Is Japan Still Number One?

By Ezra F. Vogel
June 2000
Pelanduk Publications
ISBN: 967-978-728-1
141 pages, 5 1/2" x 8 1/2"
$25.00 Paper Original


This book tells the story of a small-town Midwestern Jewish boy who went to Harvard and became one of America's best known specialists on Asia, especially Japan. Ezra F. Vogel believes that understanding and a proper perspective come from studying the language, developing deep friendships, listening to a cross section of people from various fields, and then reflecting on their significance.

He has been visiting Asia at least once a year since 1958 and therefore had the opportunity to observe Asian countries before they took off, during and after the takeoff. In this series of interviews reviewing developments in Asia, he gives a broad-brushed perspective of Japan filled with insights that could only be gained from long and intimate study. Ezra F. Vogel is the only American academic who is widely known to the leaders of both Japan and China, and who lectures in both Japanese and Chinese.

While professor at Harvard University from 1967 to 2000, he came to know generations of able Asians and helped them train generations of able Americans working on Asia. At Harvard, he was the first head of the Asia Center and had served as director of the US-Japan Relations Program and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. He has done pioneering research on Japan's new middle class and on the province of Quangdong in China. What the United States can learn from Japan has been a growth industry since the publication of his thought-provoking book, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, in 1979.

Asian Studies

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