Details
Synopsis
A man who was the Tokyo bureau chief for the"Washington Post" for five years examines deep "Asian values" that inform the culture in Japan and which contribute to its economic success. Reid is a frequent commentator on National Public Radio.
| Size | | Length: | 276 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 19.2 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "We took a jet plane to the next century."
Industry Reviews
"Written with grace, knowledge and humor, his book is a sympathetic Baedeker to the Japanese way of life. It is well worth reading for that."
New York Times Book Review - Frank Gibney (07/11/1999)
Using anecdotes of his family's five-year sojourn in Tokyo and his own observations of Asian customs, media, and corporate practices, Washington Post bureau chief Reid offers a welcome expos? of modern East Asia on the eve of what he terms "the Asian century." He contrasts Asia's ways with the West's in an effort to explain why the United States in particular does not measure up to the East on social stability indicators such as violent crime, theft, and single parenthood. Reid gives modern Asian trends a historical basis, with particularly keen insights into European imperialism's legacy there. Confucius's life and subsequent influence in both the East and West are illuminated. An appendix of concise, almanac-like entries for each East Asian nation includes brief historical backgrounds, economy, size, current political trends, and sociopolitical projections for the future. Highly recommended for all collections. Kim Baxter, Van Houter Lib., New Jersey Inst. of Technology, Newark
Fox
In this breezy homily, Reid, an NPR commentator who was the Washington Post's Tokyo bureau chief for five years, offers a look at what he calls Asia's "social miracle" (as opposed to its once vaunted economic growth). The nations of East Asia, he reports, have "the safest streets, the strongest families, and the best schools in the world." Along with their enviably low rates of crime, divorce, unwed motherhood and vandalism, countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand boast a burgeoning middle class, a general aura of civility and a more egalitarian distribution of wealth than the U.S. enjoys. Like many other Asia watchers, Reid attributes this social cohesiveness to a shared set of core values discipline, loyalty, hard work, a focus on education, group harmony, etc. that he traces back to the Confucian classics. Yet Reid, now the Post's London bureau chief, readily admits that the East Asian model of Confucian prosperity has glaring flaws: most cities he visited were drab and ugly; Singapore is a "self-righteous and thoroughly intolerant place controlled by a small clique." Reid, who transplanted his family of five from a small Colorado town to Tokyo, serves up amusing anecdotes and cross-cultural observations (his two daughters enrolled in a Japanese public school), but his report reads like one long radio spiel and covers well-trod terrain. After gently berating Westerners for more than 200 pages, he gets to eat his rice cake and have it, too: Confucian values and our own Judeo-Christian morality, he concludes, are basically the same, differing mainly in nuance. Author tour. (Mar.)
Fox
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