by Peregrine Hodson

Kevin Rafferty's book proclaims that he was once the U.K.'s "Young Journalist of the Year," a quarter of a century ago. For the last three years, he has worked in Tokyo for a mildly left-of-center British newspaper called The Guardian. Now he has written a book about Japan. The title, like so many books on the same subject written during the '70s and '80s ("Inside . . . ," "Behind . . . ," "The Secret . . . ," "The Enigma . . . ," etc., etc.) suggests a hidden truth. The subtitle, "The Culture, Mystique and Future of Japan's Greatest Corporations," reinforces the impression that here, at last (or again), is a comprehensive guide to the mysterious world of Japan Inc. Ho hum.

Can you tell a book by its cover? In the case of this one, yes and no. The front incorporates two visual clichés: uniformed rows of factory workers around the obligatory red hinomaru circle. The back shows a list of "The World's Top Companies" over the slogan, "What makes them tick?" Ten of the companies are Japanese and, sure enough, each has a little red tick. But anyone reading the book will be disappointed to find five of the Japanese companies in the list--Itochu, Sumitomo, Mitsui, Hitachi and Matsushita--are disposed of in a mere 20 pages, and another three--Nissho Iwai, Marubeni and Tomen--don't even get a mention.

So what is Rafferty's book about? The preface provides a clue. "Much has changed since this book was first mooted. Back in late 1989, it seemed that Japan was about to become the owner of the whole world, or at least the most valuable areas of it." In other words, Rafferty was commissioned to write the book at the height of the bubble, but took so long (his excuse is his struggle "with a computer that was felled by the dreaded Barcelona virus and then with the treacly world of bureaucrats") that by the time he completed his 342-page opus, events had undermined the original idea, forcing the author to cobble together a mish-mash of news'n'views to fit whenever the book was published. "It could not go on. It did not go on. Plummeting prices for stock and land on top of recession have damaged Japan's self-confidence." And so on.

The book is ploddingly informative. "The biggest of the sogo shosha in terms of annual sales is not one of the biggest three, but Itochu, which does not have a keiretsu named after itself." Great slabs of company publicity material are used to pad out the text: "neodymium magnets, which have the strongest magnetic fields among permanent magnets, show a magnetic field strength of 0.45 tesla. Nippon Steel claims to have maintained an yttrium oxide magnet with a field of 1.0 tesla even after three years at a temperature of 77K (Kelvin or absolute scale)." Cool, Kelvin!--sorry, Kevin.

The lazy trick of using unattributed quotations to introduce the author's own opinions ("`Can't think of any major contribution that Nakahira has made on any question,' commented his western contemporaries from round the negotiating tables"--in chorus, presumably) weakens the book's notional credibility. It claims to be a "cool appraisal of how different Japan really is," but the few comparisons with other countries, mainly the U.K., more often point to similarities.

Rafferty criticizes foreign press coverage of Japan for its superficiality and sensationalism, but favors The Financial Times with a mealy-mouthed compliment: ". . . an honorable exception. It has lots of space, though it does not always use it discriminatingly and rarely offers enlightenment on wider social issues." But--wait for it--Rafferty's own paymaster, The Guardian, "was sometimes surprisingly better than the rest." Before young Kevin joined its pages? Rafferty does not say.

It's hard to see who would want to read this book. Any foreigner who has lived here more than a year or so will wearily recognize all the standard clichés. There are no surprises. Compared with other recent books about Japan, such as Eamonn Fingleton's Blindside or James Fallows' Looking at the Sun, Rafferty's tome is deeply shallow. The absence of any bibliography suggests he hardly bothered to read around his subject, content to cull magazines, newspapers and glossy brochures for most of his information. The result is a dull catalog of newscuttings rearranged over many hours on a word processor--a sad memorial to the "Young Journalist of the Year" of 25 years ago, but an excellent investment for anyone suffering from insomnia.

Bookworms

Meiji Revisited by Dallas Finn (Weatherhill $45) is a pricey but plush illustrated guide to one of the weirdest and most appealing moments of world architectural history, the Meiji period. In its breakneck drive to modernize along Western lines, cohorts of British, French, German and American architects were shipped in to impart a veneer of European sophistication to palaces, railway stations, bridges and prisons, with results often closer to Walt Disney than Neo-Gothic. Fascinatingly, the Western exteriors of these buildings often concealed the most traditional Japanese skeletons--wooden frames joined without the use of nails, native styles of stone masonry.

Adams the Pilot by William Corr (Curzon Press L24.95) tells the story of another, much earlier import: Will Adams, the British navigator, also known as Miura Anjin. Adams suffered two extreme misfortunes. In 1600 he was shipwrecked in Japan, and never left (even for Christmas) before his death in 1620. History played an even crueler trick 350 years later when James Clavell wrote his dimwitted bestseller Shogun, based on Adams' story. As Corr demonstrates, there is no evidence that he resembled Richard Chamberlain; in fact, very little survives in any form to explain how the simple English sailor became a trusted retainer of the first and greatest shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa. This is a fascinating story nonetheless, with much insight into the grubby backbiting between the Christian sects in 16th-century Japan, and a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography.