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Japan is an island nation in East Asia comprising a large stratovolcanic archipelago extending along the Pacific coast of Asia. Measured from the geographic coordinate system, Japan is 36° north of the equator and 138° east of the Prime Meridian. The country is north-northeast of China and Taiwan (separated by the East China Sea) and slightly east of Korea (separated by the Sea of Japan). The country is south of the Russian Far East. The main islands, sometimes called the "Home Islands", are (from north to south) Hokkaid?, Honsh? (the "mainland"), Shikoku and Ky?sh?. There are also about 3,000 smaller islands, including Okinawa, and islets, some inhabited and others uninhabited. In total, as of 2006, Japan's territory is 377,923.1 km², of which 374,834 km² is land and 3,091 km² water. This makes Japan's total area slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Montana, slightly bigger than the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Japan is bigger than Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand and the U.K., and is 1.7 times the size of Korea. ... Read more

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Based on the most up-to-date sources, as well as extensive research and direct observation, Japan as Number One analyzes the island nation's development into one of the world's most effective industrial powers, in terms of not only economic productivity but also its ability to govern efficiently, to eduate its citizens, to control crime, to alleviate energy shortages, and to lessen pollution. Ezra Vogel employs criteria that America has traditionally used to measure success in his thoughtful demonstration of how and why Japanese institutions have coped far more effectively than their American counterparts. ... Read more

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Key ideas still not realized

Next year (2009) marks the nearly thirty year anniversary of Ezra Vogel's overview of the differences between Japanese and American industry. The book holds up very well and a first time reader will walk away with good insights into a still undiscovered and little known country, Japan. Vogel must have taken an enormous risk writing the book. He really broke all the rules, he spoke about an enemy, studied them in detail and then tried to tell his own country, to reflect and change.

It is important to note the setting in which the book was written. According to Vogel, "In gross national product per person, Japan passed the United States in 1977 or 1978", page 21. Finding a situation like this must have been dire and an immediate investigation must have been called for. In my opinion Vogel did a good job at explaining, what happened, why and what to do. In hindsight it is disappointing that even after thirty years since its first publication; few of his insights have been further studied by western countries. For example: "the Shinkansen bullet trains are a model of passenger transportation that may yet influence American patterns as energy problems affect passenger car travel", p80

It is easy to label his work too positive toward all things Japanese, but it must be remembered that when one truly discovers through detailed study and observation a unique Japanese technique. It can be hard not to be in awe of it, as it may be something so simple but yet very powerful that doesn't match anything in western logic and thinking.

He could have focused on negative aspects of the culture but that was not the aim of the book. It was aimed at making the reader consider that Japan could overtake America as the number one economic power. As an American he saw what was happening to America and dared to share his insights by observing a key competitor, Japan. His positive view can be seen more as a worried observer wanting changing after discovering insights of a serious competitor, rather than coming across as loving all things Japanese.

One must also put into perspective that Vogel's work is significant in that he put himself in a position to study the culture and tried to explain it to a western audience. Added to this one must also consider just how difficult it is for westerners to truly enter Japanese society. Vogel's lifetime of study, can hardly be compared in the same breath as a short term expat experience in the modern era.

Yes, Japan has changed over the past thirty years and the current economic situation is vastly different. Will Japan prosper in the future, who knows? I personally don't agree with all his observations but I do credit his detail and insight.

If one looks at the key premises of the book, it is not the systems that makes Japan unique and of interest, but the stability of the culture to adapt and keep changing. A key point that keeps recurring throughout the book is just how formidable the Japanese are as competitors,"very flexible in adjusting...to changed conditions", p70.Another premise equally important, is why the West doesn't study Japan, the way Japan studies the West.

The book today would be of interest to academics, business leaders, small business and students preparing for study abroad in Japan.

Vogel's book is good from a historical perspective as it provides a window into the past and it can easily be used as a reference point from which to observe and understand the future.

