Shifting Boundaries of the Firm: Japanese Company–Japanese Labor

Perspectives on Work and Employment in Japan
Edited by Peter Matanle and Wim Lunsing
Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pages, $85

Reviewed by Jeff Kingston

It is a sign of the times that one of the most popular television dramas in Japan focuses on the experiences and attitudes of a female temporary worker. Having been "restructured," she has progressed from feeling betrayed to learning the art of self-reliance and the importance of having a life outside of work–in her case flamenco dancing.

Unlike the regular employees who remain at work until all hours, she is out the door at 6 p.m. sharp, no matter what. Also unlike the regular workers, she is productive and doesn't hesitate to toss an eraser at a dozing colleague. She has an endless array of qualifications earned on her own time, and in general puts the full-timers to shame. When offered a full-time job she declines, making a clear statement that she prefers the time, freedom and lifestyle denied the sad-sack drones around her.

This sea change in popular discourse about work reflects aspects of Japan's stunning transformation and the anxieties it is generating. Japan may be experiencing its longest period of continuous economic expansion since World War II, but it doesn't feel like it. People are pessimistic as the security and stability of Japan Inc. seems to crumble about them. Restructuring, M&A, outsourcing and other foreign terms have entered the local lexicon, sending a chill up the collective spine, even as there is a growing sense that Japan must adapt to survive. Pundits praise deregulation for reviving the economy while politicians blame it for increasing income disparities. This ambivalence suggests nostalgia for the glory days before Japan's prolonged recession of the 1990s.

Mari Sako's excellent book focuses on incremental institutional changes resulting from the organizational strategies of corporate management and unions. What is the link between corporate restructuring and labor markets? She writes, "How the boundary between the core and the periphery is drawn affects not only labor market outcomes such as pay inequality but also business performance by structuring company incentives to invest in capabilities."

Drawing on interviews with Nissan, Toyota, Matsushita and their respective unions, Ms. Sako, a professor of management studies at the Sad Business School at Oxford University, maps the shifting corporate boundaries that are redefining labor relations and employment practices. Her analysis focuses on how firms have interacted with unions in a process of industrial adjustment that has led to greater decentralization and variation in terms of employment. Hers is a "systematic study of what the enterprise should mean for enterprise unions" which finds that "unions typically have a choice in extending or contracting their boundaries and that their boundary decisions affect subsequent choices of corporate structure by management." Thus, she shows that unions are not just fading relics, but in fact are involved in shaping the restructuring process.

Her innovative approach bridges the disciplines of business strategy and industrial relations. She shows how practices such as outsourcing and dispatching of workers to subsidiaries–redefining who is an enterprise employee and potential union member–are influencing labor relations. In her view, the strategic interaction of management and unions is critical to understanding the growing fragmentation and diversity of employment systems. Ms. Sako writes that the once-prevalent firm model in the OECD provided:

 "... secure long-term jobs and careers, private reserves for retirement, health insurance for workers and their families, and training and education to build human capital. But now, such corporate enterprise as a well-defined, stable and enduring organization to which long-term employment rights could be attached is simply disappearing. The boundary of the firm is becoming blurred due to crosscompany work-teams, more project work, strategic alliances and outsourcing."

She believes there is no turning back and that corporate restructuring and fluidity in ownership and business relations will gain momentum in coming years. In the midst of this slow-motion transformation, "lifetime employment has been redefined" and in her view is fading as the numbers of contingent workers increase.

However, in Perspectives on Work and Employment in Japan, editors Peter Matanle and Wim Lunsing remind us that there is considerable diversity of opinion on the state of lifetime employment in Japan. This volume of 11 chapters reflects this diversity and presents an intriguing array of perspectives from an equally broad range of experts on issues such as evolving employment systems to the role of Filipino hosts and boxers.

Mr. Matanle finds that tenure among regular workers at Japan's largest companies has not decreased since the bursting of the economic bubble. He attributes this to risk-averse behavior, continued respect for the legitimacy of lifetime employment and workers' attitudes toward work. In addition, he writes that lifetime employment "has the flexibility to adjust to new circumstances," and in his view it will remain an important aspect of Japanese employment culture.

Contributor Franz Waldenberger agrees that changes in employment practices since the 1990s have not been so dramatic, but trends "do raise doubts as to whether the core elements of the Japanese employment system, namely in-house skill formation and career paths, will and should have a future." Low growth, the demographic time bomb and globalization are propelling an incremental retooling of employment practices. In his view, firms are less inclined to invest in developing employee skills, meaning that this burden will increasingly shift to individuals. This, he argues, "implies a redefinition of the social role of the company and of employees who will have to identify themselves not as members of a company, but as owners of marketable skills."

In her essay, Helen McNaughton, analyzes trends in women's employment and the problems they face in balancing careers with raising families, and finds far too much continuity. In her view, government and corporate policies, in addition to unhelpful husbands, channel women into nonstandard work where pay, benefits and security are lower. The peripheralization of female workers and the de facto emergence of "a distinctive and separate female employment system" represent a squandering of human resources, a thwarting of ambitions, and gender discrimination.

Earlier this year, Japan's health minister, Hakuo Yanagisawa, stirred controversy with his reference to women as "child-bearing machines" and request to increase their output. Ms. McNaughton recalls that policy makers and politicians have a history of "foot in mouth disease," preferring to blame women for the nation's low birth rate rather than creating conditions that help women balance work and family life. While Japan's patriarchal dinosaurs want women to stay at home and have babies, it is worth noting that countries like France have both a relatively high birth rate and a large proportion of full-time female employment.

