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4.0 out of 5 stars
Yomiuri Review was on the Money, January 3, 2006
This review is from: The Japanese Disease: Sex and Sleaze in Modern Japan (Paperback)
I quote below a review of this book published in the Yomiuri last November. From his choice of terminology, I presume Mr Kruse had access to this review and that it inspired his criticisms. I remember Hayes writing science reviews for the Yomiuri some years ago, some good, some bad and some referenced in this book. The Yomiuri review does highlight many of the strong and weak points of the book. There are too many tangents in the footnotes on science, economics, world politics and the arts. However, an important point is that Hayes seems to be saying that "unusual Japan" is not all that unusual and, as the Yomiuri mentions, he cites similar cases throughout the world. As the Yomiuri states, he also spends only a comparatively small amount of pages highlighting some of Sophia's dirty linen - as it is in a chapter beginning with a gang rape society at Waseda University, perhaps he felt some balance was needed. He does cite far too many crimes without, as the Yomiuri points out, going into any detail on most of them. However, the sheer number of crimes he cites seems to me to make the point that Japan is lawless in many ways, just like other countries. Finally, as the Yomiuri and Mr Kruse echoes, the author does jump, mothlike around from topic to topic much too much. The question to decide before spending your money: is do you want to follow the moth from the war crimes of the Second World War (chapter one) via more modern crimes to the final chapter dealing with the media and judicial system in Japan? If so, his book might be worth buying.
Japan scholar reveals all the muck that's fit to rake -- and then some
Mark Austin / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
The Japanese Disease: Sex and Sleaze in Modern Japan By Declan Hayes
iUniverse, 619 pp, 35.95 dollars
Can you think of any other country that has a sexual molestation problem on the scale that Japan does? I don't recall seeing anti-groping posters in any of the mass transit systems in the world's big cities I've visited outside Japan.
And in how many other countries have railway operators introduced women-only train cars to counter a groping problem?
The design of one anti-groping poster used in the Tokyo subway system until a year or so ago was ironic, though the irony was obviously lost on the railway operator that commissioned it. It had a photograph of a pretty teenage girl, wearing school uniform and a fierce expression, holding one arm out in a "stop!" gesture.
I have no doubt the poster became a collectors item among the legions of chikan (gropers) in the nation's capital.
About 10 years ago, one of them, Samu Yamamoto, became a regular on the late-night TV circuit when his Chikan Hyakka (Encyclopedia of Groping) was published. I remember watching, dumbfounded, one show in which he gave advice to a group of young, would-be chikan, who wore ski masks to preserve their anonymity, while the audience howled with laughter.
"Only in Japan," I remember thinking.
Is that right, though? Do the Japanese--Japanese men, more accurately--have an innate, culturally determined predisposition toward forms of sexual behavior considered outrageous in the West, or is the groping problem simply a malign symptom of a "pressure cooker" society--a problem that could occur anywhere, given the right conditions?
Declan Hayes--whose previous books include Setting Sun, Japan's Big Bang and Japan: The Toothless Tiger, all from Tuttle Publishing--seems to believe both the former and the latter. His self-published The Japanese Disease: Sex and Sleaze in Modern Japan is a phone book-sized indictment of a society he claims has lost its moral compass, and yet--surely inadvertently--the book offers plentiful evidence that any "disease" Japan suffers from is far from endemic.
Hayes, associate professor of money, banking and finance at Sophia University, unabashedly introduces his tome as "the mother of all Japan bashing books!" But he concludes its final chapter with the claim: "Although this entire book will lead to the hoary charge that I am a Japan-basher, that is not the case at all."
Glaring inconsistencies such as this are, unfortunately, evident throughout the book, which resembles an extended Web blog written by someone suffering from logorrhea.
Hayes' book is hard to describe; indeed it beggars description. Within the covers, its author flits, mothlike, over a bizarre potpourri of subjects that have at best only a tenuous connection with Japan including:
-- The "Sokal affair"--a hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal upon a leading humanities journal that exposed the "Emperor's New Clothes"-type theorizing espoused by post-modernist academics (four pages).
-- Political correctness allegedly gone mad at Hayes' employer, Sophia University (five pages; four pages in the endnotes).
-- An overview of economics that encompasses the theories of the ancient Greeks; Newtonian, Einsteinian and quantum physics; game theory; the theories of Marx and Darwin; the development of eugenics; and the theory of rational expectations (24 pages; dozens of lengthy references in the endnotes).
-- Keynesian economic theory (total of 17 pages in the endnotes).
-- The Irish Republican movement (13 pages; dozens of lengthy references in the endnotes).
-- The theory of mercantilism (eight pages in the endnotes).
-- "Empty" apologies by individuals, institutions and nations (20 pages in the endnotes).
-- Anti-Semitism (six pages in the endnotes).
While these topics are undoubtedly interesting, their inclusion and lengthy explication in a book that purports to analyze the "putrid underbelly" of Japan, which he describes as "a country gone seriously off the rails," is bewildering.
Much of The Japanese Disease consists of long lists of lurid crime reports culled from vernacular newspapers. Those who have lived in this country for a few years will be familiar with most of the cases that Hayes cites. There seems little point in his belaboring them in such numbing detail in his book; it would have made far more sense if Hayes had concentrated on a few representative cases and provided some context to advance his apparent premise: that Japan is a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.
What context he does provide, however, fatally undermines that claim. Discussing the blight of underage prostitution in the "Japan's Child Sex Industry" chapter, for instance, Hayes admits that "the West, of course, has a blotted copybook in this regard" and devotes the following four pages to the pedophilia problem in Australia, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United States and other countries.
Similarly, while a glance at the national pages of any Japanese newspaper reveals that corruption remains widespread, Hayes' claim that "Japan's political system resembles that of its wartime ally, Italy. Nice on the surface but rotten to the core" sounds a bit wide of the mark considering that Japan ranked 21st out of of 158 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index 2005--a fairly creditable showing.
If, for the sake of argument, we accept Hayes' claim that Japan is indeed going to hell in a handbasket (which requires a suspension of reason on the part of this reviewer, a longtime resident of this safe, peaceful and wealthy nation), then at least it won't be short of company there.
(Nov. 27, 2005)
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