Hendry Joy, Massimo Raveri. Japan at Play. The ludic and the logic of power

NY: Routledge, 2005. — 328 p. — ISBN: 0-203-99656-9Foreign perceptions of Japan since around 1980 have been in turn euphoric, apprehensive, dismissive and sober. If the 1980s was an age of spectacular economic growth (leading to widespread concern about the international impact of Japanese economic expansion), the 1990s was often dismissed as the ‘lost decade’. After the emergence of severe problems with the Japanese financial system in the early 1990s, those who had urged other countries to learn from Japan came to be ridiculed as purveyors of misleading nostrums. Japan seemed unable to bring about muchneeded reform to its systems of economics and politics. Many observers thought that the State interfered too much with the market, that there was far too much
“cronyism”, government wasted huge sums on poorly costed and unneeded infrastructure projects, large swathes of economic activity were massively protected from competition, and democratic accountability was there in form but hardly in
substance. A very few so-called “Japan-enthusiasts”, such as Ronald Dore, continued to maintain that there was merit in the way Japan organized things, but they were voices crying in the wilderness