Review 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.

Review Mar 10, 2013

Providing lessons on nuclear policy

FALLOUT FROM FUKUSHIMA, by Richard Broinowski. Scribe Publications, 2012, 273 pp., A$27.95 (paperback) Most books about the nuclear reactor accident of Fukushima No. 1 are very opinionated. Given the many repercussions of the disaster, it is not surprising that people find it difficult to ...

Review 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) The radical makeover Japan prescribed itself in the course of the Meiji reforms, driven by entirely justified fear of Western domination, ...

Review Aug 29, 2010

New look at old Edo's window to the West

DEFINING ENGAGEMENT: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868, by Robert I. Hellyer. Harvard University Asia Center, 2010, 281 pp., $39.95. (hardcover) 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 ...

Review 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, ...

Review 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 ...

Review 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 ...

Review 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 ...

Global-related 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. After the war, when preparations were made for the ...

Review 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 ...

Review 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 ...

Review 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 ...