Is there is an inexorable convergence on the Anglo-American system? Leo McCann, John Hassard and Jonathan Morris examine the tensions between Japan's "welfare capitalism" and "stock market capitalism," concluding that "contemporary pressures are certainly tilting Japan more towards Americanized systems of employment, organization and governance." In Shifting Boundaries of the Firm, Ms. Sako agrees to some extent, but sees a convergence with Japanese characteristics.

One of the most dramatic changes in Japanese employment over the past 15 years is the sharp increase in the numbers of nonstandard workers, to more than 30% of the workforce now from 10% in the early 1990s. Tenure levels of core workers in big companies may be unchanged, but for the growing legions of part-time, dispatched or temporary workers, jobs are less secure and pay less.

Yuki Honda's analysis of "freeters" adds a welcome contribution to this discussion about continuity and change in employment systems, one that resonates with popular discourse and concerns. Freeters are atypical workers who take on a succession of part-time jobs. She observes that for all the media hype about their nonconformist lifestyles, their current prospects "are grim with little possibility of achieving either economic or social independence."

She discusses the various push and pull factors that led to the dramatic expansion of atypical employment in Japan during the 1990s. There is a large middle-aged baby-boom cohort that has been freezing young workers out of regular jobs since the slump of the 1990s, and this group won't retire until 2015. In addition, the increase in women's labor-force participation and the expansion of post-secondary education have increased the pool of applicants for full-time, "good" jobs, while the shift in the economy to services has increased demand for irregular workers. The demand for university graduates has remained steady–about 300,000 a year–but the supply has soared, as 45% of high-school graduates continue their education as of 2001, up from 31% in 1990. Desperate universities are lowering standards to stay in business, but she says that their curriculum and career advising leave much to be desired.

It is interesting that atypical workers are more likely to be women and from poor backgrounds, meaning that the expansion of this employment reinforces existing disparities. Some pundits have romanticized freeters as conscientious objectors to stifling corporate life, while others condemn them for lacking proper discipline and attitudes, but here they emerge as an underclass with few options.

In sum, these two books probe the continuities and changes affecting the Japanese labor system and together provide a comprehensive understanding of employment policies, perspectives and evolving paradigms since the early 1990s.

Mr. Kingston is director of Asian studies at Temple University, Japan campus.

China's Psychiatric Inquisition: Dissent, Psychiatry and the Law in Post-1949 China
by Robin Munro
Wildy, Simmonds and Hill Publishing, 390 pages, 65

Reviewed by Benjamin Robertson

A leading human-rights researcher and prolific author on the issue of China and forensic psychiatry, Robin Munro presents harrowing evidence to show how China continues to use (read misuse) psychiatric institutions to detain political nonconformists on a scale surpassing even the former Soviet Union. Though long suspected, the alleged size of the detentions is both astonishing and haunting, particularly when considering China's efforts to become a respected global power.

Mr. Munro estimates thousands of otherwise normal people have been sent to mental hospitals since the 1980s, where they have been subjected to widespread abuse and torture. Include data from Falun Gong support groups, and the number is even higher. Mr. Munro writes that this is a departure from traditional assumptions about the system, explaining that a lack of written evidence means "the general assumption has therefore been that the Chinese authorities ... have at least never engaged in psychiatry as a means of dealing with dissident thought and activity."

Using press clippings and first hand interviews, Chinese psychiatric training manuals and professional journals, as well as classified internal documents, Mr. Munro demonstrates how in recent decades the main center of this shocking practice has been the system of ankang institutions, their name meaning "peace" and "health." The ankang mental hospitals fall under the control of the Public Security Bureau, and in a true Orwellian twist on titles, many patients find neither peace nor health. Mr. Munro believes that during the 1980s as many as 10% of ankang inmates were political or religious activists.

In recent years (excluding not-always-reliable Falun Gong figures) this has dropped to about 2% to 3%. Mr. Munro offered several reasons for this, including a less politically active Chinese population after 1989, greater use of conventional jails for political offenders and greater disdain for misuse of psychiatry profession from within psychiatric community.

Confinement to an ankang is entirely at the whim of security forces, and incarceration is indefinite as administrators operate independently from both courts and other government agencies. "Not only does the judiciary play no role in this process even during the stage prior to the detainee's removal from the formal criminal justice system, but also there appears to be a significant degree of confusion within the system as to whether criminal psychiatric custody measures should properly be seen as a form of pre-emptive or preventative administrative custody," writes Mr. Munro.

One example of an ankang inmate is Wang Wanxing, a political activist who was released in 2005 after 10 years and later found by a team of Dutch psychiatrists to be in perfect charge of his faculties. And such treatment is not reserved for hard-core activists. In one of the many detailed case studies Mr. Munro documents, well-connected personalities have abused the ankang system to dispose of opponents. In 2000, primary school teacher Wang Henglei was sent to the Xian Ankang after an unresolved dispute with the school headmaster over housing subsidies prompted Mr. Wang to petition the local government. He was diagnosed with "schizoid personality disorder and paranoid psychosis," though in Mr. Wang's case no proper psychiatric evaluation actually took place. With the assistance of a good lawyer and a sympathetic judge, Mr. Wang won a rare ruling in his favor. However, there was no happy ending. On the eve of the court verdict, the Xian Ankang director announced Mr. Wang had experienced "sudden death" while in police custody.

