Autumn 1990
Everyday Life in Japan
In Essence
James L.Does Congress Payne, "The Permanent Democratic Congress" Norman Need to Be Fixed? Ornstein, and "Public Opinion and the 'Congress Problem' " by
Everett Carl1 Ladd, in The Public Interest (Summer 1990), 11 12 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Who is to blame for Washington's long deadlock over the federal budget deficit and other national issues? Congress has emerged as the favorite culprit of many critics. They tend to think that only struc- tural changes-limitations o...
Willard Sterne Randall, in American Heritage (Sept.-Oct. 1990), 60 Fifth Ave., New York, Benedict Arnold N.Y. 10011.
In grade school, every child learns about the treacherous Benedict Arnold, who coldly sold out his country for �£20,000 But Randall, a historian at the University of Vermont, writes that Arnold's treason can be explained, if not excused, a "long fuse of bitterness."
Arnold's vanity and brashness made him an outsider throughout his military career....
David R. Beam, Timothy J. Conlan, and Of Reform Margaret T. Wrightson, in Political Science Quarterly (Summer 1990), 475 Riverside Dr., Ste. 1274, New York, N.Y. 10115-
There used to be only one way to enact radical reforms in Washington: Elect a
u
new president who sweeps into office and rallies Congress to his cause during his fig- urative first 100 days.
Recently, a second stvle of reform has emerged. Because of the explosive growth of congressional staffs, think tanks, and other institutions....
David R. Beam, Timothy J. Conlan, and Of Reform Margaret T. Wrightson, in Political Science Quarterly (Summer 1990), 475 Riverside Dr., Ste. 1274, New York, N.Y. 10115-
There used to be only one way to enact radical reforms in Washington: Elect a
u
new president who sweeps into office and rallies Congress to his cause during his fig- urative first 100 days.
Recently, a second stvle of reform has emerged. Because of the explosive growth of congressional staffs, think tanks, and other institutions....
Jorge Castaiieda, in World Policy Journal (Summer 1990), 777 United
A Latin Policy Nations Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017, and "Rediscovering Latin America" Abraham l? Lowenthal, in Foreign Affairs (Fall 1990), 58 E.68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Will the end of the Cold War finally free the United States of its last inhibitions against wholesale military intervention in Latin America? That, apparently, is what some Latin Americans fear.
Castafieda and Lowenthal both cite this minority v...
Jorge Castaiieda, in World Policy Journal (Summer 1990), 777 United
A Latin Policy Nations Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017, and "Rediscovering Latin America" Abraham l? Lowenthal, in Foreign Affairs (Fall 1990), 58 E.68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Will the end of the Cold War finally free the United States of its last inhibitions against wholesale military intervention in Latin America? That, apparently, is what some Latin Americans fear.
Castafieda and Lowenthal both cite this minority v...
PERIODICALS
the number of countries armed with mis- siles more than doubled during the past decade, to 18. The United States and the Soviet Union began developing ballistic missiles in 1953, and until recently they shared the missile manufacturing monoply only with France and China. All four be- came active missile merchants. And now new missile makers are emerging.
The list of Soviet customers is daunting. Libya, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Algeria, Egypt, and Iraq are among those who have o...
? "Europe 1992: Opportunities and Challenges" Gary Clyde Hufbauer, in The Brooking5 Review (Summer 1990), 1775 Mass. Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Judging by the headlines, you would think that Japan is this nation's only major trad- ing partner and competitor. It is easy to forget that the 12 nations of the European Community (EC) purchase a quarter of all
U.S. exports, more than any single nation. And nearly half of the $76 billion that the EC spends in the United States buys...
IODICALS
Kids And Capital
A surprising remedy for Americans' notori- ously low rate of personal savings is per-ceived James McNeal, writing in Ameri-can Demographics (Sept. 1990).
Today, children are viewed by business as in- dependent customers. But just how much clout do children actually have? Almost $9 billion worth, according to a nationally repre- sentative sample of children ages 4 to 12 sur- veyed in 1989. This figure is up from $4.7 billion in 1984, an 83 percent gain. .. .
Children's in...
1988, only 30 percent were.
