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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
In January the leaders of two great automobile companies made separate appearances before the media of their respective countries to demonstrate how Japanese- and American-style capitalism continue to differ.
In the United States, Bill Ford, the chairman and chief executive of the automobile company that bears his family name, announced that his firm is embarking on a recovery plan that involves laying off 30,000 workers over the next six years, many of them in the next twelve months. The latest cuts bring the total announced job cuts of the Big Three auto firms over the past five years to 140,000-one-third of their former workforce.
[1] Japan was not the only country to see the emergence of employment regimes providing high levels of job security in the postwar period. Many nations on the continent of Europe developed regimes that offered similar levels of job protection.
[2] See Miura Mari, “From Welfare Through Work to Lean Work: The Politics of Labor Market Reform in Japan,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2002; and Leonard Schoppa, Race for the Exits: The Unraveling of Japan's System of Social Protection (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 118-121.
[3] Data from the Ministry of Labor, Rodo hakusho—Heisei 12-nen-han, 2000, 515, updated with data from the Labor Force Survey, on-line at http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/wp/wp-l/29.html (accessed January 25, 2006).
[4] Hiroshi Ono, “Lifetime Employment in Japan: Concepts and Measurements,” Paper Prepared for the National Bureau of Economic Research conference in Tokyo, October 2005, p. 43—available.
[5] These figures are based on the government's 2002 employment status survey of individuals aged 15-34. See Genda Yuji, “The NEET Problem in Japan,” Social Science Japan 32 (September 2005): pp. 3-4.
[6] In my book, Race for the Exits, I also ask why Japanese women have not worked harder to dismantle the gendered vision of labor inherent in the lifetime employment system.
[7] METI, Dai 33-kai wagakuni kigyo no kaigai jigyo katsudo kekka gaiyo, March 31, 2004, Figure 5-1—available (accessed February 10, 2005).
[8] Terutomo Ozawa, “Japan in a New Phase of Multinationalism and Industrial Upgrading: Functional Integration of Trade, Growth, and FDI,” Journal of World Trade 25 (1991), p. 51.
[9] See Schoppa, Race for the Exits, p. 86, updated with data from METI's 34th Survey of Overseas Business Activities, available.
[10] Solis, Banking on Multinationals: Public Credit and the Export of Japanese Sunset Industries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 178
[11] Fukushima H, “Introduction,” in Fukushima H, ed., Changes in Agglomeration Structure of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Machinery and Metal Industries: A Survey of the Actual State in Ohta-Ward, Tokyo (Tokyo: Research Institute of Economic Science, Nihon University, 2001), cited in David Bailey, “Explaining Japan's Kudoka (Hollowing Out): A Case of Government and Strategic Failure,” Asia Pacific Business Review 10:1 (October 2003), p. 4.
[12] The terms “exit” and “voice” are drawn from Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). For a more detailed elaboration of competing views on how exit and voice work together in the globalization process, see Schoppa, Race for the Exits, pp. 6-13 and 18-27.
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