Alert to cultural and legal minefields in dissecting national standards on insanity and antisocial behavior, Mr. Munro takes as best practice benchmarks the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, to which China is a signatory, as well as the World Psychiatric Association, of which China is a member. These, along with other U.N. conventions, condemn imprisonment on political grounds, and in the case of the WPA, deplore the misuse of psychiatric facilities for political ends.

Even so, he takes care to spell out the historical context of China's mental-health practices. Traditionally treated sympathetically during successive imperial dynasties, "lunatics" were usually entrusted to the responsibility of family members. Attempts began after the fall of the Qing Dynasty to construct a system of Western-style psychiatric hospitals, but most failed due to the upheavals of that era. By 1949 there were no more than 60 qualified psychiatrists left in China.

As in many areas, Chinese doctors came to rely on Soviet advisors for training. By that stage the hugely influential Serbski School of Forensic Psychiatry–which identified political opposition to socialist utopia as a form of mental abnormality–was ascendant. "To those who might start calling for opposition to Communism ... clearly the mental state of such people is not normal," wrote Nikita Khrushchev. It was the kind of the thinking that appealed to China's communists. Terms such as "counterrevolutionary" were already in daily use and soon tens of thousands of Chinese became tainted with the name and the mental instabilities it came to suggest.

In addition to prescribed drugs, patients were often subjected to political indoctrination sessions as part of medical treatment. One patient at the start of the Cultural Revolution, perhaps just desperate to be released, wrote a glowing testimonial to the institute. "How could correcting one's ideology ever make one recover from mental illness? Wouldn't this mean I actually had some kind of ideological sickness? Now that I've gained an understanding of the dialectical relationship between ideology and illness, however, I realize why medicine I used to take had no effect and I've become confident of being able to cure myself."

Unlike other aspects of the country's judicial and law enforcement system, the forensic psychiatric system has never been reformed, just rebranded. It was only after the death of Mao Zedong that the ankang system was formalized, and more recently "counterrevolutionary" offenses have become "crimes of endangering state security."

At times tentative in his conclusions, Mr. Munro is rightly wary of the gaps to his research. Unlike the Soviet archives, official Chinese sources remain closed. Since many of the figures he relies on are therefore piecemeal, when he does try to extrapolate he usually does so conservatively. While the book tidily details China's legal obligations and how international bodies like WPA have tried, and so far failed, to effect reform, there is little insight into the actual running of an ankang. Finding it understandably difficult to access (former) ankang administrators or doctors due to their status as PSB employees, Mr. Munro can only leave us with theories as to why qualified doctors would violate both national laws on treatment of prisoners and their Hippocratic Oath.

The reader is also left wondering, what of the future? Mr. Munro devotes several succinct pages to a national outcry following the news that one man was found "insane" and committed to an ankang hospital after his scheming wife paid a bribe to the head doctor. But there is little on reformers, if they exist, who might be lobbying for change from within China. Even so, despite efforts by WPA and others, including himself, Mr. Munro is right to say, "ultimately, the only place where the requisite pressure for change and reform of this nature can possibly come from is from inside China itself."

Mr. Robertson is a Beijing-based journalist.

Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia
by Adeeb Khalid
University of California Press, 253 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Susan Sypko

Isolated for decades behind the Iron Curtain, the Central Asian states are an enigma to many. As the role of Islam in world politics has grown, government officials and observers around the world continue to lump their understanding of Pakistan and Afghanistan with that of the unknown "stans." This is a grave mistake, with far-reaching consequences. Adeeb Khalid's new book, Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia, is a welcome rebuttal to ongoing misunderstanding of the region. In this overview of the history and current role of Islam in Central Asia, Mr. Khalid's theme is that there is no necessary relationship between Islam and politics in Central Asia.

While Afghan mujahideen battled the Soviets in the 1980s, Western observers predicted, and hoped, that Soviet Central Asia would become the next hotbed of Islamic insurgency, precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cold War-era scholars defined two realms of Islam in Central Asia. "Official Islam" included those mosques and imams associated with the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, an organization set up by the Soviets to regulate Islam in the country. All other activity, termed "parallel Islam," was considered a threat to the political establishment.

The assumptions, however, that Islam can be divided into two faces, and that the "unofficial" face is necessarily politically subversive, have not been validated–the Islamic bomb never exploded in Central Asia. Nonetheless, the legacy of this scholarship has outlived the Soviet era, and the lackluster quality of scholarship on Central Asia has been tolerated until only recently. Mr. Khalid challenges not only the Soviet legacy of scholarship on Islam, but also the simplistic Western understanding of Islam in Central Asia.

After Arab armies brought Islam to the region in the eighth century, Islam was increasingly indigenized as it gradually spread throughout Central Asia, so that local identities were viewed through an Islamic lens. To be a Muslim in Central Asia did not require the recitation of prayer or the memorization of passages from the Quran. "Rather, communities asserted their Muslim identities through elaborate myths of origin that assimilated elements of the Islamic ethical tradition with local norms and vice versa," writes Mr. Khalid. The Russian conquest of Central Asia caused many changes, though Mr. Khalid is reluctant to describe them as simply "Russification" or "resistance." In general, Mr. Khalid claims that Russian colonialism brought Central Asia into the modern world.

As elsewhere, the prospect of modernity provoked debate among Central Asia's Muslims, most notably giving rise to the jadid (new method) cultural reform movement. Its proponents sought to redefine Central Asian culture through reform of the traditional maktab and the introduction of modern education. Mr. Khalid finally describes the rise of the Soviet government and its "assault" on Islam, i.e., the persecution of ulama, the destruction of mosques and madrassas, and the unveiling of women. According to the author, Soviet policies resulted in two important developments: Islam became localized and synonymous with cultural heritage, and the public realm was significantly de-Islamized. In other words, historical events in Central Asia made the form of Islam there quite different from that of Afghanistan or Iran, for example.

