Volume 38, Number 10 · May 30, 1991
Is Japan the Enemy?
By James Fallows
The Coming War with Japan
by George Friedman, by Meredith LeBard
St. Martin's, 429 pp., $24.95
Japan Versus the West: Image and Reality
by Endymion Wilkinson
Penguin, 299 pp., $9.95 (paper)
The Rise of Modern Japan
by W.G. Beasley
St. Martin's, 306 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Japan's Administrative Elite
by B.C. Koh
University of California Press, 297 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Japan's Expanding Role and Influence in the Asia-Pacific Region: Implications for US Interests and Policy
by Richard P. Cronin
Congressional Research Service, 79 pp., free
Deepening Economic Linkages in the Pacific Basin Region: Trade, Foreign Direct Investment, and Technology
by Masaharu Hanazaki
Japan Development Bank, JDB Research Report #20, 88 pp., free
White Paper on International Trade, 1990
by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Tokyo
77 pp., free
Arming Our Allies: Cooperation and Competition in Defense Technology
by the US Office of Technology Assessment
113 pp., $5.00
Thoughts on US-Japan Security and Economic Linkages in East Asia
by Michael W. Chinworth
MIT Japan Program, 23 pp., $12.50
Kokusanka: FSX and Japan's Search for Autonomous Defense Production
by Michael J. Green
MIT Japan Program, 64 pp., $12.50
It is easy to imagine the dilemma the publisher faced when deciding whether to call its new book The Coming War With Japan. The authors are not widely known. George Friedman is a professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Meredith LeBard, originally from Australia, teaches writing at a community college in Harrisburg. If a book by these two had been published under a title that would accurately sum up its argument—such as, After the Cold War: Diverging National Interests Between Japan and America—few people would have paid much attention to it. By swinging for the fences with an inflammatory title and hyped-up passages every few chapters on the 'inevitability' of war, both the publisher and authors virtually guaranteed that reviewers would say, as I'm about to, that the book does not come close to proving its announced case.
Review, 6633 words
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