Publisher Description

"Fascinating...clearly stated, interesting and provoking.... A plainspoken account of living in Asia."  --San Francisco Chronicle

Anyone who has heard his weekly commentary on NPR knows that T. R. Reid is trenchant, funny, and deeply knowledgeable reporter and now he brings this erudition and humor to the five years he spent in Japan--where he served as The Washington Post's Tokyo bureau chief.  He provides unique insights into the country and its 2,500-year-old Confucian tradition, a powerful ethical system that has played an integral role in the continent's "postwar miracle."

Whether describing his neighbor calmly asserting that his son's loud bass playing brings disrepute on the neighborhood, or the Japanese custom of having students clean the schools, Reid inspires us to consider the many benefits of the Asian Way--as well as its drawbacks--and to use this to come to a greater understanding of both Japanese culture and America.

Author Biography

T.R. Reid is currently the Washington Post London bureau chief.

Review

"A provocative and entertaining portrayal...unfolds with insight, wry amusement, and unforgettable portraits that do indeed teach us as much about ourselves as about those living in 'the East.'" --The Washington Post Book World

"Engaging...a fascinating read...he is amusing, droll and extremely knowledgeable." --Detroit Free Press

Review Quote

"A provocative and entertaining portrayal...unfolds with insight, wry amusement, and unforgettable portraits that do indeed teach us as much about ourselves as about those living in 'the East.'" -- The Washington Post Book World "Engaging...a fascinating read...he is amusing, droll and extremely knowledgeable." -- Detroit Free Press