How this has affected the relationship between Islam and politics in present-day Central Asia is Mr. Khalid's next focus. As national identity became salient during the Soviet period, the leaders of the Soviet Central Asian republics came to embody the nation, since they protected their people against the central government in Moscow. When this elite was left standing in newly independent states after the Soviet collapse, they continued their so-called guardianship of the nation. Because Islam had come to be viewed as part of each republic's national heritage, the new states' nation-building projects embraced Islam, including the construction of new mosques and Islamic institutions of learning, as well as the use of Islamic rhetoric and symbols.

Islam's return to the public arena, however, did not reverse the developments of the Soviet period. Islam remains in the background of public discourse. Even if Central Asians want otherwise, political elites do not allow Islam to supersede nationalism or to challenge their legitimacy, and in no way is Islam allowed to participate in politics. Three known Islamic groups in the region, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and the transnational Hizb-ut-Tahrir Islamic political party, all remain either in opposition or underground. In fact, the current regimes have used the argument of Islamic terrorism, which is especially convincing to Westerners after Sept. 11, to persecute Islamic groups and the outwardly pious. Yet, Mr. Khalid emphasizes that it is a fallacy to equate Islamic rhetoric with Islamic militancy. These Islamic groups do not have a large following. Many Central Asians, like their leaders, are wary of calls to give Islam a greater role in politics.

The U.S. has tended to support the current Central Asian regimes in their persecution of Islamic groups, albeit for its own practical reasons of maintaining the status quo in Central Asia or waging its war on terror. For example, in 2000 the U.S. officially listed the IMU as a terrorist organization, and Uzbekistan was later an important partner in the war in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, allowing the U.S. military to lease its Karshi-Khanabad airbase. Nor have U.S. officials seriously criticized the IRPT's lack of political access in Tajikistan, even though granting the IRPT the right to participate in politics was one of the stipulations of the peace agreement which ended the Tajik Civil War in the late 1990s. The deterioration in U.S.-Uzbekistan relations after the tragic events in Andijan, Uzbekistan, in 2005, may suggest that the U.S. will not thoughtlessly support the rhetoric of Uzbekistan's officials, though one wonders whether U.S. criticism of Uzbekistan would have been muted had it still needed the Karshi-Khanabad airbase at that time.

Mr. Khalid's contribution to current scholarship lies particularly in his nuanced retelling of the story of Islam and politics in Central Asia. He draws attention to the ahistorical and primitive view that some people have of Central Asia. For example, in the beginning of the 1990s, many treated Central Asia as if it had just emerged from the 1920s, ignoring the impact of the Soviet period. Others attributed political and social behavior to "clans," which he calls an unfortunate essentialist term. Second, Mr. Khalid faults scholars' simplistic portrayal of the attitude of Central Asian Muslims to their Russian and Soviet masters. In reality, those who worked for "official" Islam and cooperated with the government maintained authority within their communities, while those who moved outside the official realm did not necessarily oppose the government. In fact, few complaints or uprisings were couched in Islamic terms.

Likewise, Mr. Khalid criticizes the essentialist views people both within and outside the region hold of Islam, referring to it as either bad or good, official or parallel, normative or local, moderate or extremist, true or untrue. Instead, the author emphasizes that Islam has many faces and is internally diverse. Islam can be heterogeneous even within one country. Most importantly, the assumption that Islam is always tied to politics is untrue, and Mr. Khalid provides examples of religious and political authority held by different entities. These subtleties are important to analysis of Islam everywhere.  

As with any scholarly work, however, Mr. Khalid's account of Islam after communism raises some questions for further consideration. What is it about Central Asia that enables religion and politics to remain so separate? Is the independent variable here really the communist legacy? If so, how does the relationship between Islam and politics in China compare? China is only mentioned once by Mr. Khalid, and he dismisses its persecution of Muslims there as "shorter than the six decades of Soviet history." One cannot ignore, however, the prominence of the issue of Islam in Chinese politics today, as the recent ban by the Chinese central government of pigs in television advertisements shows. Does the history of Islam in Central Asia or its development after communism provide any lessons?

On the other hand, should the independent variable be the Soviets? If so, one wonders why Mr. Khalid did not expand his account to include the Muslim minorities of the Russian Federation and other former Soviet republics–in particular, Azerbaijan, the only other former Soviet republic which is predominantly Muslim. In connection with this point, one cannot help but notice the overwhelming presence of Uzbekistan throughout the entire book in Mr. Khalid's examples. Because the people of the present-day territories of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan were largely nomadic before the arrival of the Russians and Soviets, focusing on debates that occurred within the sedentary population of present-day Uzbekistan may not accurately represent the discourse that occurred in other Central Asian communities.

Overall, Mr. Khalid's book represents the hopeful beginning of insightful scholarship on the relationship between Islam and politics in Central Asia. At a time when world attention is focused on the region, it is a must-read for scholars, students and politicians. As the author mentions in the conclusion, there are many sources of instability in Central Asia, foremost being the succession of Central Asia's aging presidents. While there have been no signs of conflict following the recent death of Turkmenistan's president, Saparmurat Niyazov, in December 2006, it will be interesting to see whether or not "accusations of religious extremism" play a role in the future. One can be certain, however, that Central Asian Islam will keep eluding simplistic explanations of the relationship between religion and politics, as Muslims in Central Asia continue to renegotiate their identities and attitudes towards the past and present.

