Book of the week

After last week's unexpectedly timely choice of book, I think this week is an appropriate time to step back and recommend a novel. (Everyone could probably use a break from more serious matters after the past week.)

As such, I would like to recommend Murakami Haruki's most recent novel, After Dark, which was just published in English translation (translated by veteran Murakami translator Jay Rubin).

While there are those in the Japanese literary establishment who dismiss Murakami's novels as trite, I find them remarkably appropriate for our anxious age — and morally serious to boot. Murakami is a humanist. Throughout his novels and short stories (and non-fiction) runs a clear thread: after the horrors of the twentieth century, the only morally appropriate belief is humanism, the firm belief that each individual has a right to live as he sees fit without external interference (and without interfering with others). His world view rejects the idea of there being one best way to live, but instead leaves each individual to find his own way.

Beyond that, Murakami has a phenomenal ability to make the bizarre seem normal, and the normal seem bizarre.

Both of these ideas are on display in this latest novel (though at 191 pages it is more of a novella). Set over the course of an autumn evening in Tokyo, Murakami spins a yarn starring a prickly university co-ed, her sister, a teenage bikini model, an amateur jazz trombonist studying to be a lawyer, the manager of a love hotel, a Chinese prostitute and other flotsam and jetsam of Tokyo after dark. The setting is undoubtedly familiar to anyone who has missed the last train and been stranded in Shibuya or Shinjuku. But when used by Murakami as a setting for his story, the mundane becomes eerie, unfamiliar — the Tokyo night won't look the same again.

As for Murakami's humanism, it is probably best voiced by his scruffy, awkward lawyer-to-be, when he tells the heroine his reason for taking law seriously. He explains to her how after watching trials, he went from feeling that a wall separated the accused from him and everyone else to feeling that all are trapped in the same web of conditions; the line between a criminal and a law-abiding citizen is not so clear as one would like to think. He writes: "What I want to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of a person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle."

While I cannot say that After Dark is my favorite Murakami novel, it is among his best work, and a fine illustration of how Murakami has refined his craft.

Book of the week

As the regular session of the Diet winds down — and with the government's priority legislation passed — it seems that the matter of Agriculture Minister Matsuoka Toshikatsu has returned to the forefront of the national political agenda.

In light of that, this week's book of the week is Aurelia George Mulgan's study of Matsuoka, Power and Pork. (I should also note that the Far Eastern Economic Review's June issue will include a review of this book by yours truly.)

In this book, George Mulgan narrates, in lavish detail, Matsuoka's career from his time as a specialist in the Ministry of Agriculture through his political career from his first election to the Lower House in 1990
to the time when he joined the Abe Cabinet, just prior to the publication of this book. The picture that emerges is that for all the talk about how Japanese politics changed when the LDP briefly lost power in 1993, the rules of the game remain depressingly familiar. Despite the Koizumi interlude, when it looked as if maybe, just maybe, Japan might be on the brink of a new era, under Abe it seems that Nagatacho is back to business as usual. With Matsuoka stonewalling his critics under the protection of the prime minister, the Japanese political system seems as inadequate to the challenges it faces as ever before. (For a summary of the Matsuoka saga, check out this recent post at Trans-Pacific Radio.)

Of course, each week seems to bring new news of Matsuoka's wrongdoing, and more criticism. On Saturday, at a general meeting of the Gifu branch of the LDP, Kaneko Kazuyoshi, chairman of the Lower House Budget Committee, suggested that Matsuoka should resign after the Diet session ends and further suggested that a cabinet reshuffle may be in order. This is in light of revelations this week that Matsuoka received donations from construction companies that received contracts from the Japan Green Resources Agency ('J-GREEN') of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. Readers of George Mulgan's book will find that this is entirely consistent with the span of Matsuoka's career. Matsuoka has excelled at securing public funds for corporations, which subsequently direct donations to his political support groups.

In short, putting Matsuoka at the head of MAFF is about as good an example of putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop as one can find.

