In the West, particularly the English-speaking world, neoliberalism seemed to easily replace the collectivist values of the full employment era that followed the Second World War. It constructed a world where individualism was prioritised over society, even though it claimed that society (all of us) would be better off by pursuing our own greedy interests. All the collective apparatus of the full employment era – welfare state, democratic institutions, social solidarity – were attacked by the phalanx of think tanks, media companies that sprung up in the 1970s to propagate the ideology. These machines played on our natural suspicion of politicians to mount a major reconfiguration of the state under the pretence that through privatisation outsourcing, and the promotion of unfettered ‘markets’ we would all prosper. It was a fraud – a deliberate deception and the question is whether the ideological onslaught has become so entrenched in our value structures that it will be hard to move beyond. Today, I want to convey some of the research I am doing tracing the way the neoliberal ideology has interacted with the traditional cultural values of Japan. Japan is a curious mix or hybrid of Western and Eastern values and one might venture to say that the latter make it harder for neoliberal precepts to spread as deeply as they have in the West. That is what I am writing about today. This is Part 1 of a two-part series on this topic.