Japan I Do Not Think That Japan

Japan I do not think that Japan avoided the monstrous hybrid trap. The monstrous hybrid can manifest itself as a government entity using guardian methods to impact on commerce. During the economic rise of Japan, this was very much the case, as the government maintained strict control over the trading function through the keiretsu, commercial groups with close ties to each other and to government officials. This system was deliberate on the part of the Japanese government, and the corporations in question received substantial support over the years.

This is the form in which Japan developed its monstrous hybrid. The period of economic stagnation that Japan endured from 1990-2005 is symptomatic of a banal outcome of a monstrous hybrid -- an economy dependent on tight relationships and fierce loyalty struggled over a long period of time specifically because of the way those bonds inhibited innovation and the trading function.

Once Japan entered into its recession, characterized by a liquidity trap, the government had no choice but to increase its involvement in the economy, through both intensive fiscal and monetary policy. The Japanese government was also compelled to begin to break up the keiretsu system in order to stimulate more innovation in the economy. The monstrous hybrid needed to be broken down somewhat, and the process was difficult.

In particular, the Japanese people had become accustomed to this system and it took a long time for the society to think in terms outside of the monstrous hybrid system. Japan's monstrous hybrid may have been relatively banal in terms of its outcomes -- economic stagnation was not met with police state, removal of freedoms or other such negative consequences -- but nor can it be argued that Japan avoided the monstrous hybrid. It simply avoided the worst outcomes associated with monstrous hybrids.

Japan's situation, especially during its long recession, bears some hallmarks of the zombie capitalism concept. Japan's economic growth was built on export booms, its firms actively and aggressively supported by a paternalistic government. Ultimately, Japan's rapid growth had a ceiling. With a static population, the domestic market was not a source of growth. With costs being high, competing globally as a low cost producer was not an option. The only thing left was innovation to maintain its strong export share, and the monstrous hybrid had effectively stifled that.

Japan was naturally going to struggle. In some ways, Japan has become the front line for zombie capitalism, in part because of its demographic situation. Even in Western Europe, access to Eastern European markets has allowed those nations to largely avoid Japan's economic fate by virtue of opening up new markets.

While one of the reasons it took Japan so long to break out of its recession was that it needed to dismantle the guardian components of its economy, another reason is that it hit upon the upper growth bound predicted in zombie capitalism. Capitalism works through economic expansion -- when opportunities for such expansion become limited, the capitalist economic system struggles.