Ms. Sypko is a research assistant for the Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus, which is sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created its Own Lost Generation
by Michael Zielenziger
Doubleday, 340 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Roger Buckley

Japan's "lost decade" may be officially over, but the nation is still in the doldrums. Despite insistence from the coalition government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, few citizens believe that the good times are really here again. One manifestation of this is the persistence of, perhaps even the growth of, the hikikomori disorder. These are youths who isolate themselves from society, living at home and often refusing contact with even their parents–literally "pulling in and retiring."

Shutting Out the Sun is a pioneering attempt to confront this recent and disturbing phenomenon, which has become more pronounced since the early 1990s. Mr. Zielenziger digs deep, and finds that the nation has been reluctant to confront what may well be symptoms of a major incidence of social dislocation. Yet his subject remains fuzzy, since there is little agreement on how to define the disorder or how it might best be treated.

Mr. Zielenziger's highly ambitious text offers a detailed examination of the state of the nation today, employing interviews with psychiatrists, bureaucrats and intellectuals. Their collective uncertainties on Japan's faltering performance since the collapse of the "bubble" economy and the end of the Cold War are linked in his view to what he terms the "plague" of hikikomori. The fact that young Japanese–estimates range from a few thousand up to one million–retreat into the inner sanctuary of their homes and stay there for months or years serves as an icon of the larger social trauma the country is undergoing.

The author, who watched Japan implode during his time as Tokyo bureau chief for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, aims "to unravel the unusual social, cultural and psychological constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation and prevented change from bubbling up from within." To tackle this requires much cooperation from insiders, and probably the best sections rely heavily on the responses Mr. Zielenziger skillfully draws from his many interviewees.

When discussing hikikomori though, few of his interlocutors seem willing to confront the issues. His material suggests that many within Japan either ignore the young recluses, or mutter that they represent a weak generation spoon-fed on affluence and incapable of handling the tensions associated with education and employment. In a society where endurance and determination are highly prized, those who are reluctant to display backbone get little sympathy.

Mr. Zielenziger's own sympathies are clearly with the hikikomori, who absent themselves from school and work by locking themselves away inside their parents' homes. He writes that as an outside observer, "when it comes to the nature and pathologies of many of the syndromes I will try to disentangle, there is a great deal we don't know–a testimony to the relatively shabby state of social science and psychological research within modern Japan as well as to the low status afforded to such inquiry."

Despite such barriers, Mr. Zielenziger works diligently to learn more about the fate of individual hikikomori by persuading some of them and their parents to talk of their difficulties. He meets, for example, Kenji (a hikikomori to whom the book is dedicated) and tries to understand and help him in his situation. Yet at the end of the book, Kenji, who has lived for over 20 years inside his mother's apartment with very rare excursions into the wider world, is still isolated and marooned at home. Attempts to arrange a possible course of therapy with a Japanese counselor who specializes in treating hikikomori fail, as Kenji's intense anxieties, traced back to bullying in elementary school, make further journeys impossible.

The future for some hikikomori may be improving, though. More sympathetic attention is being paid to the problem today, partly because of increased media interest. One of Japan's leading newspapers, the Yomiuri Shimbun, has devoted more coverage to the phenomenon recently. Web groups for hikikomori are receiving more notice and mainstream newspapers have started to publish interviews with reclusives who say that for months their only conversations have been with their mothers. Foreign media from the BBC to the New York Times have also been covering the phenomenon, and bestselling Japanese novelist Ryu Murakami has seen the issue as a reflection of current uncertainties within Japanese society. In his view the nation has lacked a general sense of direction ever since it achieved its postwar economic goal of "catching up" with the West.

This positive trend still leaves open the question of how best to treat such individuals. Those involved are often reluctant to seek help for their disorders and their parents may be equally unwilling to encourage visits to clinics, hospitals or any of the groups that have been formed to assist hikikomori in re-entering school, college or the workplace. Unfortunately, the longer the hikikomori remain in near-total isolation, the greater the difficulties of achieving successful reintegration into society. It is also claimed that mothers have been overprotective of these children, with some critics suggesting that mothers may almost approve of seclusion of their sons and daughters as "a form of retaliation" against their workaholic husbands.

It may be no coincidence that the hikikomori phenomenon emerged in the 1990s as Japan's economy turned sour and the pressures on youth to live up to their parents' expectations became increasingly difficult to fulfill. Graduates discovered that secure employment with decent corporations was hard to find, despite the fact that undergraduates hunt like mad to land jobs as soon as they begin their junior year in college. Once individuals recognize that work is unlikely to be absorbing or fulfilling, their tendency to look inward probably grows, aided by middle-class parents who end up financing their sons and (more rarely) daughters as they retreat into seclusion. Fear of street gossip and the twitching curtain only reinforces such isolation and makes any return to normality fraught with difficulties.

Mr. Zielenziger's study on hikikomori is certain to gain deserved attention. His attempts to demonstrate a close match between the isolation of Japanese youth and the nation's problems of groupism and globalization are necessarily only speculative, however. His material throughout the book builds up to a grand thesis: There is a national wish "to shut out the sunshine of pluralism, as the Japanese 'system,' an overpowering and idiosyncratic mechanism of social control, proves ruthlessly efficient at insulating its people from those pernicious influences that seem to invade from beyond the oceans." But proving this may be mission impossible.

