CARTELS OF THE MIND: Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop.

By Ivan Hall. Norton. 208 pp. $25

During the mid-1600s, Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate took the fateful step of expelling almost all Westerners from the nation and confining the rest to a small artificial island in Nagasaki harbor. In the era of sakoku (seclusion) that followed, the shoguns banned overseas travel, monitored foreigners’ movements, and used a handful of mostly Dutch traders as their conduit to Western teaching and technology. Today, despite recurrent tensions between Japan and its trading partners, a visitor to Tokyo, with its Hermes boutiques and McDonald’s restaurants, could be forgiven for thinking that those exclusionary days are over. Yet as Japan scholar Hall shows in this disturbing and important work, the xenophobic mindset of the Tokugawa era still holds powerful sway.

Unlike critics of Japanese economic policies who have focused on cars, computer chips, and the keiretsu (corporate networks) that produce them, Hall sets his sights on what the political scientist Chalmers Johnson has called Japan’s "cartels of the mind": the formal and informal networks and rules that make it difficult, if not impossible, for foreign professionals to find work.

The restrictions that Hall painstakingly details would seem merely absurd if they did not apply to the world’s second-largest economy. So stringent are the rules governing the activities of foreign lawyers that a Japanese attorney who goes to the United States and joins a U.S. firm can no longer argue cases in his home country. Foreign journalists must work extra hard: although their lot has improved since 1964, when American reporters were kept out of a police press conference on the stabbing of U.S. ambassador Edwin Reischauer, they remain effectively barred from the cozy kisha (reporters) clubs that monopolize news from most government ministries, industrial associations, and private companies. Those foreign professors lucky enough to be hired in Japan are denied chances at tenure and generally endure a second-class status that Hall calls "academic apartheid." In one of his book’s more powerful chapters, the author draws on his years as a professor in Japan to show how and why foreign scholars are generally treated like "temporary transmitters of knowledge, to be celebrated, sucked dry, and sacked."

Hall is by no means the first scholar to scrutinize Japan’s highly resistant strain of cultural isolationism. As the Japanese social critic Takeo Kuwabara observed more than a decade ago, "Japanese respect the principle of cultural interchange... but in reality they tolerate one-way traffic only." As more than a few Japanologists have learned, Japanese often react to a foreigner who speaks their language and knows their ways much as one might respond to a talking dog: initially charmed but increasingly suspicious—especially if the dog begins to criticize.

Perhaps understandably, Hall’s account is colored a shade too purple by the slights and injuries he has witnessed or experienced in nearly three decades as a journalist, diplomat, and academic in Japan. His prediction that Japan’s closed system will spread to its neighbors seems misguided, especially given the push for democratization and greater openness in many Asian countries suffering from a regional financial crisis.

But the flaws in some of Hall’s conclusions do not detract from his valuable mapping of Japan’s barriers to intellectual exchange. Cutting through the disingenuous blather of Japan’s intellectual establishment about its commitment to kokusaika (internationalization), Hall shows that as technology and trade turn much of the world into the equivalent of a global village, Japan will increasingly stand out as one of its more provincial neighborhoods.

—James Gibney