Customer Reviews

Touching the Heart of Japan

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It was clear that the author put much time and effort into this book. The information was packed in there and interesting. I appreciated the author's own personal experiences and his feelings of being an American coming into Japanese society. There are two caveats to the book, though. The first is the author's obvious bias on certain subjects. For instance, on pages 156 & 157, he writes "The heart of the Japanese woman is sweet... they are fragile, both physically and emotionally...they ARE feminine and relish in their feminity...they ooze with feminity" Ugh! Those generalizations are nauseating. The over idealization of the Japanese culture is also apparent at times and one cannot help but roll one's eyes when reading these sections. Another caveat about the book is the author's lack of citations on facts and statistics. There were many parts of the book which intrigued me but due to lack of citations, I could not research them further. Those two caveats aside, it is an excellent and interesting read. I suspect that it is a self-published work because it is ripe with syntactical errors and the text did not flow so it could be cumbercome at times.

I have recently finished reading this fine book. If you have an interest in learning about the Japanese people this book is a great place to start. A great many subjects are discussed in a pleasant easy to read format. Each chapter is like a window into Japanese culture.