Mr. Buckley is author of The United States in the Asia-Pacific since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and teaches at Temple University, Japan campus in Tokyo.

Imagined Enemies: China Prepares for Uncertain War
by John Lewis and Xue Litai
Stanford University Press, 377 pages, $60

Reviewed by Larry M. Wortzel

The title of this book is something of a mystery, since the PLA is quite clear about where its potential enemies lie. PLA authors see the United States as the only country with the military potential to coerce China, and Japan as a rising military power allied with the U.S. Yet the thesis of this otherwise excellent book is that the Chinese nation is "haunted by imagined enemies nearby and across the Pacific." Therefore, the People's Liberation Army "reluctantly prepares for uncertain war."

Ten years of research produced a work that is chock-full of interesting historical anecdotes and new information about strategic missile forces and the political control of China's military. The result is a very readable, rich examination of the evolution of the PLA from a force that concentrated on "people's war" and the defense of the motherland to a military that can project and coordinate force beyond the immediate waters and airspace of China and Taiwan. The PLA described here is launching satellites to support integrated military operations involving all its arms and services. The General Staff Operations Department and its command centers use sophisticated communications systems to link with the regional military commands and war fronts.

Mr. Lewis received his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1962, and since 1968 he has been a professor of Chinese politics at Stanford University. Mr. Xue has been a research associate at Mr. Lewis's Stanford-based Center for International Security and Arms cooperation since 1984. There is not much public information available about his background, education, or ties to China and its military. This is relevant because in the last two decades these two have been the sole American-based authors with excellent access to internal Chinese military publications and senior military leaders. Indeed, Mr. Lewis was once a part of a collaborative effort to form a joint-venture partnership with PLA General Ding Henggao that involved China's Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. The result of this collaboration was the creation of Guangzhou Huawei Communications Company, which established China's first broadband network in Guangzhou in 1995.

The authors make the story interesting for readers who carefully follow domestics politics in China by telling about the internal factional disputes that make life exasperating in that communist state. Still, some of the statements by Messrs. Lewis and Xue read more like statements from the PLA General Political Department. For instance, they tell us that "Taiwan's moves toward statehood pose the most dangerous long-term threat to China's ambitions."

However, the authors provide no full explanation of the PLA's (or China's) long-term military and security ambitions. Is the Chinese Communist Party solely interested in achieving territorial integrity?  If territorial integrity is so important, why was it that Beijing could give up its claims to Mongolia? What about interests beyond Taiwan, such as the ability to secure sea lines of communication?  Will China seek to build a military capable of projecting power to secure interests in Africa?  What of the South China Sea and China's claims there?  The authors seem to be wearing blinders when it comes to China's security ambitions beyond Taiwan. 

The treatment of the Second Artillery Force, the PLA Air Force, and the PLA Navy in the book benefits from the authors' examination of three new, authoritative doctrinal texts from the PLA Academy of Military Science. The first of these, Zhanlue Xue, has been republished in English as The Science of Military Strategy. The second book, Zhanyi Xue (On Military Campaigns), is actually a text published solely for the PLA's internal use and not officially available outside the Communist Party or the Chinese military, but copies have made their way around to some foreigners. If Zhanyi Xue is the "doctrine of the faith" on how to fight campaign-level operations, the third book, Zhanyi Lilun Xuexi Zhinan (A Study Guide to Operational Theory), is the catechism. It is the book of instruction for PLA officers on how to read and interpret campaign doctrine.

Herein lies an interesting point. At one time, two decades ago, Mr. Lewis may have been the only Western security author who could get access to internal PLA writings. Perhaps Mr. Xue, or his now imprisoned compatriot, Hua Di, facilitated that access. Today, however, the barrier to foreign access set up by the Party and the PLA is a lot more permeable.

For instance, David Finklestein and James Mulvenon, of the Center for Naval Analyses and the Rand Corporation, respectively, in the U.S., have published superb analyses of these books and related documents. Evan Medeiros, of Rand, has exploited these documents for revelations about China's nuclear doctrine, as has this reviewer on nuclear and command and control matters. Thus, Messrs. Lewis and Xue are no longer unique. Nevertheless, they remain a much better read than the dense and technical studies of other specialists.

The discussion in chapter four of the national command authority of China is good, but incomplete. The authors describe the "central command authority" as the "Party center" (zhongyang) and tell us that leadership is exercised through the Politburo Standing Committee, the Central Secretariat, and the Central Military Commission. However, the book does not address why there was a heated debate in the PLA over whether the military could respond to "two centers" during the period when Jiang Zemin was chairman of the Central Military Commission and Hu Jintao was CCP general secretary. Does this mean that the "real" center, the "supreme command" (tongshuaibu), lies in the individual who jointly occupies these two positions?

Imagined Enemies is also noteworthy for what it missing. Today, all Chinese navy destroyers have secure data-transmission links that will allow for active data transfer among other ships, aircraft, helicopters, and–through satellite links or airborne warning and control systems (AWACS)–shore-based command centers. This is a huge advance in command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities. Yet the concept, and even the terms or acronym, are absent from the book.

The PLA is on the cusp of a revolution in military affairs that will change the way it can fight and project force. The authors make no mention of the qudian system, a national command and control (or C4ISR) network that links all arms and services, major headquarters, regional command centers, and the Second Artillery Corps. This system has been mentioned in major defense publications from the United Kingdom, in the Washington Times, in the U.S., and in defense journals in India. It uses radio, data transmission systems, satellite communications and relay, fiber-optic communications, and microwave systems. Once China is able to launch a full tracking and data-relay satellite system, it will give China real-time high-resolution surveillance capabilities and persistent regional cooperative target engagement.

