Let me stay with the Japanese case.  
  
Martin Bronfenbrenner seems to be the first to discuss in English   
the concept of "excessive competition" often used by Japanese  
politicians and business people in the 1960s. He was critical of   
Japanese "excessive competition" talk as follows,  
  
[Quote] To an economist raised, like myself, in an orthodox tradition,   
the visceral reaction to "kato kyoso" [Japanese phrase for excessive  
competition] talk is "Impossible!" and the subsequent intellectual   
reaction is extreme suspicion. This is not because the purely   
competitive market provides of necessity any Utopian "welfare optimum,"   
for there are circumstances aplenty where it falls short...  
The reason is rather such talk has so often provided a rationalization   
for restrictions of output and increases of price, victimizing consumers   
for the benefit of monopolistic cartels and their junior partners in the   
labor aristocracy. [Unquote]  
  
Martin Bronfenbrenner (1966) 'Excessive Competition in Japanese   
Business' (_Monumenta Nipponica_), which is also available on JSTOR.   
It was 1 of the 16603 references I hit by searching the phrase "excessive   
competition" on JSTOR.  
  
Japanese economists believed it was the standard thinking of American  
economists.  
  
Bronfenbrenner visited Japan in 1945 for the first time. Since then he   
had not only visited there several times but also stayed probably for   
more than a decade in total.  
  
Bronfenbrenner's criticism did not have much impact on Japan's policy  
making in the 1960s. However, the things became different in the   
1980s, when the US government (and some scholars) began to criticize   
the closedness of Japan's market on a similar basis.  
    
In the 1930s Japanese bureaucrats and economists read the literatures   
related to anti-depression policy and state-control over some industries  
written in German, Italian, English, etc. They preferred the German style  
of government-business relationship to "control" each industry with   
cooperation of the both sides.    
  
I would like to provide the title of the reference which was missing in my   
previous posting.  
Philip H. Trezise with collaboration of Yukio Suzuki,  
'Politics, Government, and Economic Growth in Japan'  
in H. Patrick and H. Rosovsky eds (1976) _Asia's New Giant._   
Washington D.C. Brookings Institution.  
  
Aiko Ikeo