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Florian Coulmas
For Florian Coulmas's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Mar 31, 2013
Glacial change slow to heat up Japan's economy
The Japanese manager was once portrayed as a fearless samurai ready to take on the world. This was when Western companies and management scholars woke up to the presence of a potent competitor outside the Western world.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Mar 10, 2013
Providing lessons on nuclear policy
FALLOUT FROM FUKUSHIMA, by Richard Broinowski. Scribe Publications, 2012, 273 pp., A$27.95 (paperback)
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jan 19, 2013
Meiji Japanese who sought to improve China
ASIA FOR THE ASIANS: China in the Lives of Five Meiji Japanese, by Paula S. Harrell. Merwin Asia, 2012, 407 pp., $35 (paperback)
CULTURE / Books
Aug 29, 2010
New look at old Edo's window to the West
Japan's seclusion policy (sakoku) from the early 17th to the mid-19th century is commonly studied from the point of view of the bakufu, the Tokugawa government in Edo that exercised central control over the other domains of the realm.
CULTURE / Books
Dec 21, 2008
Japan threatened by social divide
POVERTY AND SOCIAL WELFARE IN JAPAN, edited by Masami Iwata and Akihiko Nishizawa. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2008, 323 pp., A$54.95 (paper) Recent commotions on financial markets have underscored the fact that neoliberal reforms and destatization have not brought us the advantages of competition, but the sellout of governmental steering mechanisms that can protect the common good and prevent the splitting up of society into haves and have-nots. The past decade has seen the coming into existence in many advanced countries, including Japan, of a "precariat" ("precarious proletariat") of people struggling with short-term jobs to make ends meet, as well as a new underclass of the socially excluded.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 3, 2008
Japan politics in the 'short 20th century'
MARUYAMA MASAO and THE FATE OF LIBERALISM IN TWENTIETH- CENTURY JAPAN by Karube Tadashi, translated by David Noble. I-House Press, 2008, 212 pp., ¥2,500 (cloth) Masao Maruyama was one of the most influential contemporary Japanese intellectuals. Tadashi Karube is his heir in the sense that he is a professor in the School of Legal and Political Studies at the University of Tokyo, the institution from which Maruyama retired in 1971.
CULTURE / Books
May 4, 2008
Japan as a land of many religions
PROPHET MOTIVE: Deguchi Onisaburo, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan, by Nancy K. Stalker. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007, 265 pp., $49 (cloth) Reviewed by Florian Coulmas Japan has sometimes been called an irreligious country, but students of religion know that this is only because Western notions of religiosity do not necessarily apply to Japan, and because the Christian mission has been remarkably unsuccessful in this country. How important a role religion plays in Japanese life is perhaps best attested by the many religious movements that came into being in addition to Buddhism, Shintoism and Christianity, the three creeds officially recognized by the Meiji government in the late 19th century as part of its modernization efforts. They are collectively known as "new religions" and have at times attracted a numerous following, especially during hard times.
CULTURE / Books
Dec 2, 2007
Japanese intellectual crosscurrents
The Scars of War: Tokyo during World War II: Writings of Takeyama Michio, edited and translated by Richard H. Minear. Lanham, M.D.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 207 pp., 2007, $24.95. (cloth) Michio Takeyama (1903-1984) was one of many 20th-century intellectuals who in the course of their life wandered from the left to the right, but he is surely among the most interesting. With the book under review here Richard Minear makes available for the first time in English 10 essays Takeyama wrote between 1940 and 1953, augmented by an insightful and sensitive biographical sketch of a man who lived through World War II at home and was deeply influenced by this experience.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 9, 2007
Act of missionary hypocrisy
The ordeal of the women who were coerced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Armed Forces during the 1930s and 1940s is beyond dispute, as is the responsibility of the Japanese state for these deeds.
CULTURE / Books
Dec 24, 2006
Word power: 'The way' and the way you say it
OGYU SORAI'S PHILOSOPHICAL MASTERWORKS: The Bendo and Benmei, edited and translated by John A. Tucker. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006, 478 pp., $56 (cloth). One of the foremost thinkers of our time, Noam Chomsky, has argued that the United States is a rogue state. To arrive at this conclusion, he applied the definition the U.S. government uses to identify rogue states. A quibble about semantics? Certainly not, if by that we mean an insignificant argument. Much rather it is an example of the eminently political nature of determining the meaning of words and how they relate to facts.
