business facts are bad enough. Still, some $800 billion worth of bad bank loans, most of them the result of crony capitalism, are no laughing matter. Mass layoffs from the much touted full-employment society are in themselves shocking. (They include, not so long ago, the announcement of 15,000 jobs to be chopped off at NEC -- a ritual in reverse for a large number of new employees.) But the answer to these problems far transcends mere economics. Japan's real crisis is one of governance. Caught in the decades-long ecstasy of rising G.N.P., the Japanese electorate sold its collective soul to a corrupt, faction-ridden political party, backed by a decadent father-knows-best bureaucracy that has yet to grasp the virtues of real free enterprise. No society in the world has a higher threshold of political indignation. Why? Because subservience to the Government is rooted in the ritual. It is not polite to protest, or to argue with those above you. Reid is right about Japan being a Confucian society -- more so, I believe, than any other country in Asia, including China. Unfortunately, the one fatal legacy left behind by the Master is the imperative to respect any lawful authority whatever. (It is no accident that partly Christian Korea and Buddhist Thailand, caught in the throes of even more obvious economic crises, have been able to throw out at least a part of their badly flawed governing structure.) Admittedly, the Master's ritual and his sense of group responsibility tided the Japanese over the difficult postwar half-century, just as they did for centuries past during the troubled times of the old Tokugawa shogunate. But in a world that for better or worse has become globalized, marked by computer-assisted innovation, unsparing competition and virtually automated international money markets, it's about time to send the old boy packing. The core of this book suggests that societal deficiencies in the West (the US in particular) might be amel...
