Description
Book SynopsisInvesting Japan demonstrates that foreign investment is a vital and misunderstood aspect of Japan’s modern economic development. This study investigates the role played by foreign companies in the Japanese experience of modernization, highlighting their identity as key agents in the processes of industrialization and technology transfer.
Trade ReviewA brilliant treatise in economic history. -- Jerry Bowyer * Forbes *
A major contribution to the literature on Japanese financial and economic history, this work is the first comprehensive study in English of foreign involvement in Japan’s modern economy through both loans and joint ventures. It challenges notions of Japanese economic development as a largely ‘autonomous’ process by highlighting the long history of foreign investment in modern Japan. The book richly documents the enormous inflow and multifaceted use of some ¥4 billion in foreign capital prior to World War II and places in compelling historical perspective the growing foreign presence in Japan’s postwar economy. -- Steven Ericson, Dartmouth College
An accessible and illuminating account that demonstrates the crucial and often neglected role of foreign investment in Japan’s capital formation and economic activity from the mid-19th century up to the present. Simon Bytheway’s book will become standard reading for all those interested in Japan’s financial and monetary history, and the country’s economic development as a whole. -- Janet Hunter, London School of Economics and Political Science
In this new major contribution to international financial and economic history, Simon Bytheway covers a lot of ground, from Japan’s market-opening shock in the mid-1800s, to the origins of the Japanese gold standard, to present-day globalization. Bytheway is one of the rare foreign scholars based in Japan and writing in Japanese. He knows the subject intimately, and he has now brought his history of the critical role played by foreign investment in Japan to an international audience. -- Mark Metzler, University of Texas at Austin
Bytheway’s study is a tour de force. He has delved into multiple archives and an extensive array of Japanese and English-language sources to come up with a masterly description of Japanese foreign borrowing over a century and a half. His command of the Japanese sources is particularly impressive. -- Richard Smethurst, University of Pittsburgh
