Whither the Japanese model? The Asian economic crisis and the continuation of Cold War politics in the Pacific Rim

Ten years ago, Japan's economy was the envy of the world, and business managers and scholars in the west hurriedly dissected Japan's managerial practices and economic institutions to try to understand the secret of the success of the 'Japanese model'. The consensus about Japan's economic prowess was such that a rapid recovery from the bursting of the 'bubble economy' was considered likely, even though it had been perhaps the largest speculative bubble in modern times. By the mid-1990s, Japan's failure to recover was blamed on its inability or unwillingness to switch from the developmentalist model it had pioneered to a more open, western-style capitalist system deemed more appropriate to a fully developed nation, but the efficacy of the model itself was not questioned. Spectacular growth rates registered first in Southeast Asia and then China, coupled with rhetoric by Asian leaders touting the political and economic institutions of the region, lent credence to the idea that the Japanese model and its Asian variants still showed the fastest pathway from the periphery