Most of the losses poor nonelderly families are explained by reductions in the contributions of men to family income. As is well known, more and more families are poor because they lack a male breadwin-
The Change in Family Incomes, 1979-88
(Nonelderly Families)
Pm& Wnd nlrd Fourth Rich& Qulnnle QulnUle Qulnnle QulnUle Qulndle
The stark portrait of inequality above changes if the elderly are included: Then, only the poorest quintile loses ground (five per...
the likes of Amos Taylor, a former New Hamp- shire schoolteacher who took to peddling books and pamphlets during the 1780s. Taylor traveled the back roads of the Northeast selling such items as 17th-century English chapbooks, Indian captivity narratives, and even some of his own literary efforts. Taylor thought of his own role in heroic terms. Such "men of an excellent charac- ter," he wrote in The Bookseller's Legacy
Massachusetts shopkeeper Silas Felton was a typical consumer of the...
all. The idea is man, hence a contemporary at all times. to teach children that "their We smile at this naivete, but they understood Aristotle bet- identity is determined ter than do our scholars, as one can see simply by perusing 'cultural genes.' " More per- their commentaries. Pluto and Kant claim that they speak to
all men everywhere and forever, and I see no reason to re- nicious still, the particular- ject those claims a priori. But that is precisely what is done ist vision implies...
IODICALS
Lasch, a historian at the University of Rochester, is one of the few authorities who refus'e to blame the schools for this depressing state of affairs. The fault, he as- serts, lies squarely with the American press. Once the great inciter of public de- bate, it has settled into the role of mere purveyor of information. "When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention," Lasch writes, "we become avid seekers of relevant information. Oth- erwise we take...
the time the first real newspa-
RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
pers were started in Boston during the early 18th century, the teleological import of the news had all but vanished. Even so, Nord argues, journalism continued to feel the Puritan influence. "The news would remain event-oriented, devoted to unusual (but conventional) occurrences, and de- pendent on reportorial empiricism." The chief difference is that, today, "no one knows what the stories mean."
Locke's Lapses &qu...
Men sort them, are made Men."
Where does Glausser stand? He thinks that slavery is integral to Locke's thought, but only as part of an ambiguous "destabi- lizing competition of values."
"The Roots of Muslim Rage" by Bernard Lewis, in The Atlantic
The Muslim Mind
Monthly (Sept. 1990), 745 Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 02116.
The Cold War may be over but the clash of civilizations is not. Even if the inhabitants of what was once called Christendom still cannot quite bel...
Robert S. Root-Bern- stein, in Perspectives in Bioloev and Medicine (Summer 1990), Culver Hall 403, 1025 E. 57 ST, Chicago, 111. 60'637, and "Is the AIDS Virus a Science Fiction?" Peter H. Duesberg and Bryan J. Ellison, in Policy Review (Summer 1990), 214 Mass. Ave. N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002.
The whole world is waiting for a cure for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Yet medical researchers may have made a fundamental mistake. They may be wrong about its cause.
The generally a...
Robert S. Root-Bern- stein, in Perspectives in Bioloev and Medicine (Summer 1990), Culver Hall 403, 1025 E. 57 ST, Chicago, 111. 60'637, and "Is the AIDS Virus a Science Fiction?" Peter H. Duesberg and Bryan J. Ellison, in Policy Review (Summer 1990), 214 Mass. Ave. N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002.
The whole world is waiting for a cure for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Yet medical researchers may have made a fundamental mistake. They may be wrong about its cause.
The generally...
spraying a solution of manufactured bacteria over mine wastes and processing the liquid, workers can re- cover huge amounts of copper. "Bioleach- ing," which produced about 30 percent of the U.S. copper industry's output 1989, literally saved American copper compa- nies from extinction.
Some day, Debus says, it may be possi- ble to eliminate conventional mining alto- gether. Bacteria engineered to remove specific kinds of minerals may be pumped into the ground and then extracted and placed...
con-
trast, physicians in England,
home of the empirical tradi-
tion of Bacon, Hume, and
Locke, are the most cau-
tious. They even dispute the
efficacy of the drug AZT as a
treatment for AIDS.
Neither the West Ger- mans nor the French have ever fully accepted Louis Pasteur's discovery that germs cause many diseases; they share the tendency to view disease as a "failure of internal defenses rather than an invasion from with- out," notes Payer. Thus, German doctors rarely pre-...
mystics and certain apologists for industry who saw the Gaian vision of a self-policing global environ- ment as a license to pollute. But now, be- cause of increased appreciation of feed- back mechanisms, scientists are beginning to pay serious attention to the idea.
