Notwithstanding contemporary Western images of ‘changing Japan’, expectations of lifetime employment within a remarkably stable population of leading firms continue to underpin a distinctive style of Japanese management based on high levels of inter-employee trust and extensive transactions in tacit knowledge. After reviewing some factors that distinguish Japan’s national innovation system from its Anglo-American counterparts, we develop an ‘inside the black box’ model of Japanese organizational knowledge creation. This highlights some aspects of Japanese management which do not sit easily amidst Anglo-American organizational turbulence and predilections for explicit knowledge. The second part of our paper uses two case studies to explore factors limiting the ‘transferability’ of Japanese management to Anglo and American innovation environments. These case studies illustrate differences between Japanese and Western systems, together with processes by which their respective advantages can combine to produce synergic benefits.