wonweekend
In business school, my favorite subject was financial manias and bubbles. To me, the fact that people could collectively lose their minds over a story, made it seem like the whole world of business and industry was just…not so serious.
I graduated into the blinding champagne spray of the pre-GFC era and had the opportunity to observe some manias of my own. One of them was a particular strain that hit the East Asian countries in precise order of development - Japan, Korea, then China. Underlying it was a belief that theme parks were a magical land use, that if you Built Them, People Would Come, and completely revitalize the fortunes of the land.
Even though some accounts hit the press sporadically, there have been no proper histories of it. And especially now, in light of the inexorable aging of all three societies, the era stands like a golden age, a pivotal point between the rapid industrialization that made all three economies the envy of the world, and the looming demographic challenges on the other side.
This is a concise history of the phenomenon, which spanned the late 1980s to 2020.
