Conclusion

Abstract

The direction of Japan’s current economic trajectory has become the subject of much debate within and outside Japan. Its embrace of the “neoliberal turn” globalized by the “Washington Consensus”¹ or, alternatively, the attempt to keep in place a now putatively obsolete and anachronistic institutional economic structure remains a contested field. Discussions of privatization (minkatsu), de-regulation (kisei kanwa), and marketism (shijo-shugi) on the one end, and the conservative defense of the status quo on the other, or alternatively a Japanese “Third Way,”² have set the parameters of debate about possible solutions to the longstanding economic malaise since the early 1990s that appears to have consolidated its hold over the “miracle economy”. This concluding chapter briefly traverses the theoretical and political terrain with a view toward posing the question: what does the analysis developed in this book contribute to the larger debate about the direction and nature of reform in contemporary Japan?