REIMAGINING JAPAN: The Quest for a Future That Works [ハードカバー]

If you're expecting a book that addresses post-3/11 Japan explicitly, this is not the book for you. Like a seared piece of maguro, only the surfaces of the book -- the introduction, conclusion, and first and last chapters (each chapter being a collection of articles) -- have been significantly affected by those events. Most of the 79 articles pay them lip service, or ignore them altogether. As the editors explain, this book was already on its way to the printer when the earthquake hit.

As a book about the challenges facing Japan more generally, the book has a huge number, but relatively limited variety, of points of view. If you don't tire of hearing over and over that Japan should let in immigrants, encourage entrepreneurship, liberalize ___ (fill in the blank: trade, the labor market, regulation), reduce the corporate tax rate, hire more women, and reform its educational system, and don't mind indulging some CEOs as they pat themselves on the back, you may find it spellbinding. Otherwise, I'd generously estimate about 25%-30% of the contents to be interesting, either for offering a different perspective on Japan's challenges or for describing some features of Japanese culture (sumo, baseball, cuisine, a popular manga series, etc.) better than the Western media usually do.

As one might expect from a book edited by a huge management consulting company, the emphasis is on business and economics more than on most other aspects of Japanese life (esp. Chaps. 1-8). By "bland" in this review's title I mean less the substance of most of the recommendations (some of which might rather be called Draconian), than their uniformity and the fact that most of them have been circulating non-stop in the Western and/or domestic press during the past decade; only a small minority of authors bothered to "reimagine" anything. The authorship split is about 5:3 foreigner:Japanese. Aside from a couple of European executives, the foreigners come almost exclusively from Anglophone countries. Despite there being some excellent European institutes for social science research here in Tokyo (including the Maison Franco-Japonaise and Deutsches Institut f'r Japanstudien), the viewpoints of Continental scholars are entirely absent. Given the current condition of the US economy, its rising inequality and political polarization, suggestions that Japan might compare favorably to the US along some dimensions are strikingly rare.

There are a few stand-out pieces. Far and away the best out of the 79 is a very apt and very funny dark satire by Alex Kerr, called "Japan After People". Unfortunately, some of it may go over your head if you haven't lived here or at least travelled outside major metropolitan areas (e.g., references to the concrete that is the "lifeblood" of local communities (@406), and to how "in the late 20th century, Japan's staple food began to switch from rice to mayonnaise" @410). Articles by the mayor of Yokohama (Hayashi) and a sarariiman turned school principal (Fujihara) described wonderfully pragmatic and creative programs. Yuji Genda has provided an excellent piece on the challenges facing of youth in Japan. Pico Iyer's lovely essay about life in Nara looks at Japanese society through a more down-to-earth lens, and Martha Sherill's essay about a dog-breeder in Akita gives the lie to the notion that Japanese don't express their personal views. I very much disagreed with the recommendations of Masaru Tamamoto about bringing Enlightenment liberalism to Japan, but found his contribution among the most thought-provoking in the book. I was also glad to see two pieces (Iwasaki, Clifford) express the contrarian view that the future Japan doesn't need economic growth (a position that I've taken in print here myself).

A brief outline (I'll usually stay silent about the conventional punditry and corporate puff-piecing):

Chap. 1 (5 articles) - commenting most directly on 3/11; mostly expressing confidence that Japan will recover, plus one article about energy policy (Ebinger &al.). If this is your main interest you would be vastly better-served -- as well as serving the cause of disaster relief -- if you download the e-book from Foreign Policy, "Tsunami: Japan's Post-Fukushima Future" (Jeff Kingston, ed.), published a couple of weeks before this one (available from Amazon US).

Chap. 2 (10 articles) - industrial policy, corporate success stories and trends like aging. Carlos Ghosn's essay is encouraging but anodyne; nonetheless he is important as an object lesson that, despite many writers' urging, gaijin managers are not necessarily good for Japanese companies -- *Carlos Ghosn* was good for one. (Cf. Sony CEO Howard Stringer, who has managed to drive share price lower than it traded during the reign of his destructive, Japanese immediate predecessor.) Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, the "Bill Gates of Japan," defends convicted Livedoor CEO Horiemon, wants more stock option-based compensation and urges that Japan give up manufacturing. (I hope the havoc wrought on global supply chains by the 3/11 tsunami has made him re-think that.) Not surprisingly, the chapter's most solid essay is by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower, about how Japan is not so resistant to change as it's believed to be.

Chap. 3 (9 articles) - the most "macro" chapter, featuring macroeconomics and a smidgen of politics. Several good essays, especially Iwasaki, Clifford, Koll; though the last derails for me in its treatment of agriculture. Adam Posen, affiliated with the Bank of England, is the only author who talks reassuringly about Japan's public debt (and rightly, I think). Richard Katz cites the Nordic countries as a role model for Japan -- a nice idea, but too much in the optimistic "you CAN have it all" vein; a more realistic appraisal would have been more helpful.

