I won't keep you in suspense: this is a dry, academic text, rendered somewhat stale, no less, by events of the past few years. Obviously, I was hoping for more when I came across an essay highlighting some of the demographic findings in The Atlantic earlier this summer. In fact, I had high hopes of being able to assign many of the essays, if not the entire book, to my Business and Culture in Japan students next spring. Given the readability of such trade-centric volumes as Borderless Economies, this didn't seem unreasonable.
Unfortunately, most of the essays in Japan: The Precarious Future - particularly those that do not deal directly with demographics - were too dry to hold my attention, let alone that of my students. What's more, given the evolution of the geopolitical situation in the past year, from the Philippines and the South China Sea, to North Korea, to our own contributions to world instability, many of the essays read as woefully out-of-date. Although the topics remain timely - Japan will face future natural disasters; a visionary PM is still needed to shift the economy; questions of a Japanese military have perhaps never been more relevant - too much that has happened is not included for me to feel that there is real, ongoing value in the essays Frank Baldwin and Annie Allison have edited here.
Unless you are a scholar of all things Japanese, with an insatiable appetite for anything to do with Nihon, it's probably best to skip this one.
No stars. (But who gives stars to academic essays, anyway?)
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