Abstract
Through a review of the discourses and images presented by the Japanese government and business community, this paper explores how the concepts of “small business” and “entrepreneur” have been defined in Japanese society since the late 1990s.
This paper uncovers the irony in the construction of entrepreneurship in the era of post-Japanese-style management following the collapse of the Bubble Economy, during which political and business establishments encouraged the entrepreneur to save the Japanese economy. Despite related-policy blueprints' emphasis on free will and self-responsibility, calling for entrepreneurs to assume a self-sustaining attitude, these statements are always placed in the context of national interest (e.g., “revival of the Japanese economy” or “revitalizing the national economy”). In policy blueprints, an entrepreneur is never constructed as someone who pursues his/her own private profit or who sets his/her own goals. Instead, an entrepreneur is framed as someone who should “contribute to the Japanese economy” and “prime the Japanese economy.” As a sub-plot, small businesses have been supported, especially after youth unemployment surfaced as a social problem, as an effective way to create new jobs.
Historically, supporting small- and medium-sized companies has been an element of social policy in Japan, the goal being to prompt SMEs to modernize and to reduce the disparity between SMEs and large companies. Such aims were influenced by the so-called double structure theory until the revision of the Small and Medium Enterprises Basic Act in 1999. Therefore, the discourse that calls for entrepreneurs to take full responsibility over themselves to save the Japanese economy is particular to the late 1990s and 2000s.
