The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (Japan in the Modern World)

Make no mistake: While The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence is a critical examination of the dilemmas facing contemporary Japan, it is most emphatically not a work of Japan-bashing. Its scrupulous attention to history and to political economy makes clear that Japan's problems are the consequence not of putative Japanese peculiarities but of specific decisions and processes, on the one hand, and global structural forces, on the other...This book is indispensable for anyone interested in the implications of extraordinary economic success across the spectrum of social life anywhere in the world and therefore in the tantalizing possibilities of other East and Southeast Asian countries...As we stand at the threshold between the Cold War order and the twenty-first century, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence exemplifies the thoughtful investigation we all need if we are to proceed with our eyes open, refusing to surrender the vision of a just and humanely livable world. Norma Field, University of Chicago, author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century's End. Gavan McCormack was ahead of the news on the Kobe earth Against the powerful image of Japan as a rising economic superpower, or even, in Ezra Vogel's influential formulation a deade ago,'Japan as number 1', this book explores the fragility, hubris and human and environmental costs of Japan's desperate drive for hyperdevelopment. As this economic superpower finds itself drifting, rudderless, through the decade, four seminal events seem to emblemise the enveloping crisis: the Kobe Earthquake, which the author shows to be no mere act of nature, but an event whose consequences are intimately bound up with desperate hypergrowth; The Ayum Rikyo poison gas attack, which struck at Japan's sense of security in its deepest senses (psychological and moral, as well as physical); the collapse of the LDP single-party rule after nearly 40 years, plunging Japan's superstable political system into crises manifested by implausible coalition with little more than a thirst to rule in common; and Japan's inability to come to terms with war respnsibility ever after 50 years, best symbolised by the Comfort Women issue and the government's hapless attempt to come up with an appropriate formula for recognising, apologising and making amends for wartime aggression and crimes. Gavan McCormack addresses these issues - which are political, economic, social cultural and moral in the most profound sense - directly in this book. Against the powerful image of Japan as a rising economic superpower, or even, in Ezra Vogel's influential formulation a deade ago, "Japan as number 1", this book explores the fragility, hubris and human and environmental costs of Japan's desperate drive for hyperdevelopment. This work aims to show that Japan even at it's height of success, while the successful version of capitalism was blighted at it's core, being unsustainable. This revised edition features n introduction which gives an analysis of Japan's contemporary crisis.