Of course he should be forced to resign. But that's a matter of course. Political reform, starting with measures to require detailed reporting of all donations and expenditures by political support groups and measures to curtail interaction between bureaucrats and Diet members, is needed to deprive Japan's Matsuokas of opportunities to pervert the system to private ends.

Will the newly buoyant prime minister add political reform to his agenda, starting with the sacking of Matsuoka? With Abe, and Nakamura Shoichi, Abe's id, defending Matsuoka, not bloody likely.

Book of the week

This week's book, Japan's Security Strategy in the Post-9/11 World: Embracing a New Realpolitik by Daniel M. Kliman, provides concrete analysis of how Japanese security policy has changed not just in the post-9/11 world as the title suggests, but since the end of the cold war.

Although it is a relatively slim volume, it is packed with useful observations, particularly concerning the role played by the North Korea threat in the process of normalizing Japan's security policy.

Kliman, moreover, further reinforces the idea that the policies resulting from Japan's sensitivity to its international environment — well documented by Kenneth Pyle and Michael Green — have shifted as the region has changed; whereas during the cold war the Yoshida Doctrine's opportunistic pacifism and reliance on the US were a rational response by a broken country at the front lines of cold war, the uncertain post-cold war environment suggests a different set of policies. Steps taken by Abe lend more weight to Kliman's argument.

Book of the week

Apologies for not posting a recommended book last week, due to my travels in China.

This week's selection is Fareed Zakaria's From Wealth to Power (Amazon link at right).

Zakaria's book, while in part a theory-laden discussion of the rise of great powers, focuses on how the US went from being an economic giant but a political and military midget in the late nineteenth century. Zakaria takes issue with the standard realist account of the balance of power, suggesting that in the case of the US what mattered in the emergence of the US were decisions taken in Washington in the decades following the civil war that enabled the federal government to exercise the latent power of the continental nation. The state's ability to draw upon the power of the nation forms the basis for what Zakaria calls "state-centered realism."

The implications of this theory for contemporary Japan are obvious. Twenty-first century Japan, in a manner not unlike late nineteenth America, is in the process of making the political decisions that will enable its government to wield national power that it has heretofore been denied.

One significant difference, however, is that Japan is trying to normalize its security policy in a regional environment more akin to Europe in the late nineteenth century, which means that whatever decisions that Abe Cabinet makes regarding Japan's security policy will undoubtedly raise alarms in neighboring capitals. Hence the absurdity of Abe's remarks last week about Japan's needing to keep its neighbors informed about constitution revision. The problem is not a matter of the fairness of Japan's having to genuflect to its neighbors regarding every mooted change to the postwar regime. No, Abe's pronouncement that Japan will explain changes to its neighbors is absurd because changing the constitution will send a clear signal to Japan's neighbors that it will play a more significant, independent role in the regional balance of power, a reality that no amount of "explanation" will be able to obscure.

In any case, Zakaria's book is an excellent corrective to systemic realism and a reminder that in international politics what happens within states is incredibly important (a point that seems obvious to most people but with which some — though, of late, fewer — IR scholars struggle).

Book of the week

In honor of Prime Minister Abe's visit to Washington later this week, this week's selection for book of the week is an oldie but a goodie -- senior Asahi correspondent Funabashi Yoichi's Alliance Adrift, an account of the process of reaffirming and redefining the US-Japan alliance during the middle and late Clinton administration.

As I have argued consistently, the alliance is in the midst of a similar period of political drift, and as Abe heads to Washington to patch up relations, it is worthwhile to look back to see how the US and Japanese governments struggled with and briefly overcame problems in the relationship.

Book of the week

Readers will notice a new feature to the right: the book of the week.

Each week I will suggest a new book that might be of interest to readers of this blog.

This week's book is About Face, by veteran journalist James Mann, who has just released a new book on US-China relations entitled The China Fantasy.

In About Face, Mann provides a thorough retelling of the US relationship with China since Nixon's visit, showing how the same patterns reemerge in every administration, whether Republican or Democratic. It is both accessible and erudite, providing a useful guide to understanding a relationship that will only become more important over time.