Japanese Capitalism and Entrepreneurship: A History of Business from the Tokugawa Era to the Present

From being the last country in the world to open its doors to global trade in the 1850s to becoming the second industrialized nation in the 1960s, Japan has experienced impressive economic and social development over the last two centuries. In the last three decades, however, it became entrenched in a long phase of economic stagnation, dropping from second to third place in the global economy, having been overtaken by China in 2010. Inspired by the recent works on the history of capitalism, this history of business shows that the Japanese company was not the product of a unique national culture.