Ebook: Japan Since 1980

Newspaper articles on Japanese politics have been pretty confusing to me in the last few years -- like, what was this postal service privatization all about? So I was glad to see this book. And I wasn't disappointed. It goes deeply into the postal privatization issues as well as most of the other major political and economic changes in Japan from 1980 to 2007. It opens up an array of events not well-reported the United States. It makes much more sense of the economic issues; the bubble of the 1980's, the continuation of the slump, the success of Koizumi, the failure of the post-Koizumi prime ministers, and (though the book was published prior to the event) the LDP's loss of power.

If you don't know what the LDP is, this book is probably not for you. It's no popular history - it's an economic textbook. There's almost no discussion of culture, high or low, popular or otherwise. No art, no movies, no anime, no Shibuya kei, no hikikomori, no hostess clubs, no yakuza. It's dry and pedantic, presenting charts and graphs, coming across as the compilation of academic papers it is.

Given the opacity of Japan's bureaucracy, the authors are forced to stick with public results, understandably missing out on much of the deeper causes. The authors also tend to lecture -- after listing mistakes that the politicians and bureaucrats made, they pedantically explain how they (and presumably anyone with a PhD in economics) would have known better, occasionally expressing their mystification at how such powerful people would have made such misguided decisions.

Ultimately, the authors are optimistic. They are very supportive of Koizumi, though they point out where his successors backtracked and where they didn't. The book was published in 2007, just before the big downturn, so the optimism at times seems jarring. But the fact that the recession hit Japan as hard as it hit everyone else does underscore one of the authors' main points -- that while many Japanese and non-Japanese alike consider Japan somehow "special," its economy for the most part follows the same universal economic laws that any economy follows.