A Prescient Essay Which Still Holds Lessons For Today
I have just finished Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One and I found it a surprisingly good book. I say surprisingly good because I had some preconceived notions about the book without having even read it. I thought that it was full of cliches, that it was too positive about Japan and that it ignored the bad aspects of Japanese economy and society, that it wasn't based on serious research and that one could only learn distorted lessons from it.

And in a way all these criticisms proved to be true: the cliches in the book are those generalizations that Japanese love to repeat about themselves, especially in the presence of foreigners; painting a rosy picture was all too natural for a country that had experienced more than two decades of unprecedented growth and overcome the first oil shock; most of the structural weaknesses of the Japanese economy were not already visible (although the book does pinpoint social weaknesses), Western scholars who had studied contemporary Japan were only a handful, and the knowledge base was very thin; and the book proved too pessimistic in its depiction of American ills that it thought could be cured by drawing lessons from the Japanese model.

So what makes it a good book? First, one has to consider the date when it was published: 1979. At that time, an academic pretending that Japan was a number one nation may only have invited incredulity and bewilderment. Americans knew very little about Japan or, if they did, were mostly attracted to the traditional aspects of its culture and national character. But here was a book that was telling the general public that "Japan has dealt more successfully with more of the basic problems of postindustrial society than any other country", and that "Japanese success had less to do with traditional character traits than with specific organizational structures, policy programs, and conscious planning" that America would do well to imitate. One can barely imagine how new and provocative these statements were at that time. But the book came to define the zeitgeist of the following decade, when learning from Japan was all the rage.

Second, at a time when little was known about Japan, the book gathered an impressive array of knowledge spanning all aspects of Japanese economy and society. This knowledge formed the conventional wisdom about Japan that was to be echoed and amplified in numerous publications, seminars, and everyday conversations. Most of this conventional wisdom is no longer true, and some wasn't even accurate at the time the book was published, but these generalizations inherited from the past still influence the beliefs that foreigners entertain about Japan or the image that Japanese hold about themselves. People who specialize in contemporary Japan will only ignore them at their peril.

Third, although the lessons for America that Vogel identified some thirty years ago may no longer hold, the idea that Japan has lessons for other countries is still as true today as when it was first formulated. The reasons listed by the author are as follows. For one, Japan, unlike Western countries, has consciously examined and restructured all traditional institutions on the basis of rational considerations and offers the best example of intelligent design in modern societies. A second reason why Japan is a useful mirror is that of all the industrialized democratic countries, Japan, as the only non-Western one, is the most distinctive, and thus offers must sought-after variance that allows the testing of hypotheses and the validation of theories. Third, circumstance has forced Japan to pioneer in confronting problems that other developed countries later experienced with a time lag. If only by its failures and challenges, Japan still holds lessons for America and other Western countries.

True Foresight: The jury is still out
Written in 1979 before the world new just how big that little country on the edge of Asia was going to be, this book prefigured the realisation if not the reality of Japan's rise to economic power by a decade. In that decade many more 'Japan Hype' books came out, and a decade or two later the "Japanese miracle" is seen as a debacle. But Japanese economy remains the second largest in the world and there are still lessons to be learned from the Japanese in various areas such as education (still doing far better than the US despite the lack of inter-school competition), public safety (still way up at the top of the OECD tables), and manufacturing technology and management. Japan has its problems, and so does the US, but who would have thought, when this book was written, that the Japanese economy and Japanese way, would compare almost on a par with that of the USA some thirty years later? Which economy will turn out to be 'number one' is still open to debate, but as a book that started the debate, it deserves to be read for its insight.

Furthermore, despite the initial postwar success of the Japanese economy the Japanese have and continue to import Western economic, educational and management systems wholesale, with decreasing sucess. Who knows, perhaps if this book had been read *more* in Japan, and the Japanese had more confidence in their own convictions, the Japanese way might even still be flourishing. The Japanese themselves, increasingly nationalist and increasingly self-confident, are starting to think so.

