The Enigma of Japanese Power : People and Politics in a Stateless Nation

Rating:
Summary: Worth Reading
Review: When I first read this book, I have to admit that I was impressed with its depth of coverage and how the ideas presented in the book make sense as a whole. A few months after reading it, I went to Japan and lived there for a year and a half, my understanding of the culture and language steadily improving the longer I stayed. While talking to Japanese and constantly thinking about the culture and how people there view their surroundings and the world as a whole, the ideas from this book were almost always in my thoughts. I also read a long review (50~100 pages!) of the book by a well-known Japanese professor of political science, and I have to say that he was spot-on with his review (I only wish I could remember his name...): _The Enigma of Japanese Power_ is a book written by an outsider (as Wolferen proudly claims himself to be) whose criticisms of Japan amount largely to a yearning that it become a western country and not what it is -- a Japanese country.
For example, he criticizes the Japanese educational system as producing a compliant population and generation after generation of students exhausted and brain-washed by the famously intense studying in junior high and high schools. What he fails to do, however, is to find out how the Japanese feel about the system. And if you look into the subject, you find that many Japanese very much enjoyed their experience in school (that is, compared with American students, a much greater number say they enjoyed the experience) despite the intense pressure. One gets the impression from Wolferen that despite the _appearance_ of excellent school performance, in reality the schools produce a poorly educated populace. Only someone who is unfamiliar with the many examples of cultural excellence and genius in Japan can present Japanese society in such a light.
And this is where Wolferen's outsider-status really becomes a problem. He doesn't speak or read Japanese, and so remains unaware of the depth of Japanese culture; as a foreigner there, all he sees is the surface. His complaints about the structure of Japanese society are familiar enough to anyone who has been a part of the society of foreigners living in Japan. When he sees television commercials, he sees how short are the sound-bytes and how childish are the programs. But after I saw the same garbage TV programs and then came home to the US, I saw exactly the same garbage. When he hears Japanese pop music, he thinks it sounds all the same and that it reflects a lack of creativity and individuality. This is only natural if you can't understand the words: try listening to any pop music in a language you don't understand -- it's all going to sound basically the same and becomes dull quickly. And, again, is the US any better? I don't have Wolferen's confidence in proclaiming that, say, Japan's pop groups "Morning Musume" and "SMAP" are any worse than, say, "Spice Girls" and "Backstreet Boys". Every country has elements in its popular culture to be embarassed about.
So, what would I say to someone who wanted to understand Japanese culture? Unfortunately, I don't have a simple answer to that; the books I would recommend present pieces of Japanese society with a humility that attempts to understand a different way of thinking rather than an arrogance that assumes something must be wrong. For example: "Japanese Lessons" by Gail Benjamin presents the perspective of a thoughtful American woman encountering the difficulty of introducing her children to elementary school in Japan. Another example is "Forces of Order" by David Bayley; he is an American expert on police affairs and spent a year in Japan studying the Japanese approach to law enforcement. "Nihongo: In Defence of Japanese" by Roy Andrew Miller is a book which defends the Japanese language against the incessant attacks from Western writers (regarding its absurdly contorted structure, use of too many letters that take too long to learn, etc.) and show how these features instead reflect something important to Japanese society, a richness that is hidden from many who never go far enough to become fluent in the language, and are important assets to he language.
The most valuable contribution of _Enigma_, and which is the reason why the book still sits on my bookshelf, is that it is the best example I've ever read of the dangers of superficiality in interpreting another culture. He makes you feel like the Japanese are a people very different from you or I -- aliens if you will. But the truth is that they are ordinary people just like us, with our exact same worries and desires.