The Sun Also Sets:
Kovler, Peter
STUCK IN THE FAST LANE? THE SON ALSO SETS The Limits to Japan's Economic Power William Emmott Times Books, Inc., $19.95, 292 pp. Peter Kovler Recent polls show increas-ing American...
...His most forceful chapter is "A Nation of Speculators...
...Sometimes it feels as if the only things in our lives that have been made in the U.S...
...His closing analogy that Japan will have to be listened to now, much as "European countries have been since the 1950s" is convincing and does not suggest a calamity for anybody...
...It performs the service that all great educational material does when timed just right: it demystifies that which seems omnipotent...
...His European perspective is especially needed and refreshing, for unlike most American authors on this subject, he is not alternatingly expressing awe of the Japanese with disillusionment about Uncle Sam...
...In our family's world, this parent comes home late in the day and sees our oldest son playing Nintendo, the Japanese electronics game which American grammar school kids are hooked on and which has made Nintendo Corp...
...It was 134 percent of the pretax income at Sanyo and 1,962 percent at Isuzu that is, profits on securities were nearly twenty times larger than profits on ordinary business...
...The comparisons between how Europe reacts to Japan and how we do are especially enlightening...
...one of the most profitable in Japan...
...My other son struts around with his first Sony Walkman, a new device aimed at his age group, kids from three to five...
...Many of them made their money through "trading," a method of making a living that is arguably riskier then free-lance writing...
...While we don't drive a Japanese car, our street looks as if it could be visual material for a TV ad for a Japanese car manufacturers' association...
...How did we get to such a situation is a question often, even excessively, asked, but the pronoun should be changed and the question for each American should be rephrased to "How did I get in this situation...
...As for being a nation of producers rather then consumers, Emmott demonstrates the increasing rate of acquisitiveness...
...The details on profits of some major Japanese companies in the mid-eighties are also compelling...
...The linkage between climbing land prices and climbing stock prices is apparent, he writes, and the explanations to justify such numbers "are unconvincing...
...We are reminded of Japan's new pride in itself and its new assertiveness...
...In its 1986-87 fiscal year, Nissan, Japan's second largest maker of cars and trucks, would have reported a loss had it not been for profits on securities trading...
...Is it, in other words, stuck in the fast lane...
...At present there is great resentment that "they" have beaten us and have replaced us in many world rankings...
...A large danger, of course, is that if things were to get really economically bad in the U.S., the Japanese might very well become the premier scapegoats...
...In a country such as ours with its history of anti-Nisei sentiment, the results could be disastrous...
...Emmott reminds us how between 1985 and 1988 the value of the yen doubled and how not even the world stock market collapse of 1987 affected the Japanese market...
...The author, who lived in Japan for three years as Tokyo bureau chief for the Economist, makes a compelling case about why Japan may have trouble in certain areas...
...Ultimately, Emmott is rather optimistic about the ways in which Japan, the U.S., and Europe can work together...
...are our children...
...A new generation seems to be a bit sensitive to the charge that all work and no play makes Jack (Yoshi...
...Emmott does not suggest that the Japanese equivalent of my youth, the Age of Aquarius, is upon them, but he does make a strong case for a new generation's perspective...
...As for savings, Emmott shows how savings rates are actually going down, even if slowly...
...The subtitle pointing to Japan's "limits" is the key...
...But Emmott rhetorically asks about Japan: "Is it going to be a nation of savers, of producers, of workaholics, of the young...
...Workaholism may be the myth, but as with any society, a subsequent generation takes a somewhat dimmer notion of the driven life...
...In the year to March 1988, securities profits accounted for more than half the pretax profits of Matsushita Electric (58.8 percent), Nissan (65.3 percent), Japan Victor Company (93 percent), and Sharp (73 percent...
...And, not infrequently, we will talk about our talented relative who graduated from college two years ago and has gone to Hiroshima to work for Mazda...
...At night we'll watch something on our Japanese VCR...
...Emmott begins by describing the Japanese challenge and finds inspiration in Mark Twain's remark, "Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know...
...It is largely because we are all getting so nuts about Japan that William Emmott's The Sun Also Sets: The Limits to Japan's Economic Power is such an important book...
...a dull boy...
...Peter Kovler Recent polls show increas-ing American unfriend-liness to Japan, and in this reviewer's totally unscientific style of surveying talking to acquaintances and friends the "data" come out the same...
...While the book was written before the collapse of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe and therefore has numerous thoughts about how Japan fits into the superpower equation the fact that the author's observations about Japan remain powerful is a claim to relevance that few journalism-history-world affairs books of 1990 can make.ks of 1990 can make...
Vol. 117 • May 1990 • No. 9