Excerpt from Book

We took a jet plane to the next century. When our thoroughly American family of five moved from the wide-open spaces of Castle Rock, Colorado (population 7,600), tothe noise, rush, and crush of teeming Tokyo (population 27,600,000), we knew that we were in for a long journey, in more ways than one. The trip itself seemed endless--it took two taxis, four buses, two airplanes, one train, one subway, and more of those assembly-line meals on little plastic trays than I care to remember. Our flight to Tokyo took off in July and didn''t land until August. While this was actually just a quirk that came from crossing the International Date Line, we all felt as if we''d been traveling for a month or more when the jet finally came to a stop at Narita International Airport. Still, we didn''t realize how far we had come until we got settled in Asia and began to look around. For a family that had previously considered it fairly exotic just to cross a county line, the prospect of moving to a vastly different culture had an element of adventure to it. Ever since my bosses at The Washington Post had asked me, a few months earlier, to take over the paper''s Tokyo bureau, we had been eagerly studying the life skills that we would need in our new home: eating soup with chopsticks, washing at the public bath, greeting people with a polite bow, taking a child''s temperature in Centigrade, and so forth. But on that August afternoon when we finally landed at Narita and took our bearings, we felt deflated. The place looked depressingly ordinary. It was an airport, after all, a vast sea of concrete with planes from United and Northwest and British Airways tooling around and people with big orange fans in each hand guiding the planes to their parking spots. In the terminal, there were crowds of travelers and lots of signs, primarily in English, leading us to Customs, Baggage Claim, and the like. The PA system was broadcasting announcements in English as well. For this we packed up all our belongings and traveled halfway around the planet? We''ve been here, we thought. We''ve done this. Fairly quickly, though, it became clear that this wasn''t just another airport--or at least, not an airport like the ones we knew back home. Those workers out on the tarmac, guiding the planes, pumping fuel, unloading luggage, weren''t dressed in the standard jeans and T-shirts; they wore neatly pressed gray uniforms, maroon neckties, and white gloves. And when our jet successfully steered up to the landing gate and came to a stop, the entire uniformed crew lined up on the tarmac beside the plane to give us a deep, respectful bow of welcome. As for the signs and PA announcements in the terminal, they were in English, but not the sort of English we knew back home. The first poster we spotted, just inside the door at International Arrivals, said, "Welcome to Here!" We found this friendly, if a little strange. When we boarded the shuttle bus to get to the train station, a chipper tape-recorded voice welcomed us again, in English, and said, "We hope you enjoy your life on our bus." Friendly, but a little strange. My favorite sign, on the wall of the Narita Airport train station, had a delicious ambiguity to it: "We are glad you could come in Tokyo," it said. Was this just a mistaken English preposition, or something more suggestive? Over the next few weeks, as we adjusted to life in the new land, we found many more indications that Asia really was the distant and different place we had imagined. The countryside really was marked by patch after square patch of pale green rice shoots rising from the paddy fields beside bamboo groves swaying gracefully in the breeze. A couple of times I saw farmers in round-brimmed straw hats bending over the rice crop, knee-deep in mud--an image straight out of my junior high world geography text, circa 1960. As we settled in Tokyo, and began traveling to Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, and the other major cities of East Asia, we relished the sights and smells and flavors that seemed to match our expectations for a place called The Orient. We bought fried octopus and roasted ginkgo nuts on the street. We rode that notorious commuter train out of Tokyo''s Shinjuku station--our kids called it the pancake train--where polite conductors with white gloves really do push you onto the train, jamming three hundred riders into a car built to seat fifty. In almost every big city we found impossibly crowded, noisy, bustling, fragrant, and delicious Asian bazaars--tightly jammed collections of tiny shops, stands, or handcarts stacked with goods, with runners in rice-straw hats weaving through the crowds, pushing wagons filled with fresh fish or bunches of bananas or color TV sets or cases of sunglasses or massive burlap sacks full of rubber bands. These places were incredibly fun and colorful--and great shopping as well. On Petaling Street in the old Chinese section of Kuala Lumpur, I bought not one but two solid gold watches for a total price of $8. Genuine Rolex, too--the salesman told me so. In the marvelous Nandaemun Market in Seoul, where youthful waitresses slithered through the crowded alleys with five lunches, on five separate trays, stacked neatly on their heads, some guy sold me a brand-new pair of Nike Airs--a $180 pair of running shoes--for $13. As he pocketed my money, the salesman decided to come clean. "Actually, they''re not really brand-new," he told me, in a half whisper. "Actually, they''re not really Nike, either." But for all the sights and sounds that came straight out of the textbooks and the travel guides, we also found something, in East Asian countries in the 1990s, that we hadn''t expected. We found ourselves smack in the middle of a fundamental shift in world history--a basic realignment of global stature and political power that will change the way the world has worked for the past five hundred years or so. To use a phrase we heard time and again, we found ourselves in the Asian century. Anyone who spends some time in Shanghai or Singapore, in Taipei or Tokyo, can see and feel the new era emerging. Whether we like it or not, the familiar world order we have all grown up with, a world dominated and controlled by the nations of Western Europe and the United States, has come to an end. Today, the countries of East Asia consider themselves just as important as the traditional Western powers. They think they have just as much right as Americans and Europeans to run the United Nations, the World Bank, the Red Cross, the Olympics, and all the other international organizations that have always been the preserve of white Westerners. After centuries of indoctrination from Christian missionaries and education in Western universities, the Asians now argue that they have valuable lessons to teach the rest of the world. And they''re right. By the simplest measures--size and wealth--the Asians already outrank the West. East Asian nations have more people than the West. They have more money, too; of the three richest countries on Earth, as measured by total output, or gross domestic product, two are in East Asia. (The United States has the highest GDP, followed in order by Japan and China, with Germany and other Western European democracies trailing behind.) The Western media paid enormous attention to the currency crises and economic disasters that hit some East Asian countries in the late 1990s. From reading this coverage, you''d almost think that Asia''s economic growth was over, and that the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Malaysians, etc., were going to revert to their traditional role as water bearers and rickshaw pullers for rich whites. This is evidently an appealing notion to some people in the West--but it is wrong. Even after the series of crises that began in the summer of 1997, almost every East Asian country continued to record higher economic growth rates than the Western powers. Even after years of recession, Japan still has the largest foreign currency reserves in the world--which is an economist''s way of saying that they are sitting on about $200 billion of our money. The world''s second-biggest stash of foreign currency is in Taiwan. The economic and political transformation that has turned East Asia from a bystander to a major player in global economics and politics has been studied and chronicled and heralded under various grandiose titles: the "East Asian miracle," the "Asian renaissance," the "Asian ascent," the "Rising East." Not surprisingly, business and government leaders in East Asia like all these terms. But the one they seem to prefer for this reshaping of the globe is the "Asian century," embracing the belief that the twenty-first century will be the time when East Asian countries use their wealth, population, and power to stand equal--at least--to the Western nations that have run the global show for so long. There''s a certain logic to the claim that we are about to enter an Asian century. The timing is right, for one thing. The Asian "economic miracle" began in the closing decades of one century, and despite the setbacks of the late 1990s in some Asian nations, it will reach full flower in the first decades of the next one. For another, the end of the twentieth century marks the end of Western colonialism in Asia. On July 1, 1997, with less than three years remaining in the twentieth century, Great Britain returned Hong Kong to China. That left just one last sliver of Western colonial rule on the Asian continent. And on December 20, 1999, this last remaining colony--the enclave of Macao, across the Pearl River delta from Hong Kong--will revert from Portuguese to Chinese control. That means Asia will enter the twenty-first century free of foreign governors--for the first time in five centuries, Asia will be fully Asian. The financial and political a

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