Closer to Fiction than Non-Fiction
This was the book that launched a thousand other efforts in the "Japan Hyping" that marked the Bubble Economy of the 1980s. The very same qualities that Vogel pointed out as key to Japan's success, and thoroughly worthy of emulation, are now attributed as being the cause of the country's post-bubble stagnation, and it is laughable to think that the Japanese edition of this book was an all-time bestseller on the country's non-fiction list. Who still advocates taking lessons from Japan on education, finance or corporate governance today?

Ezra Vogel deserves a place of honor alongside Paul Ehrlich and other would-be prophets of the future whose prophecies ended up being egregiously far off the mark. His book should
be read, if at all, as a caution against buying into journalistic hype, a problem those susceptible to today's China-boosting would do well to take heed of; the future is rarely a straightforward extrapolation of the past. ... Read more

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Although located far from the populated centers of traditional Japan, the three Kumano shrines occupied a central position in the Japanese religious landscape. For centuries Kumano was the most visited pilgrimage site in Japan and attracted devotees from across the boundaries of sect (Buddhist, Daoist, Shinto), class, and gender. It was also a major institutional center, commanding networks of affiliated shrines, extensive landholdings, and its own army, and a site of production, generating agricultural products and symbolic capital in the form of spiritual values. Kumano was thus both a real place and a utopia: a non-place of paradise or enlightenment. It was a location in which cultural ideals--about death, salvation, gender, and authority--were represented, contested, and even at times inverted.

This book encompasses both the real and the ideal, both the historical and the ideological, Kumano. It studies Kumano not only as a site of practice, a stage for the performance of asceticism and pilgrimage, but also as a place of the imagination, a topic of literary and artistic representation. Kumano was not unique in combining Buddhism with native traditions, for redefining death and its conquest, for expressing the relationship between religious and political authority, and for articulating the religious position of women. By studying Kumano's particular religious landscape, we can better understand the larger, common religious landscape of premodern Japan.

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Long needed study of esoteric Japanese practice
This book provides a wonderfully detailed description of the concept of "kumano mode, " from religious, sociological, historical and political perspectives. Wonderful deconstruction of the Kumano mandala.

Ups and Downs on the Road to Kumano
At first I thought I was really going to love this book. During the mid-1990's I lived in a small coastal town just a short train ride away from the three Kumano Shrines, and I spent many a pleasant weekend visiting these fascinating religious institutions. It became increasingly clear to me that their role in Japanese religion, literature, and history was quite significant, too, and for years I've felt that the lack of any real substantial discussion of the Kumano Shrines and the Kumano Pilgrimage in English publications was a seriously regrettable lacunae. And then "Localizing Paradise" came along. Finally, I exclaimed.

Then, as I was reading the introduction, I started thinking that I was really going to hate this book. Only on page two and already Michel Foucault is invoked, with the unquestioned assumption that some 20th-century French intellectual's armchair anthropology and crypto-Marxist philosophy has universal relevance and validity. As if we can't truly understand Kumano Pilgrimage without the blessing of his "insights" framing the study. Then on page three, Moerman assures the reader that this is not an institutional history of Kumano. Why not? I think we definitely need a good, solid, objective institutional history of this religious phenomenon as a basis before we start getting into fancy theoretical interpretations of specific issues. Deconstructing something not yet constructed is really putting the cart before the horse. Insult is added to injury when a footnote informs the reader that Kumano's institutional history is a subject well represented in the Japanese scholarship. Good, but so what? The assumption here seems to be that the reader can blaze through scholarly Japanese with fluency and can just hop over to the university library and get the sources mentioned, but for many potential readers this is simply not the case at all, and they are being cut off, basically. Moerman and a handful of his peers are having a conversation here, and the interested generalist is not invited.

