They Broke the Mold: The Spirit of Creativity in Japanese Enterprise

Abstract

Every society is an enigma. The Japanese have been characterized as the most enigmatic of all. They are variously described as hidden, unknowable, impenetrable, inscrutable; all words which accuse the Japanese of being a group apart. This is a moral, as well as a scientific judgement, made by the same western scholarship which has characterized other non-western peoples. After the war, when commentators assumed that Japan would never be anything more than a colony of the first world, no one dreamed that within 35 years, Japan would challenge the US yet again.