After reading Joi Ito's mention of this book, I decided to pick it up and read it. I must say, I read this book faster than I've read any book in recent memory. It doesn't even look like anyone's read it yet. I could probably even return it still ;) Anyway, I liked it. There are many points lacking throughout, but all in all, I think it's high time this book was written, and people begin to try to understand that Japan has serious chronic and systemic problems. Many of these are almost impossible to see even within Japan; many of them are invisible precisely because they are always in plain sight.

There is so much to talk about with regard to this book, it's truly overwhelming. Just quoting the facts and figures that shocked me would take pages and pages. I know a lot about Japan, but I honestly can't imagine how Mr. Kerr managed to find out about some of the more sensitive issues without resorting to 'watergate' methods... ;)

If you can overlook the author's sometimes repetitive aesthetic judgements and prejudices, in the end you will see a picture difficult to swallow. Difficult, mostly because it is a sad state of affairs, and it is hard to see any easy way out. Well, there is no easy way out for Japan — the nation will at some point have to face these issues and change the way it does business.

I'll be writing more about the interesting things I found in this book, but for now, I'll just say this. The author at one point raises the specter of the failure of the Japanese movie industry. The industry is currently bleeding cash, and there is no real hope of a renaissance soon. Mr. Kerr talks about how one of the big three Japanese movie companies depended for so long on the proceeds from endless sequels of "Otoko wa tsurai yo." Japan is in a state of stagnation partially because of this mentality — the obsession with riding cookie-cutter scripts for success to their grave, then beating them to get up for years before realizing they're actually dead.

All is not lost for Japan. Anyone that would say so would have to be fantastically short-sighted. But the first step to fixing problems is always opening them up to the light of public scrutiny.