Posted at 2014.01.02 Category : 未分類
David Pillingさんの新刊についての書評が英国メディアのガーディアンやインデペンデントで出ていました。どちらもeccentricitiesとかenigmatic and mysterious countryとして書き出しています。英国の一般の人の感覚はそのようなものかもしれません。
Book review: Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival
David Pilling presents an eye-opening portrait of Japan’s peculiar charms
By John Kampfner / The Guardian
Is Japan the most culturally specific country on Earth? Each time I go there I marvel at the eccentricities: the taxi and bus drivers with their gloves, the ritual of the onsen bath house and the incessant bowing. Nowhere else induces in me such feelings of amused amazement.
Bending Adversity, By David Pilling - Review
DOUG JOHNSTONE Sunday 29 December 2013
From the outside, Japan can seem like an enigmatic and mysterious country. Historically closed off to foreign influence until relatively recently, the island nation can seem to Western eyes to be almost incomprehensible in its outlook – culturally, politically and even economically.
This fascinating and well-researched book seeks to shed some light on that culture. Subtitled “Japan and the Art of Survival”, Bending Adversity takes as its starting point the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, and looks in detail at how the Japanese coped, or otherwise, in the aftermath of that terrible natural disaster.
エコノミストの東京支局として働いていたビルエモットさんも特殊な国として書き出しています。
BENDING ADVERSITY: Japan and the Art of Survival. By David Pilling. Allen Lane
Literary Review - December
Working in Japan as a foreign correspondent, as your reviewer did three decades ago for The Economist and as David Pilling did brilliantly for the Financial Times from 2002-08, can be a frustrating business. You quickly realize that the big news about Japan is that there’s no news there. Or, more strictly, that Japan is a culture of processes, of evolutions, not of big events or flashy announcements or dramas. Which actually makes it more fascinating, but produces another phenomenon, born also out of frustration: a yearning, especially among foreign observers but also many Japanese, for a big exception to this rule, for a crisis that might suddenly accelerate these processes and produce a transformation.
とは言ってもエモットさんの場合は、著名な日本論を書いただけあって、なかなか考えさせられる指摘をしています。
Now, in fact, the crisis-theory is mutating, showing the constant lure of wishful thinking, into one in which the Tokyo Olympic Games of 2020 provides a new organizational focus for the mooted transformation, channelling a nation’s energies as did, in myth at least, the last Tokyo games of 1964. Japan even has a name and a neologism with which to identify and to force along this change, in the form of “Abenomics”, led by the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who returned to power a year ago for a second go at the job, six years after his first effort ended in failure and humiliation.
The mission of this book by Pilling, now Asia Editor of the Financial Times in Hong Kong, is, in effect, to rescue Japan from this notion and, indeed, from all such superficial theories. His title indicates that he wants to replace it with a subtler and more realistic idea: that change-through-adversity, whether wartime defeat or natural disasters or indeed financial crashes, is indeed a Japanese characteristic, especially because such adversity has been such a feature of life in that archipelago. But it doesn’t occur in the rapid, wham-bam-thank-you-mam manner of the crisis theories but rather in more gradual ways, ones less easy to discern. It really is a place of processes more than of news.
Most of all, Pilling, like many writers who come to love Japan and to enjoy its many eccentricities, wants to rescue the country from the standard one-dimensional images of the country as some sort of model (pre-1990) or cautionary tale (post-1990), and even more so from the even older idea of an inscrutable, mysterious east. It is a place populated by real people, with real complexities and real struggles, especially struggles about how to turn simple recipes about what should be done into actual practice.
（中略）
Such a culture is not one prone to messianic visions or sudden bursts of leadership or inspiration. The one period when Japan did turn a tad messianic, seeking to emulate European colonialism, the result was calamity. Evolution, altering things step-by-step, is much the safer option—and Japan is above all a country of caution, of trying to reduce uncertainty. So we need to drop fantasies of dramatic change, and most immediately of “Abenomics” or the Olympics as a source of renaissance. And to read this book, to find that Japan is a much more interesting and engaging place, for all its flaws and frustrations, than the drama theorists would have us believe.
