The economy of Japan, with its high rates of growth, exemplary productivity levels, overall stability, and resilience in the face of financial and other crises, has been one of the wonders of the postwar world. In this book, which has since its first publication in 1981 been a standard text and reference work on the postwar economy, one of Japan's leading economist-scholars describes its workings, its roots in the prewar and wartime years, and its structure and institutions.

For this revised second edition, the author has written several new chapters, added data bringing the discussion up to the 1990s, and reorganized the presentation.

After a historical survey moving from the period of reconstruction and reform to the rapid-growth 1960s and early 1970s, the book turns to an analysis of the organization of Japan's economy, with special emphasis on the "dual structure" of large modern-sector firms and small traditional-sector entrepreneurial firms. By the 1980s, the economy had moved from rapid growth into a period of stable growth, financial reform, and a new sense of its global responsibilities as an economic power.

At the end of the decade, a period of wealth-building ended in unrealistically inflated expansion; this "bubble" burst in the early 1990s, and the book ends with a discussion of the new economic realities for Japan.