Japan has successfully modified and reinforced its own economic model -- rather than surrendering to the American one -- while fighting its way out of the prolonged stagnation it got mired in when the bubble economy imploded in the early 1990s, an American scholar said at a recent seminar in Tokyo.

Japanese companies today retain their traditional long-term ties with employees, suppliers and banks, but have become more selective, diverse and open in dealing with these relationships, said Steven Vogel, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.

At a May 19 seminar organized by the Keizai Koho Center, Vogel said the reforms that have recently taken place in corporate management and government policy defied one of the views most popular at the height of Japan's post-bubble misery in the 1990s -- that Japan would have to radically change its economic model and adopt a U.S.-style form of capitalism.