How Japanese economic statecraft has shifted from promotion to protection

Is Japan ahead of the curve or playing catch-up on economic statecraft?

A vague “Japanese model” comes up in many conversations about industrial strategy in the United States. It is common knowledge that, in the second half of the twentieth century, Japan found new export destinations for its industrial output while working its way up the manufacturing value chain. Japan’s powerful (though now defunct) Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) almost always receives credit for managing this success. In short, the casual evaluator of economic security policies might answer that Japan has known what it is doing for longer than the United States.

Self-critical Japanese specialists would find such a portrait saccharine and outdated.

From the 1970s onward, Japan gradually opened it