, has been aptly characterized as industrial feudalism. To characterize the centralized focus of the Japanese economy by speaking of "Japan, Inc." is misleading. Japan is not a big General Motors, or even a big IBM. (Interestingly, though, IBM, with its tradition of paternalism, is one of the more "Japanese" of American corporations; see the discussion of IBM's corporate culture in Mobley and McKeown, 1989.) It is more accurate to say that the Japanese worker regards himself as a sort of peaceful soldier, and that the Japanese manager regards himself as an industrial samurai. One writer on Japanese industry (Davidson, 1984, p. 3) appropriately begins his discussion of Japanese industrial strategy with a quotation from the great military theorist Clausewitz. A quotation from the ancient Chinese military sage, Sun Tzu, might have been even more in order.
This military or feudal analogy may explain why the Japanese are able to combine intense personal pride and competitiveness with a degree of social conformity and adherence to group values that Americans find alien in most contexts. The relationship of a Japanese employee to his superiors and his company has less similarity to that of an American employee to his boss and his firm than it does to the relationship of a Marine to his officers and to "the Corps."
Formal governmental technology policy, therefore, has a vastly larger scope in Japan than it does in the United States. They are essentially in the position of generals planning a campaign. The "officers" and "soldiers" who will execute that campaign do not regard it as their role to question directives from headquarters, or to go off on their own in pursuit of their own initiatives. Instead, pride and honor encourage them to do exert the utmost effort and ingenuity to see that the plan is carried out. Individual creativity and initiative are not without a place in this mental framework, but it is the creativity an...