Brad, Let me be charitable here. As someone who lived in Japan for most of my youth - 1952 to 1969, with a few years in between in South Korea - I can assure you I have a pretty good sense of the relative merits of Japan in comparison to other Asian countries. But I find it pretty hard to argue that Japanese people are better off than, say, their counterparts in Thailand, Indonesia or Korea when economic (and in Korea's case, political) development was shaped and distorted by Japanese corporate expansion supported by US Cold War security policy. Japan, with US assistance (including a huge boom from the Korean War) became the most powerful country in Asia. It doesn't take a Berkeley professor to see that Japanese citizens gained as a result. But apparently one Berkeley professor can't understand, no matter how much he reads, that there was a terrible cost to the so-called Japanese miracle, not only to the Japanese environment and political culture, but to Korea's, Vietnam's and other! !
countries as well. That dichotomy, that dialectic (whatever) between the good life in Japan and under- and over-development elsewhere in Asia has led many Japanese into a life of activism, trade unionism and investigative journalism and created deep bonds of solidarity throughout the region that I feel very lucky to be part of. TS
I said Japan was the *closest thing* to Utopia in *Asia* today.
You pretend to disagree, but you don't really. For what is your candidate for a better regime and society today in Asia than Japan? You have none.
Learn to read.
Brad DeLong