This book reveals that the manipulation of culture was of more importance than the character of the original cultural stock in explaining Japan’s modern industrialization. Thus the features of private enterprise culture that are so often isolated as keys to the nation’s historical competitiveness may have been only temporary reflections of this wider process of cultural engineering: a necessary input into the program of technology transfer and late development.This book provides a highly reliable guide to the industrial economy and history and covers a wide ground; it will be of great interest to those involved in Asian studies, Japanese studies, plus economists and professionals in business and enterprise culture.