Enjoy Rendering!: Сборник текстов для перевода и реферирования. Батурина С.А. - 31 стр.

                                Japan                                       timistic. "Nihon no Jidai" (Japan's Era), by Keitaro Hasegawa, took the
                                                                            prize with its bold forecasts about how Japan would soon be managing
      Tokyo                                                                 the flow of money, people and goods around the world.
                                                                                   It may be unfair to single out Mr Hasegawa just because his
       When its economy was booming, cars and electronics were not
                                                                            book sold more copies than the dozens of others that made similar ex-
the only industries in which Japan battled the West. Japanese authors       trapolations. "It is considered bad form to ask what most of these guys
also competed with their gaijin counterparts to churn out treatises about   were writing ten years ago," says Peter Tasker, a consultant and writer
Japanese ways of doing things. On one point almost everyone agreed:         in Tokyo. Still, it is worth comparing Mr Hasegawa's outlook with that
the Japanese way of organising society was better, as its juggernaut        of the top-selling business book now. "Tomorrow's Economics", pub-
economy proved.                                                             lished recently by Heizo Takenaka – the economics and banking minis-
       Needless to say, outside Japan, demand for such books is modest      ter in Junichiro Koizumi’s cabinet – also tries to envisage a bright fu-
at the moment. But what about in Japan? After a decade of economic          ture for Japan; but his optimism hangs on Japan's making a string of
torpor, how do Japanese writers see their country now? The swagger          tough choices that authors in the bubble years did not predict.
that marked books such as "The Japan that Can Say No", in which                    Japan's economy has not been the only source of worry and con-
Akio Morita (Sony's co-founder) and Shintaro Ishihara (a novelist and       fusion, however. One of the country's best-known authors, Haruki Mu-
nationalist politician who is now governor of Tokyo) trumpeted Japan's      rakami, points out that two of the most significant events in Japan dur-
rise to world, prominence just before the bubble popped, has certainly      ing the 19905 were not economic: the Kobe earthquake and the poison
faded. But Naoki Inose, a popular history writer who gained headlines       gas attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in the Tokyo metro system, both
last year serving on a committee for highway reform, says that many         of which took place in 1995. Though one was a natural disaster and the
Japanese were never as confident as the best-selling titles of the bubble   other man-made, Mr Murakami argues, I both shook the faith of many
years encouraged them to be.                                                Japanese in their society's underpinning.
       For all the affluence that Japan achieved in the 1980s, he argues,          In "Underground", which recounts his interviews with the metro
many Japanese still felt an underlying anxiety, and were never really       attackers and their victims, Mr Murakami tried to examine broadly the
convinced that their success reflected fundamental strengths in their       cruelty with which Japanese society can treat those who are different.
society. Even as western and Japanese authors were praising the bu-         After reading about a victim of the gas attacks who had subsequently
reaucratic and business structures that Japan had developed over the        been shunned by his fellow workers, Mr Murakami writes, he decided to
previous century, Mr Inose argues, ordinary Japanese remained unsure        find out "how Japanese society could perpetrate such a double violence".
of where those overweening institutions were taking them. Even if                  It is hard to say whether this sense of economic and social drift
anxieties were lurking all along, however, the events of the past decade    explains the slew of self-help books, several imported, which now line
have driven them to the surface, and Japan's economic weakness has          Tohan's non-business list of bestselling non-fiction. In 1989, the list
clearly played a role.                                                      was stocked with home-grown biographies and photograph albums of
       A quick glance at the bestseller lists highlights the change in      prominent Japanese, from actresses and divas to Hirohito, who died at
tone. Tohan, which publishes the most prominent list, compiles sepa-        the beginning of that year. Such lists can be misleading, however.
rate tables for business books and other sorts of non-fiction. In 1989,     Books known as nihonjinron, a class of pop-anthropology books that
one of the few economic worries on the minds of Japanese readers was        revelled in the uniqueness of the Japanese, were cranked out so fre-
taxes: four of the top ten business books aimed to help them cope with      quently, and resembled each other so closely, that they rarely topped
a new consumption tax. Two other popular business books that year           the charts of bestsellers. But many Japanese could not get enough of
took a stab at forecasting the 1990s, and both of their authors were op-    them in the 1980s, paying to read again and again about how their long

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