REMINGINING JAPAN: Contributors to this volume include some of the world’s most brilliant thinkers from fields as diverse as business, politics, academia, science and technology, journalism and art and design. In the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis of March 2011, Japan has become a bigger part of the world’s consciousness than it has been for years. But Japan also is grappling with other problems that, over the long run, pose a much greater challenge to its national well-being than the devastation in Tohoku.... How can the country compete with a rising China? Cope with a fast-aging society? Deal with its enormous debt? Rediscover its entrepreneurial verve? Regain its position as a leader in technology and innovation? In Reimagining Japan, McKinsey & Company, the world’s top management consulting firm, asked more than 80 global leaders and experts to consider these questions. In essays brimming with insight, affection and occasional humor, the authors offer their assessments of Japan’s past, present and --most important -- future. What sets Reimagining Japan apart is the breadth and diversity of its contributors. They range from Fortune 500 CEOs to acclaimed writers (including three Pulitzer Prize winners) to a star videogame creator, a soccer coach, a school principal and a manga artist. There has not been such a comprehensive book about Japan in the past generation - and perhaps ever. NOTABLE CONTRIBUTORS Bernard Arnault, Ian Buruma, Gerald Curtis, John Chambers, Steven Covey, John Dower, Bill Emmott, Victor Fung, Carlos Ghosn, Pico Iyer, Bob McDonald, Stephen Roach, Masahiro Sakane, Masayoshi Son, Howard Schultz, Klaus Schwab, Bobby Valentine, Steve Van Andel, Ezra Vogel, Robert Whiting, Tadashi Yanai and more than 50 others.

During World War II, Japan was vilified by America as our hated enemy. As the Cold War heated up, however, the U.S. government decided to make Japan its bulwark against communism in Asia. In this revelatory work, Naoko Shibusawa charts the remarkable reversal from hated enemy to valuable ally that occurred in the two decades after the war.

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster (collectively referred to as ‘3.11’, the date of the earthquake), had a lasting impact on Japan’s identity and global image. In its immediate aftermath, mainstream media presented the country as a disciplined, resilient and composed nation, united in the face of a natural disaster. However, 3.11 also drew worldwide attention to the negative aspects of Japanese government and society, thought to have caused the unresolved situation at Fukushima. Spurred by heightened emotions following the triple disaster, the Japanese became increasingly polarised between these two views of how to represent themselves. How did literature and popular culture respond to this dilemma? Re-imagining Japan after Fukushima attempts to answer that question by analysing how Japan was portrayed in post-3.11 fiction. Texts are selected from the Japanese, English and French languages, and the portrayals are also compared with those from non-fiction discourse. This book argues that cultural responses to 3.11 had a significant role to play in re-imagining Japan after Fukushima.

Since the late 1980s, many East Asian countries have become more multicultural, a process marked by increased democracy and pluralism despite the continuing influence of nationalism, which has forced these countries in the region to re-envision their nations. Many such countries have had to reconsider their constitutional make-up, their terms of citizenship and the ideal of social harmony. This has resulted in new immigration and border-control policies and the revisiting of laws regarding labor policies, sociopolitical discrimination, and socioeconomic welfare. This book explores new perspectives, concepts, and theories that are socially relevant, culturally suitable, and normatively attractive in the East Asia context. It not only outlines the particular experiences of nation, citizenship, and nationalism in East Asian countries but also places them within the wider theoretical context. The contributors look at how nationalism under the force of multiculturalism, or vice versa, affects East Asian societies including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong differently. The key themes are: Democracy and equality; Confucianism’s relationship with nationalism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism; China’s use of its political institutions to initiate and sustain nationalism; the impact of globalization on nationalism in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan; the role of democracy in reinvigorating indigenous cultures in Taiwan.

Re-Imaging Japanese Women takes a revealing look at women whose voices have only recently begun to be heard in Japanese society: politicians, practitioners of traditional arts, writers, radicals, wives, mothers, bar hostesses, department store and blue-collar workers. This unique collection of essays gives a broad, interdisciplinary view of contemporary Japanese women while challenging readers to see the development of Japanese women's lives against the backdrop of domestic and global change. These essays provide a "second generation" analysis of roles, issues and social change. The collection brings up to date the work begun in Gail Lee Bernstein's Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (California, 1991), exploring disparities between the current range of images of Japanese women and the reality behind the choices women make.

