The making of an ideational economic geography: “Placing” Japan’s economy in the aftermath of American Fordist-Keynesianism (1970s-1990s)

Abstract

Transactions of meaning are punctuated by ideas about “place,” and ideas themselves are often underwritten with a sense of place—modelled from a substantive location or drawing on empirical material from an experience “here,” “there,” or “elsewhere.” Geography remains attentive to locating this normative power of place since the days of Vidal de La Blache, Sauer, and Hartshorne. While emptied of its empathetic and cultural character in the location-theoretic “central-place” movement of mid-century economic geography, the past decades recentred place in studying the constitution of economies—particularly under a hermeneutic cultural turn, and in investigating institutional change during the collapse of Fordist-Keynesianism. In this spirit, I examine relationships between “ideas,” places, and institutional change by reviewing a case of “placing” Japan’s economy. I demonstrate how ideas about Japan’s economy constructed in the US during the protracted dissolution of Fordist-Keynesianism (1970s-1990s) shifted perspectives of what is economically “normal,” enabling policymakers and corporate managers to pursue material adjustments. I focus on two holistic movements: the typification of Japan’s “developmental state” by political economists, coinciding with formal political debates about industrial policy in America; and the construction of an idealized Japanese model of production by American managers, enabling shifts in production techniques. I substantiate this through a historical review of academic, media, and corporate literature. Avoiding a general statement (or claim that Japan is unique in this role), I highlight how Japan lends a normative authority to reformist counternarratives against dominant liberal doxa—and intimate the contingent mechanisms empowering ideas to “seek” place.