East Asia's Manufacturing and Export Economies

Japan's "economic miracle" of roughly 1955 to 1973 transformed a war-devastated economy into the world's second-largest by the 1970s, built around large industrial conglomerates known as keiretsu — descendants of the prewar zaibatsu, including groups such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Sumitomo — which linked manufacturers, suppliers, and banks into tightly coordinated networks. A central innovation of this period was the Toyota Production System, developed principally by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota from the late 1940s onward, which introduced just-in-time inventory management and the kanban signaling method to minimize waste; the system was later studied worldwide as "lean manufacturing" and reshaped automotive and industrial production far beyond Japan.