Japan went from a country devastated in the wake of World War Two to the second largest economy in the world in a relatively short period of time. What kind of reaction did Japan's economic rise elicit in the rest of the world?

"Rest of the world" is a bit big, but I can offer a brief outline of how my country, Singapore, reacted. I find that interesting because Singapore was conquered by the Japanese during WW2 and suffered terribly under their occupation, yet the country very quickly welcomed Japanese investment and never encouraged anti-Japanese sentiment.

Singapore established diplomatic relations with Japan in 1966. By this time, Japan was the second largest economy in the world and Singapore was newly independent.

This led to Singapore aggressively courting Japanese investment in Singapore during the 60s and 70s. Seiko opened a watch factory, Sumitomo opened a petrochemical plant. These provided direct employment to Singaporeans. I believe Japan is today the second largest investor in Singapore.

But just as important was the perception that Japan was the world's second largest economy despite having far fewer people than the United States, and it had got there so quickly because its workers were very productive (as well as working way too hard but that's another matter). Because of that, Singapore was very keen on investment in the form of training. For instance, Singapore encouraged the Japanese to set up a computer training centre in Singapore to train Singaporeans in what was then the arcane arts of computer use.

Also because Japan had achieved so much, so fast, there was, and still is, a perception that Japan places great emphasis on quality and productivity. There was a time when Singaporeans used to joke that Japanese cars were made of hot chocolate powder tins i.e. they were pretty crummy. But this changed into admiration for the quality of Japanese products. I am not sure when this changed, but Hakuhodo, a Japanese media agency, did a survey in 2011 and found that products that were made in Japan had a very good reputation, even more so than products made in America.

There was also admiration for the Japanese management methods that had been used that had allowed their companies to conquer the world. This links to productivity again. Today there's the perception that China's solution to any problem is to throw more cheap labour at it, but in the 80s the perception was that the Japanese had some magical management techniques that enabled them to do lots and lots with very few staff. One example is the Toyota Production System, which was studied extensively in Singapore and the United States and probably in many other parts of the world (ironically, this was inspired in large part by American production methods).

Finally, perhaps because of this perception that Japan's success rested on management techniques and the positive attitude of its people, a lot of us really thought Japan was going to keep being the second largest economy in the world for a good long time. In the 80s, the brightest students in Singapore would study a third language (besides English and whatever their "mother tongue" happened to be) and Japanese was a very popular choice because it was seen as "useful".

I don't know what the perception of Japan's rise was in other parts of the world, but a novel I found very interesting is Rising Sun by Michael Crichton. It was written at the end of Japan's rise, in 1992, and conveys a mixture of fear, admiration and rage at how the United States is losing out to Japan. Somewhat similar to the feelings stirred by China's rise today.