Looking to Game Boy 
R.T. Murphy
- The Making of Modern Japan by Marius Jansen
Thirty years ago as a Harvard freshman, I was taught how to think about Japanese history. Japan had just re-emerged after a quarter-century hiatus as a country to be taken seriously. It had pushed aside West Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy and there was talk of its economy surpassing that of the USSR (actually, it already had). Japanese radios, motorcycles, ships and steel had conquered global markets; Toyota, Nissan and Honda had begun to grab sales from an uncomprehending Detroit; the flood of Japanese textile exports had been mentioned again and again during the 1968 Presidential election campaign.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
From the LRB letters page: [ 21 February 2002 ] Nancy Kenyon.
R.T. Murphy teaches political economy at Tsukuba University. He is the author of The Weight of the Yen and, with Mikuni Akio, of the forthcoming Japan’s Policy Trap.
print layout
tell a friend