
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.
RELATED ARTICLES
31 March 1988
Hamlet and the Bicycle
18 October 2001
On Haruki Murakami
17 October 2002
The Makiko and Junichiro Show
13 April 2000
Something Fishy
5 March 1998
On population history
14 June 1990
Japanese Power
17 August 2006
An Outsider in Tokyo
RELATED CATEGORIES
History, Cultural history, Asia, East Asia, Japan, 1600-1699, 1700-1799, 1800-1899, 1900-1999, 2000-present, 2000-2002
Vol. 24 No. 1 · 3 January 2002
pages 32-35 | 4817 words

Looking to Game Boy
R.T. Murphy
- The Making of Modern Japan by Marius Jansen
Harvard, 871 pp, £23.95, November 2000, ISBN 0 674 00334 9
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.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
print this article
Letters
Vol. 24 No. 4 · 21 February 2002
From Nancy Kenyon
R.T. Murphy probably knows, but other readers of his review of Marius Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan (LRB, 3 January) might not, that E.H. Norman, whose work on Japan he cites so admiringly, was Canada's Ambassador to Egypt in 1957, when he jumped off a roof in Cairo. What drove him to suicide? Harassment by the US Senate for being a 'security risk'. This despite the Prime Minister's affirmation of confidence in him. We seem to be reliving those times all over again.
Nancy Kenyon
Perth, Ontario