The problem, Schneider suggests, is that there is more than one Gaia hypothesis. "The realization that climate and life mu- tually influence each other is pro- found. . . . Nonetheless, to say that climate and life 'grew up together,'...
persuading Con- gress to allow the EPA to weigh costs and feasibility or doing so covertly. Con- gress has not gone along, and the courts, naturally enough, have rejected the EPA's covert efforts to do so.
Other commentators wag their fingers at
ARTS & LETTERS
Congress for passing laws that are impossi- ble to enforce, but Dwyer considers him- self too much of a realist to believe that that will do much good. He suggests that regulators work behind the scenes to win informal concessions wit...
"Burdens and Songs: The Anglo-American Rudyard Kipling" by
Christopher Kitchens, in Grand Street (Spring 1990), 50 River- side Dr., New York, N.Y. 10024.
Take up the White Man's burden- wrote his famous poem for an American Send forth the best ye breed- audience, and it was well received. As Go bind your sons to exile soon as the poem was finished he rushed it To serve your captives' need, off to his friend, Governor Theodore Roo- sevelt of New York, with the hope that it These opening...
then, however, the game was up for Britain. That very autumn, Harold MacMil- lan, the future prime minister, made his famous remark suggesting that Britain's role in the future would be to play Greece to America's Rome. That was not how Kip- ling had hoped things would turn out. But Hitchens suggests that "given the transmis- sion of British imperial notions to the Legates of the new Rome, he was not so quixotic a figure as Churchill's gesture makes him seem."
Subsidizing "Subsidies...
port-commissions, direct grants, and purchases for the national collection. In- deed, public subsidies for the arts remain far more generous than they are in the United States: $33 per capita annually, ver- sus 7 1 cents. Dutch art-often criticized as boring and repetitious-may not have im- proved since the abolition of the Arrange- ment, Tallman allows, but, in what seems a dubious defense, she says that the great- est defect of the Arrangement has been remedied: Art is no longer stored away i...
PERIODICALS
nesses of the French way were calami-tously revealed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when France's overly central- ized system could not get troops to the front in time to stop the Prussians.
At various times during its history-no- tably during the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848-the Corps and all it stood for were endangered the brief ascendancy of politicians and ideas in the classical lib- eral mode of Adam Smith. Between the 1880s and World War 11, these ideas did p...
Book Reviews
ROAD TO DIVORCE: England 1530-1987. By
Lawrence Stone. Oxford. 485 pp. $27.95
COLERIDGE: Early Visions. By Richard
Holmes. Viking. 409 pp. $22.95
By Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.
Harvard. 860 pp. $35
By Arthur Mitzman. Yale. 339 pp. $35
By John F.
Kasson. Hill and Wane,. 305 pp. $22.95
By H.
Perry Chapman. Princeton. 189 pp. $39.50
Translated by David
Rosenberg. Interpreted by Harold Bloom. Grove
Weidenfeld. 340 pp. $21.95
By Ray Monk. Free Press. 672 pp.
$29.95
By Kevin Phillips. Random
House. 262 pp. $19.95
By Seymour Martin Lipset. Routledge. 337 pp.
$29.95
By Paul Weindling.
Cambridge. 641 pp. $69.50
By Catherine Caulfield. Harper
& Row. 304 pp. $19.95
Essays
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...
America's muscular response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait has temporarily stilled all talk of American decline. Yet the national alarm over the expense of Operation Desert Shield, the urgent demands for more help from U.S.
In late July, 1863, in the middle of told me about you."' the Civil War, an imposing man The president's visitor was, of course, with stern features arrived at the Frederick Douglass, the editor of a re-White House hoping to meet Abra- spected abolitionist newspaper, a man in- ham Lincoln. Describing their in- ternationally famous for his oratorical terview later, he declared that, powers and anti-slavery activities. A self-though he was the "only dark spot" in the- taught former...
To return to the Soviet Union or not to return? That is the question now facing one of Russia's most popular novelists. On August 15, 1990, the citizenship of Vladimir Voinovich-as well as that of Alexander Solzhe- nitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, and other Soviet artists-in-exile-was restored. But going home poses problems. Voinovich describes his dilemma.
by Vladimir
If you want something good to hap-
pen in Russia, said the Russian
writer Kornei Chukovsky, you have
to live a long life. Chukovsky to...
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...
