By Ann Braden Johnson. Basic.306 pp. $22.95
By John Noble Wilford.
Knopf. 244 pp. $24.95
By Claude Quetel. Trans. by Judith Braddock and Brian Pike. Johns Hopkins. 342 pp. $35.95
docile industrial workers and driven white-collar "salaryrnen," bound together their unstinting loyalty to Japan, Inc.
What this picture ignores is the variety within Japa- nese society, a society that both sustains and is sus- tained by ancient cultural traditions. Anthropologist David Plath here discusses the difficulty Westerners have long had in separating images from a more com- plicated reality. His colleagues look at the various worlds that constitute contemporary Japan. Theodore...
ind the Miracle
Everyday Life in Japan
The success of Japan's postwar economy has caused many in the west- to form a somewhat distorted pic- ture of the Japanese and their society. We envision a land populated almost exclusively by docile industrial workers and driven white-collar "salaryrnen," bound together by their unstinting loyalty to Japan, Inc.
What this picture ignores is the variety within Japa- nese society, a society that both sustains and is sus- tained by ancient cultural t...
The American bestiary iden- tifies two sub-species of the
Japanese economic ani-
mal. The more familiar is
the company employee,
recognizable by its collar (white or blue) connected by a short leash to its employer, Japan, Inc. The second sub- species, only recently discovered, is the small shopkeeper. Its haunts are marked by the little non-tariff trade barriers that these creatures erect around their abodes, the hundreds of thousands of mom-and-pop stores that dot the Japanese landscape. T...
ne of the several split im-
ages we Americans have
of Japan is that of city-Ja-
pan, country-Japan. Mil-
lions of zealous factory
and office workers are packed%to sprawling cities, while beyond them lie fields of glistening rice, diligently tended by declining numbers of aging farmers, Appreciating such contrasts, many Americans also feel that city and country in Japan have one thing in common: the vigi- lant protection of the state. Even as it pro- motes efficient industrial corporations in...
In a study conducted six years ago, a team of Japanese researchers
asked children in Korea, Taiwan,
and Japan to draw a picture of a
typical evening meal. Although
most of the children depicted a family sitting together around a dinner ta- ble, a significant number of the Japanese children drew a single child holding a bowl of noodles while seated in front of the tele- vision set. These results reinforced a con- cern already voiced by influential commen- tators in Japan, including government of...
their language barrier and thriving economy, for a more adventurous life dealing with the problems of world peace and the global economy. To put it in dramatic terms, they find it hard to join the human race. For one thing, they still have inadequate skills of communication. More seriously, they have a strong sense of separateness." This extensive revision of his earlier book, The Japanese* (Harvard, 1977), provides a survey of Japanese history from the third century A.D. through the late 1970s...
Philosophy begins in response to the Delphic injunction, "Know Thyself." The essay begins more modestly, with Montaigne's ques- tion, "What do I know?" The tentative, questioning nature of the essay permits it to explore the doubts, terrors, and hopes that arise during periods of great change. According to 0. B. Hardison, this explains why the essay-along with the office memo-is the most widely read form of writing today.
by 0.B. Hardison, Jr.
The ancient god Proteus knew t...