Reimagining India brings together leading thinkers from around the world to explore the challenges and opportunities faced by one of the most important and least understood nations on earth. India’s abundance of life—vibrant, chaotic, and tumultuous—has long been its foremost asset. The nation’s rising economy and burgeoning middle class have earned India a place alongside China as one of the world’s two indispensable emerging markets. At the same time, India’s tech-savvy entrepreneurs and rapidly globalizing firms are upending key sectors of the world econ­omy. But what is India’s true potential? And what can be done to unlock it? McKinsey & Company has pulled in wisdom from many corners—social and cultural as well as eco­nomic and political—to launch a feisty debate about the future of Asia’s “other superpower.” Reimagining India features an all-star cast of contributors, including CNN’s Fareed Zakaria; Mukesh Ambani, CEO of India’s largest private conglomerate; Microsoft founder Bill Gates; Google chairman Eric Schmidt; Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria; award-winning authors Suketu Mehta (Maximum City), Edward Luce (In Spite of the Gods), and Patrick French (India: A Portrait); Nandan Nilekani, Infosys cofounder and chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India; and a host of other leading executives, entrepreneurs, economists, foreign policy experts, jour­nalists, historians, and cultural luminaries. These essays explore topics like the strengths and weaknesses of India’s political system, growth prospects for India’s economy, the competitiveness of Indian firms, India’s rising international profile, and the rapid evolution of India’s culture. Over the next decade India has the opportunity to show the rest of the develop­ing world how open, democratic societies can achieve high growth and shared prosperity. Contributors offer creative strategies for seizing that opportunity. But they also offer a frank assessment of the risks that India’s social and political fractures will instead thwart progress, condemning hundreds of millions of people to enduring poverty. Reimagining India is a critical resource for read­ers seeking to understand how this vast and vital nation is changing—and how it promises to change the world around us.

In Japan, the figure of the suited, white-collar office worker or business executive ‘salaryman’ (or, sarariiman), came to be associated with Japan’s economic transformation following World War Two. The ubiquitous salaryman came to signify both Japanese masculinity, and Japanese corporate culture, and in this sense, the salaryman embodied ‘the archetypal citizen’. This book uses the figure of the salaryman to explore masculinity in Japan by examining the salaryman as a gendered construct. Whilst there is a considerable body of literature on Japanese corporate culture and a growing acknowledgement of the role of gender, until now the focus has been almost exclusively on women in the workplace. In contrast, this book is one of the first to focus on the men within Japanese corporate culture through a gendered lens. Not only does this add to the emerging literature on masculinity in Japan, but given the important role Japanese corporate culture has played in Japan’s emergence as an industrial power, Romit Dasgupta’s research offers a new way of looking both at Japanese business culture, and more generally at important changes in Japanese society in recent years. Based on intensive interviews carried out with young male private sector employees in Japan, this book makes an important contribution to the study of masculinity and Japanese corporate culture, in addition to providing an insight into Japanese culture more generally. As such it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese society and gender studies.

American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan: From Perry to Obama is an historical survey of how Americans have viewed Japan during the past 160 years. It encompasses the diplomatic, political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the relationship, with an emphasis on changing American images, myths, and stereotypes of Japan and the Japanese. It begins with the American “opening” of Japan in the 1850s and 1860s. Subsequent chapters explore American attitudes toward Japan during the Gilded Age, the early 1900s, the 1920s, the 1930s, and the Pacific War. The second part of the book, organized round the theme of the postwar Japanese-American partnership, covers the Occupation, the 1960s, the troubled 1970s and1980s, and the post-Cold War decades down to the Obama presidency. The conclusion offers some predictions about how Americans are likely to view Japan in the future.

Sparked by the confluence of accelerating domestic transformation and increasingly explicit impacts from ‘globalization’, the Japanese education system has undergone tremendous changes during the turbulence of the past decade. This volume, which brings together some of the foremost scholars in the field of Japanese education, analyzes these recent changes in ways that help us ‘reimagine’ Japan and Japanese educational change at this critical juncture. Rather than simply updating well-worn Western images of Japan and its educational system, the aim of the book is a much deeper critical rethinking of the outmoded paradigms and perspectives that have rendered the massive shifts that have taken place in Japan largely invisible to or forgotten by the outside world. This ‘reimagining’ thus restores Japan to its place as a key comparative link in the global conversation on education and lays out new pathways for comparative research and reflection. Ranging widely across domains of policy and practice, and with a balance of Japanese and foreign scholars, the volume is also indicative of new directions in educational scholarship worldwide: approaches that center global interactions on domestic education and contribute to a far greater recognition of the polycentric, polycontextual World unfolding today. This book will be of keen interest to scholars of education worldwide, as well as those working in and across anthropology, sociology, policy studies, political science, and area studies given that contemporary transformations in Japan at once reflect and approximate political, social, and educational shifts occurring throughout the World in the early decades of the 21st century.

Morie Sawataishi lives a life that is radically unconventional by any standard but almost absurd in blatantly conformist Japan. Journalist Martha Sherrill provides a profound look at what it takes to be an individualist in a culture where rebels are rare.