Description
Japan now dominates the world's economic scene. Yet the country and its people remain an enigma. What beliefs and practices - ancient and modern - make the Japanese so success-ful? How is it that their society - individuals, groups, and classes - seems to function so well? Why, too, is Japan's immediate future filled with the kind of problems that are difficult to solve?
Peter Tasker, who has lived for eight years among the Japanese, answers these and other questions as he brings to life an ambitious yet insecure people now on the move and on the make. Every human aspect of Japan in the late 1980s is here, from the lockstep educational process (endless facts, memory, rote) to the business world (the long day of a Tokyo "salaryman"); from government bureaucracies (the goal of Japanese career aspirations) to Japanese women (obedient wives and success-obsessed mothers). Here also are the worlds of giant banks, one-party politicians, polite criminals, large savings groups - even the strange fantasy lives of many Japanese as mirrored in the country's violent, pornographic comic books. ISBN:0525246754 
