Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. By the Year 2000 [Hardcover]

Eamonn Fingleton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 1995

In the first four years of this decade, Japanese exports rose 32%, the yen rose 27%, and Japanese employers created a net 3.2 million jobs. Though Japan is now the world's largest manufacturing economy, Fingelton argues that Americans are still underestimating the country's economic prowess.

"... a crisp, well- written, well-executed alarum." --New York Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Sometimes it seems as if Americans see Washington as the Vatican of world capitalism and Tokyo as merely another diocese," writes Fingleton, Asia editor of Euromoney magazine, but "for the Japanese a more appropriate metaphor is the secular one of corporate competition. Tokyo is playing Microsoft to Washington's IBM." And Fingleton, closely examining Japan's economic thrust and its cultural traditions, finds it the inevitable winner. He compares favorably Japan's managed economy with the U.S. drive for free trade; discusses the pragmatic Confucian attitudes toward hierarchy, both for individuals and nations, versus the "American rhetoric" about democracy; and asserts that not only has America been poorly served for decades by its economists, politicians, media and elite, but it has been "blindsided" by Japan's misleading habits of apparent deference and its own "semireligious" view of economics. Although Japan is not on an ideological crusade to take over the world economically, its power structure gives it a flexibility that can make it the next global leader, asserts the author. This provocative and informed analysis is an antidote to the recent flurry of critiques that see Japan's current economic troubles as the same old omens of decline.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Despite the title and the publisher's statement on the book jacket (describing this book as a "disturbing portrait of the economic juggernaut that is still on course to overtake America by the century's close"), this is not a work of paranoid Japan-bashing in the manner of T. Boone Pickens and others' The Second Pearl Harbor: Say No to Japan (LJ 2/1/92) or Michael Crichton's best-selling novel Rising Sun. Rather, it is a thoughtful and insightful analysis of the inner workings of the Japanese economy, with particular emphasis on how it differs from the U.S. economy in outlook and perception. While the work clearly displays the problems arising from America's failure to understand how the Japanese think and operate, the work contains little of the conspiratorial thinking and out-and-out racial stereotypes of the aforementioned works. This book, by a journalist and business writer who has lived in Japan since 1985, is instead well written and balanced and deserves careful reading by anyone interested in its subject.
Scott Wright, Univ. of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 406 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; 1st edition (March 20, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395633168
• ISBN-13: 978-0395633168
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #818,415 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pure Rubbish!, July 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. By the Year 2000 (Hardcover)

This book is truly looking at Japan through sakura-colored glasses. Nothing close to this fluff has been published since Herman Kahn in the 1970's. Somehow we're supposed to believe that Japan, in its worst economic crisis in FIFTY years, is supposed to economically overrun the U.S. in less than TWO. Well, if you're "persuaded" by that, I have some nice beach-front property in Arizona to sell you cheap. It's ironic that the media praising this book to the skies have never lived in Japan, don't work for a Japanese company, can't speak the language, and know little of the Japanese system.

Mr. Fingleton attacks western economists as all myopic dolts (he doesn't say much though about the Japanese economists who largely agree with them though). All of the Japan's miseries above are all just part of a Master Plan to fool the West before Japan races ahead of the world. He puts forth lots of facts and statistics, yet constantly draws the wrong conclusions. He says more Japanese buy diamonds than Americans, a fact in a vacuum that may be true. But to conclude by such that Japanese are now more affluent is absurd--it ignores consumer preferences--such as Americans would prefer to buy something else. Most of his other arguments have already been debunked by other authors.

If this book has any value at all, it's not to count the Japanese out--even if they're not going to own the world. I've worked in Japan for 11 years now and I can tell you that Fingleton's rosy predictions aren't going to come true any time soon, if ever.

But don't take my word for it--ask those in the Dead Fukuzawa Society, an e-mail discussion group of western and Japanese economists, financial experts, and ex-pats in Japanese corporations (and Fingleton himself is a member). More than a few have attacked the book as pseudo-intellectual rubbish. Not a single member of the 500 people have defended Fingleton's conclusions. But better yet, ask the Japanese themselves. They know their own country better than anyone and you don't see ANY of them rubbing their hands together, gloating about how they're going to storm the U.S. If you really want to learn about Japan, try reading Van Wolferen's "The Enigma of Japanese Power" or John Woronoff's "Japan - As Anything But- #1". They are far less flattering yet far more realistic books on Japan. But skip this lopsided, erroneous book on Japan.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Inside the Puppet Kingdom

, June 21, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. By the Year 2000 (Hardcover)

From Tokyo Journal Magazine - www.tokyo.to

By Robert Guest

Inside the Puppet Kingdom

Blindside by Eamonn Fingleton

The stockmarket is sinking into Tokyo Bay, like a yakuza in concrete geta. GNP is growing like rice planted in a desert. Honda's stopped hiring, bad debts are menacing several medium-sized banks, and analysts are whispering that the entire financial system might be on the verge of collapse. Inside the Puppet Kingdom

This is probably not the best time to be publishing a book about the invincibility of the Japanese economic model. But that is exactly what Eamonn Fingleton, former Tokyo correspondent of Euro Money, has done. Blindside is turning out to be this summer's beach reading for bright young Japanologists everywhere. At elite private seminars, and on the Internet, young men with joint Japanese/Economics degrees and prominent Adam's apples are excitedly picking over Fingleton's thesis: that Japan is poised to overtake the United States as the world's largest economy by the year 2000.

