Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
empire. Based in Amsterdam, the Dutch empire spread across the Pacific during its golden age in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. And finally Great Britain, a small island with few natural resources, rose
to become one of history's greatest empires during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by dominating
the seas and creating colonies that provided raw materials and markets for finished goods.
Each of these earlier great empires can be contrasted with the United States, which enjoyed great ad-
vantages in size and resources. But precisely because the country is so big, many American companies
allowed the development of an aggressive world trade policy to take a backseat to the domestic market.
Content to sell to a prosperous market at home, these American companies allowed other countries—Japan
and Germany, the defeated nations of World War II, in particular—to develop overseas customers more
effectively and efficiently. That “economic isolationism” has now caught up with the United States and the
country is paying dearly—in such basic manufacturing industries as steel, automobiles, shipbuilding, and
consumer goods—for its past failure to sell to the world.
In its post-1854 quest for modern power, Japan did not make the mistake of turning inward, as so many
other countries have done, whether or not they were limited in space and resources. The leaders of Japan's
government and industry spent the past century aggressively looking abroad. In the first forty years of the
twentieth century, they did so violently, as the highly militarized, traditional Japanese government/business
structure attempted to take by conquest what it needed—land and raw materials. In its war with Russia in
1904, Japan won control of the Korean Peninsula and gradually moved into Mongolia, Manchuria, and Ch-
ina during the 1930s. By 1940 it was ready to make a bolder move for control of the wealth and resources
of the eastern Pacific area, a move that led to confrontation with American interests and the eventual attack
on Pearl Harbor. But defeat in World War II left Japan a ruined, occupied nation in 1945. And the devast-
ating losses of people, property, and overseas possessions presumably should have doomed Japan's goal of
global superpower status. So what explains the Japanese economic miracle?
First of all, Japan could more or less feed itself, in spite of the shortage of arable land. That shortage
forced the Japanese to turn to a self-sustainable diet. Raising cattle for beef or dairy is space-intensive
because cattle demand lots of room to graze. They also eat tremendous quantities of grain and consume
large amounts of water. In Japan, the pressures of space mean few cattle are kept—the Japanese eat no
milk-based products and the comparatively little beef they consume is imported. Rice, soy, and fish have
always been the nation's traditional staples. Fish are “farmed” locally in ponds, caught in coastal waters, or
brought in by Japan's vast international fishing fleets. In the past, Japan has been self-sufficient in growing
rice. The warm, wet summer climate in the South is ideal for rice. The Japanese government has also taken
a strong hand by heavily subsidizing rice farming. Overseas rice growers, like those in the United States,
have learned how heavy that helping hand is.
Another factor in Japan's rise is the country's cultural attitudes, which geography has played a critical
role in shaping. The traditional Japanese notion of
kazoku
(literally, “family” or “harmony”) was cultiv-
ated over thousands of years, uninfected by foreign concepts, including those of Western religions or the
European Enlightenment that place so much more emphasis on individual freedoms. It is this Japanese tra-
dition of fidelity and loyalty to authority that is at the heart of the relationship between Japanese firms and
their employees, bolstering productivity and promoting highly cooperative labor relations—rather than the
worker-management antagonism typical of Western labor relations.
Ironically, one of the consequences of America's wartime victory over Japan created enormous di-
vidends for the Japanese. Written during the American postwar occupation, the Japanese constitution stip-
ulated that Japan could not spend more than 1 percent of its gross national product on defense and the
military. While everyone else in the world, led by the United States and the Soviet Union, devoted huge
portions of their national budgets to the massive Cold War arms race and involvement in costly local wars
