Bamboozled!: How America Loses the Intellectual Game with Japan and Its Implications for Our Future in Asia

As the influence of the United States in Asia declines with the end of the Cold War, America must look more to brains than military might in achieving our objectives in the region. But after repeatedly allowing Japan - our closest ally in Asia - to mislead us intellectually and psychologically, how well are we prepared to deal with less friendly emerging powers like China and India? Based on three decades of on-the-spot observation and participation in Japan, Ivan Hall's provocative work draws the reader into a world of intellectual manipulation and gullibility, false images, emotional blackmail, financial beguilement, and fatuous expectations. It illuminates the many ways that American ideological hubris and Japanese pleading for special treatment combine to deprive our trans-Pacific dialogue of the honesty, openness, and plain common sense of our trans-Atlantic intellectual ties with Europe.

Ivan P. Hall, born on an American missionary college campus in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1932, received his B.A. in European History from Princeton, an M.A. in International Relations from the Fletcher School, and his PhD in Japanese History from Harvard in 1969. He is the author of Mori Arinori (1973) and Cartels of the Mind: Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop (1997). The latter was chosen by Business Week as one of the “Ten Best Business Books of 1997.” Since 1999 he has been a visiting professor in Japanese history (pre-modern, modern, and intellectual) at Temple University of Japan in Tokyo.