In the middle of the nineteenth century the first British Minister to Japan described it as ‘a cluster of islands on the furthest edge of the horizon, inhabited by a race grotesque and savage’. In the last quarter of the twentieth century Japan is the world's third largest industrial power. In the 1960s the average annual compound rate of growth of real GNP was nearly 12 per cent and of GNP per head of total population nearly 11 per cent. This post-war ‘economic miracle’ was regarded with a mixture of awe and alarm by some western observers and occasioned a flood of books with titles such as How Japan's Economy Grew So Fast, Asia's New Giant, Japan as Number One, and The Emerging Japanese Superstate. The social costs of rapid growth have resulted in some tempering of earlier euphoria. The inverted commas in the title of Morishima's Why has Japan ‘Succeeded’? are not fortuitous. Ohkawa and Rosovsky rightly warn against the temptation to ‘accentuate the positive’ to the neglect of the ‘darker side’.

There is a variety of interpretations of post-Second World War growth but two things are certain. The first is the truism that growth is a function of a large number of interacting variables, climatological, geographical, religious, sociological, political, as well as economic, many of which are not conducive to quantification. The second is that growth in any period has its roots in earlier periods.