The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence - Softcover

McCormack, Gavan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1864481242 ISBN 13: 9781864481242

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author:

A graduate of Melbourne University and London University, Dr Gavan McCormack became Foundation Professor of Asian Studies at University of Adelaide in 1988 and was appointed to his current position as the chair in Japanese History in the Division of Pacific and Asian History of the ANU's Research School of Pacific Studies in 1990. He is fluent in Japanese, and has a good command of Chinese and French. He is also well-known as a media commentator, especially in Australia but also in Japan, on matters to do with Japan and the Australia-Japan relationship.

From Library Journal:

The author or editor of numerous books on Asia (e.g., Democracy in Contemporary Japan, M.E. Sharpe, 1986) and a professor at Australian National University, McCormack here scrutinizes the political economy, national identity, and war remembrances of Japan in an attempt to understand an apparently successful economic model with its own unique problems. The author has spent years studying and working in Japan, and it is evident that he knows the country well. Some of the more intriguing war legacies he relates are the "Shinjuku Bones Affair" (bones of prisoners tortured and killed at a military hospital during World War II are discovered years later) and the "left-behind children" of the Manchukuo area of China. Finally, we are left with a plea for zero population growth and more equitable economic distribution. Not a Japan-bashing book, McCormack's work is well documented, with extensive footnotes. Recommended for economics collections.?Lisa K. Miller Paradise Valley Community Coll. Lib., Phoenix
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• ISBN 10: 1864481242
• ISBN 13: 9781864481242
• Binding: Paperback