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Reviewed by:
  • Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan, and: Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe, 1871-1873, and: Japan through the Looking Glass, and: Everyday Aesthetics, and: The Culture of Japanese Fascism
  • Jeffrey M. Perl (bio)
Donald Keene , Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 196 pp.
Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe, 1871-1873, compiled (1876) by Kume Kunitake, ed. Chushichi Tsuzuki and R. Jules Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 528 pp.
Alan Macfarlane , Japan through the Looking Glass (London: Profile Books, 2007), 256 pp.
Yuriko Saito , Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 273 pp.
Alan Tansman , ed., The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 477 pp.

The "End of Japan" is how the international edition of Newsweek chose to define the "humiliation" of the Toyota Motor Corporation earlier this year. "Symptomatic of a nation that has lost its way," this "fall from grace caps a 20-year economic malaise . . . manifesting itself in a preference for staying home, avoiding risk, and removing oneself from the hierarchical system." Somehow I thought that "end," "humiliation," "lost its way," "fall from grace," and "malaise"—packed so closely together—would service a more fearful referent, but: "Sugomori (nesting) people spend their days seeking bargains online. With wages declining, soshoku-kei danshi (grass-eating men) avoid going out or trying to find a career for themselves. According to some surveys, this generation has reported preferences for avoiding cars, motorcycles, and even spicy food. Entrepreneurship is seen as an unpromising career prospect. Estimates of the number of hikikomori (shutins who have given up on social life) have risen."

That was March 2010. In January 1876, a young Confucian scholar of the samurai class, Kume Kunitake—private secretary to Prince Kwakura Tomomi, imperial foreign minister and ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Europe and the United States—submitted to the Japanese government a five-volume "True Account" of a "Journey of Observation," involving eight months in the United States and a year in twelve European countries (including Russia). The self-isolated Empire of Japan had been "opened" to the world by threat of naval force in 1853, an event that is credited, though mainly outside Japan, with having resulted, however indirectly, in the Meiji Restoration of 1867-68, which—so far from restoring anything—disbanded the samurai military, established a European-style parliament, removed the imperial capital from Kyoto to Tokyo, and set Japan on a course of modernization, urbanization, industrialization, centralization, bourgeoisification, and Westernization imposed on the populace (and much of the upper class) from above. "The world is moving as rapidly as a turning wheel," Kunitake writes in his "true account," and informs his government that while, "individually, Europeans fall far short of the Japanese in craftsmanship [End Page 563] . . . the industrial arts flourish among them, and what vast gains in wealth and power they have made! Because they are no more able to depend on their native ingenuity than on their infertile soil, they make every effort to conquer nature by thoroughly investigating its mechanisms . . . their technology cannot escape a dependence on machines. We should not, therefore, be overawed by their engineering feats . . . the people there all wish for commerce to thrive just as people in the east wish for an abundant harvest. . . . When we had audiences with emperors, kings and queens or were received by foreign ministers, the theme of their addresses was invariably 'trade.' . . . A high regard for commerce permeates the innermost hearts of all Europeans. . . . The most important basic principle of commerce is to increase the yearly circulation of goods."

The idea of circulating goods (and circulating them increasingly) was new to the Japanese in 1876 and, apparently, it was news that stayed new. According to a Cambridge anthropologist, Alan Macfarlane, writing as late as 2007, "Western economic rationality, based on the assumption of individual profit maximalisation, does not really apply in large parts of Japanese society. Indeed," he continues, "it could be argued, somewhat paradoxically, that in the most efficient and second largest economy on earth, there is no 'Economy' at...

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