Finally, the authors do not discuss how quickly the PLA has neared one of its decade-old goals–the ability to engage a deployed U.S. aircraft carrier battle group with ballistic missiles. With its airborne warning and control systems (AWACS), once a data relay satellite is launched over the Pacific China will be near to achieving a naval anti-access capability the PLA has sought since it was embarrassed by the arrival of two aircraft carriers off Taiwan in 1996.

Col. Wortzel, a retired U.S. Army military intelligence officer, served two tours of duty as a military attache at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and has written or edited eight books on the Chinese army.

I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China
by Zhu Wen
Translated by Julia Lovell
Columbia University Press, 256 pages, $24.50

Reviewed by Jonathan Mirsky

Julia Lovell's introduction is unquestionably the highlight of this book. A fellow of Queens' College Cambridge, she is the author of a recent book about the symbolism of the Great Wall (The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC – AD 2000, Grove Press, 2006). Her big point is that China is now a materialistic, vulgar, grasping place in which anything can be written about except politics. Indeed. Urban China, Ms. Lovell says, is a "seamy, cynical" place, and Mr. Zhu provides "an unremittingly negative vision of China today and, by logical extension, of the political architects of this society."

How did this come about? Ms. Lovell explains that for some years after the Maoist repression of intellectuals, writers turned to the function and place of literature and its relationship with "its Western counterpart." After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 that enquiring period gave way to reinstituted political orthodoxy. But in 1992, Deng Xiaoping gave the signal that anything went in the pursuit of wealth–except of course political heterodoxy. A series of notorious writers led the way, Ms. Lovell writes, in "showing their fellow authors how to squeeze maximum profit out of their words." Mr. Zhu soon became well known for certain characteristics shared by other bestsellers: They focus on the patterns, cadences and banalities of everyday life. And sex. We are shown, Ms. Lovell acutely observes, a "country where the social contract–if it ever existed–is now in tatters, whose inhabitants, both materially and emotionally, are living on the edge. Only money and plenty of it- buys any kind of solicitude or compassion." I noticed few, if any, instances of these emotions in the stories.

I haven't seen Zhu Wen's stories in Chinese but Ms. Lovell's translation feels fluent. Without being annoying, she usually catches what she says is Mr. Zhu's trendy vernacular. There are only a few awkward moments, like "gotcha," for "I get it" and some strange explanations about how the Chinese language works.

I had hardly heard of Mr. Zhu, born in 1967, whose stories strike me as formless, pointless and bloodless. They lack that all-important ingredient of a short story: a story. Rambling through scenes and nonevents, their characters are without identifiable personality or definition. Paragraphs snake down the page, with few breaks and no developments.

The plots, such as they are, are quickly told. In "I Love Dollars," for example, an unpleasant, opportunistic, value-free young man, sexually predatory and feckless, takes his father on a tour of some sordid neighborhoods. The purpose of this bonding, not to put too fine a point on it, is to get the older man laid. In "The Hospital Night" another featureless young man finds himself in a hospital ward looking after his girlfriend's father. Here too the atmosphere is sordid, chaotic and pointless. There is a lot about urination that I suspect is supposed to be comic. "A Boat Crossing" relates an unpleasant riverboat journey from one murkily described place to another, the voyage itself peopled by characters straight from a third-rate Grande Guignol show. "Wheels" centers on a man and his old bicycle and some gangsters in a repulsive urban landscape.

There is a big problem here, one faced by all writers: How, for instance, to portray boring characters without being boring? Chekhov achieved this. Repulsive ones who are not simply awful? Dostoyevsky is your man. Selfish ones who arouse sympathy? Jane Austen. But where Mr. Zhu's stories are naughty–he describes heavy groping in a cinema house–I, at least, felt only like moving away a few seats. Nothing here is authentically frank or taboo-busting. It's seemingly daring, without daring anything. I've read quantities of such books from China during the last five or six years. Did the rot begin in 1999 with Zhou Weihui's Shanghai Baby, which became notorious when the authorities banned it for its sexiness?

The saddest words in Ms. Lovell's all-too-enlightening introduction are these: Mr. Zhu, she contends, is a "representative writer for his own and for succeeding literary generations." Please, no. Here's something sadder still, or should I say more revealing: According to Ms. Lovell, Mr. Zhu, "is that rare creature among writers: a novelist who doesn't keep copies of his own books." I am about to do that rare thing for me: After scanning Ms. Lovell's introduction into my computer, I, too, won't keep this book.

Mr. Mirsky is the former East Asia editor of the Times of London.

The Search for a Vanishing Beijing
by M.A. Aldrich
Hong Kong University Press, 408 pages, $49.50

Reviewed by Rebecca Kanthor

In the rush to prepare for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing is undergoing a massive face-lift. The hole-in-the-wall restaurant you visit today may fall under the sledgehammer tomorrow, and the next time you visit a skyscraper will have gone up in its place. While there are good arguments for some of this development, it cannot be denied that the "New Beijing, New Olympics" heralded by street signs comes at the expense of the old. The city's charming hutongs, for example, with their winding alleyways and courtyards, have been designated as a World Heritage site, and yet they are rapidly giving way to a generic Western-inspired architectural aesthetic, saddening locals and visitors alike.

