LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- After Harvard Professor Ezra Vogel's famous book "Japan as Number One" appeared in 1979, the West experienced a "learning from Japan" boom. I fully participated in this movement in both of its manifestations: publications, seminars etc., and the establishment of university Japanese studies programs. My doctoral thesis at Oxford in the late 1960s had been on Japanese economic history (technology transfer and "modernization" in the late Edo and early Meiji eras (1840-1885).
For the first 15 years of my postdoctoral academic life, most of my attention was focused on why, of the many countries that adopted industrialization and modernization policy programs in the mid/late 19th century -- such as Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand and China -- only Japan had succeeded.
For all of the doldrums in which the country has been wallowing for the past decade, it must not be forgotten that Japan was eminently successful -- indeed a model -- in its Meiji industrialization period (1868-1912) and again in the postwar decades.