amnath is a 51-year-old
man who owns a grocery
shop in the oldest part of
the city of Delhi. When he
took the unusual step of
coming to see me. a West- ern-trained psychoa~lyst, he w& suffer- ing from an unspecified anxiety which be- came especially acute in the company of his father. He did not call it anxiety, of course, but a "sinking of the heart." This condition was less than three years old, a relatively new development.
Ramnath had, on the other hand, long suffered from...
in Washing- ton on behalf of the elderly. 'Old-age interest groups ap- pear to be one of the great po- litical success stories of the last two decades," writes Day, a University of New Orleans po- litical scientist. Federal spend- ing on programs for the elderly rose from less than 15 percent of the federal budget in 1960 to about 27 percent in 1986, cut- ting the poverty rate among the elderly from 33 percent in 1959 to 12.5 percent in 1987.
Politicians, fearful of a back- lash from the "gray...
1990, Africans in most of the 46 black-ruled nations below the Sahara were poorer
than they had been 30 years before Yet all is not misery. As philoso- pher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes here, Africans in their
disillusionment have cast ' i
aside the shallow national-ism of the early postcolonial years. They are holding their societies together with old bonds of family and i tribe, and, increasingly,
with new bonds, spun i!
churches, sports clubs, and other groups. These humble grassroots in...
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...
Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions
"Who Reads Literature?"
Seven Locks Press, P.O. Box 27, Cabin John, Md. 20818. 106 pp. $9.95.
Authors: Nicholas Zill and Marianne Winglee
In the Age of Nintendo, do people still read "serious" lit- erature? Zill, a social psycholo- gist, and Winglee, an analyst at Decision Resource Corpora- tion, knew that someone had to be reciting from the 1,000 volumes of poetry and drama, pondering the 2,000 works o...
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...