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.

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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.