the practice in the United States, the Japanese economy was oriented strongly toward production for export. The crude oil crises of the 1970s caused serious problems for the Japanese economy. The country weathered the storm, however, and developed into a major player in the world economy (Sarathy, 1989, pp. 132-160). To protect itself against future "oil shocks," Japan cultivated economic and political relationships with oil exporting nations, and developed a vast crude petroleum reserve storage capacity that relied heavily on storage at sea.
In 1980, the Japanese economy began a transition toward maturity. During this phase of economic development in Japan, growth in gross domestic output has slowed, as the country has been required to deal with problems·both internal and external·stemming from the development of the country as an economic superpower. (Blinder, 1990, p. 21). During the 1950s and the 1960s, the United States was more than willing to accord important economic preferences and benefits to Japan to assure that Japan would remain a strong American ally in the Cold War. With the emergence of Japan as an economic superpower and a power threat to American economic hegemony, together with the waning and eventual end of the Cold War, however, the United States became much less tolerant of Japanese economic policy. Simultaneously, within Japan agitation increased for greater de facto political and economic independence from the United States, as increasing public dissatisfaction with the virtual one-party government in Japan began to be expressed.
The "Bubble Economy" of Japan developed in the mid- to late-1980s and expired in the early-1990s (Wood, 1992, pp. 1-21). The Bubble Economy in Japan was essentially a wildly speculative boom that eventually collapsed as all such speculative booms eventually do.
In the late-1980s, speculation became the byword for investment activity in Japan (Goldstein, 1992, p. 58). ...