In all fairness, such problems are typical symptoms nowadays of a general malaise infecting academic titles more generally, and it would be unfair to blame Moerman and this book for being a perfect case in point. Early in the first pages, though, I kept running into another thing that quite simply drove me up the wall with annoyance, something in fact more specific to this particular book. The author continually refers to the Kumano Shrines in the past tense: Kumano was this, it represented that, it consisted of these and was the destination of those. Anyone who didn't know better would think that we're talking about some kind of archaeological dig. All three of the shrines are still in existence and are still functioning, even thriving, as religious institutions, however--the author presumably did research at these places, too, and so should be aware of this, so I'm not sure why he insists on relegating them to some fuzzy but foreclosed premodern past. It's possible to limit one's focus to a certain time frame without giving this impression. I'm also not sure why he wishes to relegate Kumano to "the geographic margins of society" on page four. Whose margins? The priests and monks resident in the shrines? The people living in the towns wherein these shrines are located? The administrators of Kii Province? The sailors plying the trade routes along the Kii Peninsula? Okay, probably he means the courtiers in the capital (present-day Kyoto), but why privilege their perspective?

By now you're probably thinking that I did indeed end up hating this book.Not so. Everything I've just been ranting about at length (maybe ad nauseum) does certainly continue to haunt the book throughout, but the main chapters of the book do actually have some significant strong points as well. First of all, the focus on a single religious institution anchors such a study nicely, and it's a fruitful approach we need to see more of (handled imperfectly here, but okay, still...). Moerman's manner of framing his main chapters with a general descriptive tour of a Kumano Pilgrimage Mandala and then focusing on little significant details from this mandala to kick off each chapter is interesting, clever, creative, and apt. The illustrations in this book are also very good, with lots of fascinating and relevant black and white figures throughout and ten lovely and intriguing color prints. To some degree he takes away a standard institutional history with one hand and then with another gives the reader something pretty dang close in chapter two--insufficient, still, but a decent overview nonetheless of Kumano's history and of its depictions in writings and literature over the (premodern) centuries. Then in the main chapters he deals with specific issues: mortuary ritual and funeral symbolism, the role of Kumano Pilgrimage in court politics, and the complicated and ambivalent gender dynamics at the Kumano shrines. Cart before the horse or no, these are interesting topics, and Moerman utilizes a lot of fine, careful, and painstaking research in tough primary sources to carry his analysis along. Granted, chapter three is badly and almost irrevocably damaged by his all but totally uncritical use of 16th-century Jesuit letters as a source for describing Japanese Buddhist ritual practices--yeah right, the pagan heathens are all committing suicide for their beastly idols--I can't imagine a more unreliable source. But still, as a whole, the book is okay. Not superb, not wretched, but okay in a "better than nothing" sort of way. ... Read more

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The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated a period of great change in Japan; it is seldom associated, however, with advances in civil and political rights. By studying parliamentarianism--the theories, arguments, and polemics marshaled in support of a representative system of government--Kyu Hyun Kim uncovers a much more complicated picture of this era than is usually given.

Bringing a fresh perspective as well as drawing on seldom-studied archival materials, Kim examines how parliamentarianism came to dominate the public sphere in the 1870s and early 1880s and gave rise to the movement among local activists and urban intellectuals to establish a national assembly. At the same time, Kim contends that we should confront the public sphere of Meiji Japan without insisting on fitting it into schemes of historical progress, from premodernity to modernity, from feudalism to democracy. The Japanese state was inextricably linked, in its origins as well as its continuing growth, to the self-transformation of Japanese society. One could not change without effecting a change in the other. The Meiji state's efforts to ensure that the state and society were connected only through channels firmly controlled by itself were constantly and successfully contested by the public sphere.

