Reading Again

One of the things that’s great about the book club is that it’s encouraging me to read more. I’ve finished the next book for the club, Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Country, and have almost finished a second, Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons. Kerr’s book is really incredible. I’m thinking of writing a fuller review later so I won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice to say, even though it’s dated in places it’s book that I feel is telling people something few others speak up about. It’s true I haven’t read a great deal of literature on Japan so maybe everything he’s saying is old hat but compared to what I have read it’s a very different take.

As I said, I hope to do a longer review at some point in the future but for those of you that haven’t read it (I’m assuming that’s everyone) it’s central thesis is that Japan’s society has stagnated, that it is largely run by a corrupt bureaucracy that pursues goals that made sense in the 1950s and 60s but have long since passed their use by date. This mindset sees Japan constructing buildings, decimating the environment and raising a generation of factory workers long after most of those things were needed. The true culture and heritage of Japan is being ravaged by these pre-industrial policies even as Japan tries to assert itself as a post-industrial society on par with the West.

One thing that it hasn’t helped with very much is wanting to be in Japan. Kerr does a (mostly) good job illustrating how deep the problems in Japan’s society run, so much so that you get the feeling they’re intractable. Not really the type of thing you want to hear when this is where you’re thinking of spending the next few years (and possibly even raising children).

I actually want to email one of my lecturers at Sydney Uni about it since he’s lived and worked in Japan and probably has the most experience of a foreigner living in Japan that I know. I’m hoping he’s at least heard of the book and can give me some sort of idea how he feels about it. It’s really got to me quite a lot over the past few days and I’ve started thinking about buying it in Japanese for all the teachers in the English staffroom (Kerr wrote it in both English and Japanese). It’s that kind of book: one you just want everyone to read.