Chap. 4 (10 articles) - mostly about a more global outlook (esp. for companies) or the lack thereof (among Japanese youth). Best: Genda. Oddest: Masahiro Yamada, who seems to alternate between empathy for young people and contempt for them. Also, the 4 sports articles, which are quite interesting generally but don't necessarily say much about Japan's future, or even about business.

Chap. 5 (6 articles) - foreign policy issues. Hitoshi Tanaka, whose column in Nikkei Weekly always gets me scribbling critical comments in the margin, here contributes a more accurate view of Japan-China relations than the gaijin contributors. Paul Blustein has a good article about Japan's "diplomacy deficit". Interestingly, none of the authors in this chapter (or in the book as a whole) considers the possibility of political instability in China.

Chap. 6 (9 articles) - "Retooling the Economic Engine". Puff-piece alert (e.g. the one by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz). An article about the most famous manga sarariiman, Shima Kosaku, is the most substantive in this bunch. Two articles about health care: one (Kanzler & Sugahara) approaches it as a purely economic, not social, issue; e.g., no mention of the current crisis of doctor shortages in most parts of Japan. The other (S. Yanai) would be a very reasonable article about generic drugs ... except that it's by the CEO of the world's biggest generic drug manufacturer, which kind of taints its credibility.

Chap. 7 (9 articles) - technology and innovation, mostly wishing Japan could be more like Silicon Valley, urging it to become that way, or explaining why it isn't. Emphasis is on IT and Internet business, with a touch of clean energy. The best in the bunch is by William Saito, who focuses on education. Some important areas of Japanese excellence, including physics, chemistry and materials science, are pretty much ignored. No one bothers to ask why Silicon Valley should be the norm. No one asks whether Silicon Valley, or the US as a whole, has ever produced a company that's lasted 800 years, or even 300 years. Japan has.

Chap. 8 (9 articles) - "Refreshing the Talent Pool". Standouts are by Hayashi and Makihara; Kumiko Makihara also provides a sad and gripping narrative about her son's experience in "one of the country's most elite, private elementary schools."

Chap. 9 (10 articles) - a variety of pieces about society, with several strong ones, esp. Kerr, Iyer, Sherrill, Tamamoto. Tyler Br'l' rightly captures the Japanese emphasis on mastery and craft as among the greatest national virtues, though he disappointingly spins it a bit too much toward luxury consumption. Also articles on kaiseki cuisine (Robinson) and architecture (Suzuki). Minoru Mori provides the puff-piece that irritated me the most in the book, since his company is gradually destroying neighborhoods in Tokyo with its mega-projects (e.g., Omotesando, whose sidewalk ambience was killed by Mori's Omotesando Hills). Mori extolls the virtues of the Roppongi Hills project, whose tenants are usually gaijin financial service companies, high-flying law firms, Internet tycoons and others far wealthier than the folks who used to live in the neighborhood. Not everyone in Tokyo shares the warm feeling; there's a reason why in the 2006 remake of sci-fi natural disaster epic "Nihon chinbotsu" ["Sinking Japan"] the Mori Tower in that complex was the first piece of the Tokyo skyline to fall.

The introduction (Barton) and especially the conclusion (Chher) were pretty representative of the liberalizing tendencies and the topical myopias of the average for the book. By myopias, I mean that with such a huge number of essays, it's surprising how little attention some important topics got:

@ We're told very often that Japan needs to increase productivity (which puts people out of work in the affected industry). We're told often that it needs to accept immigrants. We're told often that young people are out of work. 続きを読む ›

Reimagining Japan is the most important book on Japan since the turn of the century. Japan currently faces unprecedented economic, social and political problems, some of which are related to the Tohoku disasters and some which are firmly founded on the country's inwardly-focused approach to its issues.

Japan needs change and it needs it now if the country wants to retain its position not only as a global leader, but even so much as a global participant. Japan finds itself increasingly irrelevant in world affairs as China, Korea and SE Asia rise to challenges while Japan stagnates.

The book provides an insightful, objective look at Japanese policies, business practices, social norms and existing infrastructure and finds room for improvement in virtually every area. The authors are a diverse mix of prominent Japanese and non-Japanese thinkers, all of whom have a vested personal interests in Japan's future. The authors present common-sense proposals to help address and/or solve the thornier problems in short, concise sections.

In short, this book is a MUST READ for anyone with an interest in Japanese affairs and (in my opinion) should be mandatory reading for every Japanese politician, bureaucrat and business leader.

Kudos the the authors, the editors and everyone on the McKinsey & Co. team for recognizing both the need for this book and for having the courage to publish it.

It has given me a well-rounded understainding of Japan.