The End of Japan Inc.: And How the New Japan Will Look.

By Christopher Wood. New York: Simon and Schuster 1994. 240 pp. US$23.00, cloth. ISBN 0-671-50145-3.

These days writing a book about a volatile topic such as Japan's economy and its interrelations with government and business is a risky project. Although Wood's book isn't embarrassingly out of date, his views are not particularly novel either. Nevertheless, a trade book written for a non-scholarly audience need not bother with scholarship, originality or theory as long as it delivers a good read with plenty of juicy anecdotes. This it accomplishes quite well.

Wood is good at unpacking the "iron triangle," Japan's convoluted intersection of business, bureaucracy and politics, and thus the strongest chapters are those which describe the economy and the world of politics. He tells a lively story of the unravelling of the LDP, political ties to the criminal underworld, and the forming of the Hosokawa-led coalition. His claim that the Japanese economy is now mature and thus highly unlikely to return to the cushy good old days is already assumed by most foreign scholars, but a good writer like him still fashions it into interesting reading. In addition, Wood provides his audience with information obtained from Japanese language sources, such as interviews and newspaper accounts, which are often not found in English trade books.

Although highly readable, and containing various intriguing morsels of information (such as the rental price of Tokyo office space per tsubo, or details on the proliferation of equity repurchase agreements to hide bad debt), the book also suffers from some irritating features. For one, it is difficult to like Wood's incredible arrogance. He makes recurring reference to a herd of conventional thinkers and wrong-headed academics and revisionists who are blind to what has been true and obvious to him all along. Curiously, he never actually says who these misguided others are, nor what their supposedly erroneous ideas were. Although he rarely cites academic scholarship (and there is no bibliography), he constantly interjects the opinions of his cronies who work in investment banks and securities firms.

There are some contradictory aspects to Wood's ideas, too. He criticizes writers who portray the Japanese system as unique, yet buys into this very ideology when he continually points to the enduring need for consensus in Japan. At times he characterizes politicians as merely the victims of a political system that demands huge sums of money, then depicts them as venal crooks with deep-rooted ties to organized crime.

The book's title promises to deliver insights into what the collapse of the bubble economy will mean for a "new" Japan. Yet beyond some murky and self-evident forecasts, there is very little substantial speculation about how change will affect the core of Japanese society in ways that haven't already been widely acknowledged, such as recent changes in employment patterns, decreased overseas market share, continuing trade tussles, and conflict over the constitution. One of the predictions the book closes with is that, with no institutionalized mechanisms in place to deal with public welfare in crisis situations (the author had in mind high unemployment), there will be extensive domestic conflict. It is ironic that a rift in more than the political or economic landscape may in fact be the ultimate key to future change. The Kobe earthquake of 1995 left hundreds of thousands of residents without aid for days while the government did nothing. The country's shattered faith in the system may eventually be the real spur to future political and social upheaval in Japan.