Perhaps you should go back and reread what you wrote:
>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 take what you wrote to be a claim that the "so-called Japanese miracle" was brought about at "terrible cost... to the Japanese environment and political culture" and at "terrible cost... to Korea's, Vietnam's, and other countries[']" environments and political culture as well. And the net assessment is that you find it "hard to argue that Japanese people are better off than, say, their counterparts in Thailand, Indonesia, or Korea."
If my precis is not what you meant to say, then perhaps you should spend more time trying to write clear prose and less time accusing others of racism.
Brad DeLong