by a financial crisis that provoked a climate of distrust among the population against the model implemented by the Japanese government. Thus, Japanese society, which until the middle of 1997 was based on credit and consumption, began to consume less; in spite of the country having a solid economic structure, a Japanese financial crisis shook the international market in 1998.
The government, therefore, increased public spending to stimulate consumption and attempted to repair the banking sector, which had been in crisis since 1991. The economy, however, gave no signs of improvement and they yen, the Japanese currency, suffered one of the largest devaluations in history. This episode forced the United States to lend money to Japan.
In an attempt to overcome the crisis, the Japanese government invested in industry and also in the agricultural sector, stimulating agrarian reforms such as the reorganization of small properties to produce rice, wheat, tea and sugarcane and subsidizing farmers.
With the goal of exerting a leadership role in international politics, it is part of Japan’s geopolitical strategy to influence the world economic order, principally in Northeast Asia and in the Pacific region, acting in global and regional scale. This approach has proven fruitful, since Japanese investors hold majority ownership of, for example, Columbia Pictures and Rockefeller Center, two symbols of American capitalism.
The contradictions of the Japanese system
In spite of the fact that Japan occupies a place of distinction on the world stage, there are also various problems: half of the population is concentrated in a 500-km axle around the Tokyo-Osaka megalopolis; workers’ networks are weak and tied to companies; Japanese residences are extremely small, which provokes an overcrowding in housing; the working days are long and vacation time short; and unemployment taxes are very high.
In addition to these social problems, Japan has come to face competition with the Asian Tigers and China, restrictions on Japanese imports by Western countries and pressures on Japan to import more and divert resources from domestic savings to the consumer.