アベノミクスだのオリンピックだの急激な変化を求めても幻滅するだけ、ゆっくりとしか日本は変われないからというのはあくまで、エモットさんの意見だとは思いますが。。。
Book review: Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival
David Pilling presents an eye-opening portrait of Japan’s peculiar charms
By John Kampfner / The Guardian
Is Japan the most culturally specific country on Earth? Each time I go there I marvel at the eccentricities: the taxi and bus drivers with their gloves, the ritual of the onsen bath house and the incessant bowing. Nowhere else induces in me such feelings of amused amazement.
Bending Adversity, By David Pilling - Review
DOUG JOHNSTONE Sunday 29 December 2013
From the outside, Japan can seem like an enigmatic and mysterious country. Historically closed off to foreign influence until relatively recently, the island nation can seem to Western eyes to be almost incomprehensible in its outlook – culturally, politically and even economically.
This fascinating and well-researched book seeks to shed some light on that culture. Subtitled “Japan and the Art of Survival”, Bending Adversity takes as its starting point the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, and looks in detail at how the Japanese coped, or otherwise, in the aftermath of that terrible natural disaster.
エコノミストの東京支局として働いていたビルエモットさんも特殊な国として書き出しています。
BENDING ADVERSITY: Japan and the Art of Survival. By David Pilling. Allen Lane
Literary Review - December
Working in Japan as a foreign correspondent, as your reviewer did three decades ago for The Economist and as David Pilling did brilliantly for the Financial Times from 2002-08, can be a frustrating business. You quickly realize that the big news about Japan is that there’s no news there. Or, more strictly, that Japan is a culture of processes, of evolutions, not of big events or flashy announcements or dramas. Which actually makes it more fascinating, but produces another phenomenon, born also out of frustration: a yearning, especially among foreign observers but also many Japanese, for a big exception to this rule, for a crisis that might suddenly accelerate these processes and produce a transformation.
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とは言ってもエモットさんの場合は、著名な日本論を書いただけあって、なかなか考えさせられる指摘をしています。
Now, in fact, the crisis-theory is mutating, showing the constant lure of wishful thinking, into one in which the Tokyo Olympic Games of 2020 provides a new organizational focus for the mooted transformation, channelling a nation’s energies as did, in myth at least, the last Tokyo games of 1964. Japan even has a name and a neologism with which to identify and to force along this change, in the form of “Abenomics”, led by the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who returned to power a year ago for a second go at the job, six years after his first effort ended in failure and humiliation.
The mission of this book by Pilling, now Asia Editor of the Financial Times in Hong Kong, is, in effect, to rescue Japan from this notion and, indeed, from all such superficial theories. His title indicates that he wants to replace it with a subtler and more realistic idea: that change-through-adversity, whether wartime defeat or natural disasters or indeed financial crashes, is indeed a Japanese characteristic, especially because such adversity has been such a feature of life in that archipelago. But it doesn’t occur in the rapid, wham-bam-thank-you-mam manner of the crisis theories but rather in more gradual ways, ones less easy to discern. It really is a place of processes more than of news.
Most of all, Pilling, like many writers who come to love Japan and to enjoy its many eccentricities, wants to rescue the country from the standard one-dimensional images of the country as some sort of model (pre-1990) or cautionary tale (post-1990), and even more so from the even older idea of an inscrutable, mysterious east. It is a place populated by real people, with real complexities and real struggles, especially struggles about how to turn simple recipes about what should be done into actual practice.
（中略）
Such a culture is not one prone to messianic visions or sudden bursts of leadership or inspiration. The one period when Japan did turn a tad messianic, seeking to emulate European colonialism, the result was calamity. Evolution, altering things step-by-step, is much the safer option—and Japan is above all a country of caution, of trying to reduce uncertainty. So we need to drop fantasies of dramatic change, and most immediately of “Abenomics” or the Olympics as a source of renaissance. And to read this book, to find that Japan is a much more interesting and engaging place, for all its flaws and frustrations, than the drama theorists would have us believe.
アベノミクスだのオリンピックだの急激な変化を求めても幻滅するだけ、ゆっくりとしか日本は変われないからというのはあくまで、エモットさんの意見だとは思いますが。。。
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