CULTURE / Books
Nov 5, 2006
Following the paper trail to a modern Japan
JAPAN IN PRINT: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period, by Mary Elizabeth Berry. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2006, 325 pp., $45.95 (cloth). The title of this book is to be taken literally. "Japan in Print" is not about Japanese prints or printing in Japan, but about printing and its impact on the making of Nihon.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 13, 2006
Shifting relations with China
JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA: Facing a Rising Power, edited by Lam Peng Er. London: Routledge, 2006, 242 pp., £65 (cloth). Sino-Japanese relations are of critical importance to the future development of the two countries as well as wider East Asia. At the present time these relations are characterized by a number of incongruities if not contradictions. Diplomacy is at a low point, while economic ties are closer and more intensive than ever. History continues to overshadow the present and is destined to impact the shaping of the future.
CULTURE / Books
May 14, 2006
A force yet to be reckoned with
CHINA'S NEW NATIONALISM: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy, by Peter Hays Gries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, 224 pp., $19.95 (paper). In East Asia, nationalism never acquired quite as bad a name as it did in Europe, and it is not uncommon to hear politicians go on record with nationalistic statements. Yet, it is a force that is often disruptive of international relations and dangerous for domestic politics if it gets out of bounds.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 12, 2006
Fathoming the depths and heights of Japan's intercultural encounters
JAPAN'S LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WEST by Sukehiro Hirakawa. Folkstone: Global Oriental, 2005, 557 pp., £50 (cloth). Rudyard Kipling, one of the most popular writers in the English tongue of his generation, addressed his poem "The White Man's Burden" to the American people in 1899 -- when the United States was emerging as an imperialist power in Asia, having made the Philippines its colony in the western Pacific. Of the poem Theodore Roosevelt said it "is rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansionist standpoint," the standpoint of the "powers" that divided the world among them.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
May 15, 2005
When law and justice won't mix
JAPAN'S COLONIZATION OF KOREA: Discourse and Power, by Alexis Dudden. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005, 215 pp. $45 (cloth). Lawful and just are two separate things that may be irreconcilable. A good example that offers plenty of material to fathom this out was the annexation of Korea by Japan.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Mar 20, 2005
The undeniable legacy left after Japan wreaked havoc
RACE WAR! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire, by Gerald Horne. New York and London: New York University Press, 2004, 407 pp., 4,478 yen (cloth). Racism is a particularly dirty issue of World War II in Asia that is often swept under the carpet. Tokyo's claim that Japan stood up against European domination and colonial exploitation is usually dismissed as self-serving propaganda. Gerald Horne demonstrates that this is too simplistic a view reflecting the general tendency to lionize the victor and vilify the vanquished.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jan 23, 2005
As Japan goes through a transformation, so too might those who do the observing
JAPAN'S QUIET TRANSFORMATION: Social Change and Civil Society in the Twenty-first Century, by Jeff Kingston. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, 358 pp., 3,657 yen (paper). Nothing is permanent but change. The idea of transience has a long tradition in Japan, coming to the fore at times and receding into the background at others. Reinforced by the uncontrollable elements of nature, it is never completely absent from the Japanese mind.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Nov 7, 2004
And you thought doing deals in today's Japan was tough
THE DESHIMA DIARIES MARGINALIA 1740-1800, edited by Leonard Blusse, Cynthia Vialle, Willem Remmelink and Isabel van Daalen. Tokyo: The Japan-Netherlands Institute, 898 pp., 2004, 13,000 yen (cloth). It has been 12 years since I had occasion to review on this page the first volume of the Deshima Diaries Marginalia. Now the second volume has appeared.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Aug 8, 2004
Which way for Japanese capitalism?
THE END OF DIVERSITY?: Prospects for German and Japanese Capitalism, edited by Kozo Yamamura and Wolfgang Streeck. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003, 401 pp., $24.95 (paper), $49.95 (cloth). This book is about the future of capitalism and its national varieties. "Free market capitalism and democracy for all" is the sermon preached by development-aid dispensers in the rich nations of the Northern Hemisphere, whose representatives like to believe that their countries' wealth is the result not of the exploitation of the rest of the world but of the felicitous combination of capitalism and democracy. If only the poor countries of the South would follow their lead -- welfare and peace would reign supreme around the world.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 29, 2004
To improve the East, must we move West?
JAPAN: The Burden of Success, by Jean-Marie Bouissou. London: Hurst & Co., 2002, 374 pp., £35.00 (cloth), £14.95 (paper). Jean-Marie Bouissou, who lived in Japan in the 1980s, is a political scientist at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and the Centre Franco-Japonais de Management. "The Burden of Success," an updated translation of the French original that was published under the title "Japan since 1945," establishes him as an expert on Japanese affairs, both political and economic. It is a detailed political history of post-World War II Japan tracing its economic development from the destruction of the 1940s and the period of recovery through the prolonged economic stagnation since the early 1990s.

Longform

A statue of "Dragon Ball" character Goku stands outside the offices of Bandai Namco in Tokyo. The figure is now as recognizable as such characters as Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man.
Akira Toriyama's gift to the world