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An institution in decline, possessing little power or authority in a warrior-dominated age, or a still potent symbol of social and political legitimacy? Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan traces the fate of the imperial Japanese court from the lowest point in terms of influence and prosperity in the turbulent sengoku period to its more stable position in the Tokugawa period. In showing how the court adapted and survived, the author examines internal court politics and protocols, external court relations, court finances, court structure, and ceremonial observances. Emperor and courtiers, he concludes, adjusted to the warrior elite, while retaining the ideological advantage bestowed by culture, tradition, and birth, to which these new wielders of power continued to pay homage. ... Read more

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This elegant history considers a fascinating array of texts, cultural practices, and intellectual processes--including maps and mapmaking, poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, and encyclopedias--to chart the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in early modern Japan. Marcia Yonemoto's wide-ranging history of ideas traces changing conceptions and representations of space by looking at the roles played by writers, artists, commercial publishers, and the Shogunal government in helping to fashion a new awareness of space and place in this period. Her impressively researched study shows how spatial and geographical knowledge confined to elites in early Japan became more generalized, flexible, and widespread in the Tokugawa period. In the broadest sense, her book grasps the elusive processes through which people came to name, to know, and to interpret their worlds in narrative and visual forms. ... Read more

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Where are the pictures?
I feel giped. The book has only 73 pages plus the bibliography and there are very few pictures. This book is misnamed. For shame. ... Read more

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Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy that owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steel--an industry at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth. Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon shows how working people had to compromise institutions of self-determination in pursuit of economic affluence. He also rebuts hasty predictions that Japanese industrial relations are about to be dramatically transformed in the American free-market image."This is a major achievement, and confirms Andrew Gordon's place as a truly outstanding scholar of Japanese labor history ... Those wishing to understand the post-war remaking of Japan's political economy and society will find much of value in this book."--D. H. Whittaker, Business History"A pathbreaking work ... [It] is also an uncommonly timely book, offering historical perspectives on many dimensions of Japan's tortured course in the 1990s ... A compelling, illuminating study that deserves the greatest possible readership."--William M. Tsutsui, Monumenta Nipponica ... Read more

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Cover shown is the revised printing 1949. ... Read more

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Examines the history, economy, and lifestyles of one of the world's most industrialized nations. ... Read more

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This text gives students a clear idea of where Japanesepeople live and how their land affects their lives. Itcontains a four-color atlas used in Japanese schools. It isdesigned to provide intermediate level students with oppor-tunities to develop reading abilities through vocabularyand Kanji exercises, paragraph reading, and post-readingactivities while learning cultural aspects of Japan. ... Read more

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This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more

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Original green cloth , a quite amazing compendium of historical places, persons and religion. Issued without a title page, but an 8 page historical introduction by the author, dated 1909 in Yokohama. English text. Tall 8 vo. (9 inches tall), pages xiv, 842, including index and appendices. ... Read more

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Chapters: Sea of Japan Naming Dispute. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 115. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: There is a dispute over using the name "Sea of Japan" to refer to the sea bordered by Russia, Japan, North Korea, and South Korea. Although Sea of Japan, or equivalent translations, are commonly used in international productions, North and South Korea are proposing different names. North Korea proposes the "East Sea of Korea" and South Korea proposes the "East Sea", instead of, or as a name concurrent with, "Sea of Japan". South Korean groups argue that "East Sea" should be implemented as a historically and geographically appropriate name, claiming that the sea was known as "Sea of Korea/Corea/Joseon" or "East/Oriental Sea" until Japan's military expansion in the region. They insist the title "Sea of Japan" was unfairly standardized during Japanese rule of Korea, and thus remains a symbol of Japan's imperialistic past. Korea argues that during the critical period for asserting the name East Sea in the international arena, Korea was militarily occupied by Japan and Korea's sovereignty was less influential and therefore had no diplomatic representation on the global stage. Koreans were forced to surrender the use of their native language under the Japanese rule (1938~), and adopted Japanese names (1940~), while Korean geographical names including the East Sea (Donghae - /) were dropped in favour of Japanese ones. Korea's position is that while "Sea of Korea" is actually the more common historical European name, "East Sea", without reference to a specific country, is more neutral. Since the 1990s, South Korea has been making efforts to change the official international name referring to the sea. The North Korean government supports South Korea's position, but uses "East Sea of...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=182242 ... Read more