This is what's politely called a "brave" argument. In other words, almost no one agrees with Fingleton. "Japan seen sliding into second recession," ran a recent headline in the Financial Times; "Crisis Among the Rabbit Hutches," observed the Sunday Telegraph. But Fingleton tackles the doom-merchants head on, with some perceptive observations about their over-reliance on Western securities analysts (who tend to be conventional free marketeers), and ignorance of Japanese economic history. "Some systematic flaw in Western psychology," he believes, "leads Westerners, and particularly Americans, to exaggerate Japan's weaknesses and belittle its strengths."

We all know that Japan rose from the rubble of defeat and transformed itself, phoenix-like, into the world's second biggest industrial power etc., etc. Where scholars, journalists and shot-bar bores are unable to agree is how the miracle occurred. The debate works something like this. On one side are those who reckon Japan got to be super-rich for very straightforward reasons: everyone worked hard, and the government orchestrated sensible macro-economic policies like keeping inflation down. This is the conventional, free-market view.

Opposed to it is that of the revisionists. Chalmers Johnson, the granddaddy of them all, pointed out a decade and a half ago that the Japanese government intervenes in its economy, and that these interventions seem to make rather a lot of difference. He argued that when those clever bureaucrats at MITI organized low-cost finance for high-tech industries, tolerated cartels, and gave an implicit guarantee that no big company would be allowed to go bust, it was the cozy confidence these policies fostered which allowed the bubble to expand so unstoppably.

Fingleton stands back to back with the revisionists, and in some ways overshadows them. His prose is fizzier and more arresting than scholarly Professor Johnson's, and commands a wider sweep than trade-negotiator-turned-sanctions-hawk Clyde Prestowitz.

In brutal summary, he believes that the Ministry of Finance (whose top bureaucrat has almost as much power at his disposal than the President of the United States) interferes with people's lives in such a way as to make everyone richer in the long term.

For an economy to grow, you need investment, and for investment you need capital. The MOF sees raising capital for industry as its most important task, and it gets its hands on the stuff by taking it from you and me. If we put our hard-earned yen into a Japanese bank, we earn lousy interest, because the boys at MOF want banks to lend money cheaply to the likes of Mitsubishi and Toyota.

If Junichiro Sixpack wants a loan to build an extension to his four-and-a-half mat, he can't have one. If he wants to take his money out of the bank after 7pm, he can't do that either, because MOF wants to make it hard for him to spend and easy for him to save. The will to save explains a lot about Japanese government. Why do we have trade barriers? Because they reduce the range of goods on Japanese shelves, thus dulling Junichiro's desire to go shopping. So he saves his money instead.

Such is the power of the sinister MOF that it can make politicians pass laws that their constituents hate. No one in the Diet wanted the consumption tax, but they voted for it anyway. When former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone made a stand, MOF had investigators look into his murky campaign finances, and forced his resignation. Politicians with equally grubby hands, but who supported the tax, were left alone. The consumption tax discouraged consumption, thus encouraging saving, thus giving industry more money to invest . . . which is what the Ministry of Finance wanted all along.

Bureaucratic brilliance is probably what allowed Japan to catch up so rapidly with the west-Fingleton is also right to point out the way in which South Korea has copied the Japanese model with such success. But at a time when the economic backroom boys-on both sides of the Sea of Japan-are pulling back from the economy, and undoing the old control mechanisms, Fingleton is struggling against the tide. As a work of theory, Blindside is readable, engaging and thoroughly recommended; as a chart for the stratospheric future rise of the Japanese economy, it is either a work of a busy ima

11 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Very Disappointing Book..., September 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. By the Year 2000 (Hardcover)

Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1995, "Adam Smith" refers to Blindside as an "alarum." He is far too generous. That this unbalanced collection of anecdotal reasoning, historical inaccuracies, and revisionist tripe managed to capture the imaginations of so many respectable thinkers wishing to keep the "economic juggernaut" flames alive in the Nineties speaks volumes as to the extent of the ideological problems within Japan Studies.

Thankfully, with 92 days remaining until the end of Mr. Fingleton's punditry career, protectionists, mercantilists and AFL-CIO members will have to look elsewhere for indirect justification of their own political views. Despite Mr. Fingleton's assertion to the contrary, Japan will not be "overtaking the U.S. by the year 2,000"...if ever. Reality beckons.