Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
5 Year Plans
So it seems METI is trying to encourage other countries to import Japanese culture. Well, color my scepticle.
METI stands for the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. Its the succesor to MITI which was the Minitry of International Trade and Industry. These groups have always been nominally in charge of guiding the Japanese economy to in more productive ways but I'll let you all in on a little secret, they're not very good at it. Here's a quote from Japan and the Myth of MITI
METI stands for the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. Its the succesor to MITI which was the Minitry of International Trade and Industry. These groups have always been nominally in charge of guiding the Japanese economy to in more productive ways but I'll let you all in on a little secret, they're not very good at it. Here's a quote from Japan and the Myth of MITI
Early in the fifties, a small consumer-electronics company in Japan asked the Japanese government for permission to buy transistor-manufacturing rights from Western Electric. Permission was necessary because at the time foreign exchange was controlled by the tax and trade ministries. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) refused, arguing that the technology wasn't impressive enough to justify the expenditure. Two years later, the company persuaded MITI to reverse its decision and went on to fame and fortune with the transistor radio. The company's name: Sony.MITI also initially opposed letting Japanese companies export their cars to other countries. Back when this was going on MITI thought that Japan should focus on thing like steel exports, things that really didn't work out all that well. MITI might be trying to encourage cultural exports, I seem to remember when they started doing that back in the day, but they only started after it had become obvious that it was a good idea. And really, would you trust a government buearocracy to be able to identify and promote what was cool?
In the midfifties MITI exhorted a Japanese industry to develop a prototype "people's" model of its product so MITI could designate the winning firm as the single producer. In the 1960s MITI tried to force this industry's many firms to merge into just a few. Both times the companies rebuffed MITI, and today this industry is one of Japan's finest. Its product: cars.