Japan's technoindustrial regime, which I call “relationalism,” has proved remarkably resilient in the face of powerful market and political forces for change. Despite a decade of economic setbacks capped off by the Asian financial crisis, Japan continues to be held together by a dense web of longstanding and mutually reinforcing relationships between government and business, between nominally independent firms, and between labor and management. This is not to say that Japan is immutable. It clearly is undergoing change in the distribution of economic gains and losses, as evidenced by growing income inequality. The “big tent” of relationalism today protects fewer Japanese citizens than it has at any other time in the postwar period. But the tent itself is still standing tall.

This chapter confirms a key assertion pointed out by several of the authors of this volume: globalization — or, more specifically, global financial integration — does not necessarily compel heterogeneous technoindustrial regimes to converge toward a single model. Variation survives because existing institutions, norms, and capabilities (both objective and creative) stand in the middle of the transmission belt leading from exogenous pressure to political-economic response, mediating the impact. Japan's experience reveals that a very large economy held together by intraelite cooperation can absorb such exogenous pressure better than a small economy driven by intraelite rivalry — at least for a while.