Lewis C. Arlington and William Lewisohn must have felt the same way in the 1930s when they wrote In Search of Old Peking (Henri Vetch, 1935), a homage to their adopted home, which they saw falling into neglect after the decline of the Qing Dynasty and the relocation of the national capital to Nanjing. Their book was meant to honor the many places they felt sure would soon disappear from the maps. Today, the book they wrote has become almost as obscure as the alleyways they wrote of long ago.

But it served as inspiration for one American attorney who came across a reprint of Arlington and Lewisohn's travel guide in a hotel bookshop. M.A. Aldrich, who moved to Beijing in 1993, followed in their footsteps to find out what over 70 years of upheaval, reform and neglect has left of the city formerly known as Peking. The result is The Search for a Vanishing Beijing.

Whenever I travel, I always wish for a friend who can walk me around the city, show me the sites not on any tourist map and tell me exploits of days gone by. The Search for a Vanishing Beijing is just that. Mr. Aldrich takes us by the hand and leads us through what he on the first page insists should still be called Peking–in his view this name is more romantic and evocative of the city's imperial past. And what a journey it is. Following his lead, we peer through gates, explore alleyways, backtrack numerous times, muse at the former sites of temples and shops that no longer exist, stop for a bite to eat, chat with elderly local residents, and attempt to talk our way past guards whose job it is to keep us out of the sites they watch over. With book in hand, I find a local Beijing opera house, a Uighur community and a courtyard home once rented by then library assistant Mao Zedong.

Mr. Aldrich opts to forego a scientific approach to introducing Beijing's past and present, and instead leads us on a meandering tour of the city. From the start, he is clear about his method: "I have simply gathered miscellaneous stories recorded over the centuries and set them alongside their original stage sets," he writes. 

Several chapters divide the old city and its outskirts into 18 walking or biking tours, while others introduce Chinese culture to the uninitiated. The book's final chapters cover food, drink and Peking Opera, and Mr. Aldrich recommends his favorite restaurants and haunts, while providing the background knowledge needed to properly appreciate them. Even speakers of Mandarin will enjoy his notes on pronunciation, which in most travel guides barely merit a yawn, but under Mr. Aldrich's care score a few laughs.

The stories are what make the book a compelling read, regardless of whether or not you actually make it to the sites he is describing. Some are fact, some are myth and many span the grey divide between the two. He has collected them from all manner of sources, including folklore, historical writings by foreigners living in Beijing, personal experiences and those of his friends. We are obliged to follow Mr. Aldrich's wandering train of thought and the tour often pauses for asides on such odd manner of topics as the etymology of the Chinese word for watermelon, the history of elephants in the city and a serial-killer-cum-restaurateur.

Mr. Aldrich is also quite knowledgeable about his expat forbearers, and the book provides a glimpse of what living in Beijing must have been like for the foreigners from the turn of the century up until the 1940s. One of the most revealing quotes is from Danish journalist Karl Eskelund, who lived in Beijing in the 1930s and was known for once punching Chiang Kai-shek's son in the nose:

I fell in love with the city from the first glimpse of the gray Tartar wall. I still love Peking better than any other place in the world. Nowhere else has the romantic past been blended so charmingly with the practical present. Peking has no tooting motorcars, no smoky factories, no ugly modern concrete buildings. The temples, the mysterious Forbidden City, the cozy dwelling houses with their intricate courtyards and gracefully slanting roofs, all stand today as they did when Peking was capital of the Middle Kingdom.

When Mr. Aldrich read Eskelund's words out loud late last year at a talk for members of Friends of Old Beijing, a local conservation-advocacy group, they were met with laughter. Could this be the same city? What do Beijingers today complain about more than the awful traffic, the pollution and the endless construction?

In one of his many personal anecdotes, Mr. Aldrich recounts his first and last visit to a shrine dedicated to Yu Qian, a military official and popular hero of the Ming Dynasty. The scene is common in the many Beijing neighborhoods earmarked for redevelopment: "The surrounding streets of courtyard houses were barren and abandoned, as if its residents had just fled an imminent invasion." People were moving out and movers were loading trucks with belongings. Mr. Aldrich and the residents talked about Yu Qian and bemoaned the fate of their former homes, decimated to make room for yet another high-rise. "Peking will have nothing distinctively Chinese about it anymore," he recalls one man saying. Mr. Aldrich goes on to mourn not only the loss of the residents' homes, but also their diminishing sense of community.

Mr. Aldrich could have filled his guide with discouraging stories such as these, but he chooses instead to keep the tone lighter. His subtle protests are for the most part found hidden among irreverent remarks that he can't help but toss in.

When Arlington and Lewisohn wrote their guide in the 1930s, they expected that much of what they wrote about would survive only on the printed page. Mr. Aldrich's choice of title echoes their sadness, and yet the book itself does not take on a tone of resignation and hopelessness, though the author professes to feeling as such. Rather, Mr. Aldrich manages to impart a sense of adventure and discovery to the reader even when describing spaces that are now either empty and abandoned, or overcrowded tourist traps. In the places he takes us to, history still hangs on by a thread, sometimes only in the form of an obscure street name or the memories of an old-timer. 

And like the recently reprinted In Search of Old Peking that first inspired Mr. Aldrich, the publishing of his book suggests that interest in Beijing's history could experience a revival. The volunteers of Friends of Old Beijing, for example, hope that by visiting and showing interest in hutongs, they can help local residents and government to realize the value of preservation–if not historically, then at least economically.

Ms. Kanthor is a free-lance writer in Beijing.