Is Japan Really Changing Its Ways?

Deregulation has been at the top of Japan's economic policy agenda for many years. Now, in the midst of a financial crisis that engulfs all of Asia, pressures on the Japanese government for substantial reform--coming from both inside and outside forces--are stronger than ever. But is Japan actually making the changes necessary to reduce market controls, encourage competition, and create new opportunities for imports? To most outside observers, regulatory reform in Japan is an incomprehensible blur of grandiose proposals and byzantine political maneuvering, which masks developments that could be of tremendous significance to the world at large. In this book, experts from the United States and Japan cut through the fog that surrounds Japanese regulatory reform. They review the characteristics of Japanese regulation and analyze the content of regulatory reforms proposed to date as well as the political dynamics that shaped them. The book also examines the nuts-and-bolts issues of reforms in major economic sectors and the implications of deregulation for access to Japanese markets for foreign imports. By focusing on both the larger political, economic, and strategic contexts and on the way in which the micro and macro aspects of regulatory reform are interconnected, this volume makes comprehensible the tidal wave of proposals and posturing coming out of Japan. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Miyajima Hideaki, Elizabeth Norville, Kosuke Oyama, and Yul Sohn.