Book Info: Is Japan Still Number One? By Ezra F. Vogel Pelanduk Pubns Sdn Bhd; ISBN: 9679787281; (November 2001)
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It is said that Sisyphus seemed to achieve what was denied all mortals. For a time, at least, he outsmarted Thanatos, the ruler of death's underworld.

In order to punish the sinner for this and other acts of insolence, the gods finally condemned him in the afterlife to push an enormous rock up a hill with his bare hands. He was supposed to lose his grip on the burden each time he came near his goal, so that his torment would last forever. For this punishment Sisyphus remains in human memory even today.

The twentieth century has invented much tougher, inhuman tortures, but it should reserve honorable mention of the Japan specialist—one of the most frustrated of God's creatures.

Unbeknownst to generations of the bright and sometimes naïve, Japan specialists spoon-fed the world ambitious generalizations, only later to see many of their judgments overtaken by events. It should not come as any surprise that someone, sooner or later, would come close to reinventing the Japanese with some long-lasting, die-hard appeal.

That someone will likely go down in history as the American sociologist Ezra Vogel—whose 1979 book, Japan as Number One, earned him passionate approval from business circles in the United States for his easy-to-read, straightforward assessment of the "Japanese Miracle." When his book came out in Japanese, the reaction was even more pronounced: an all-time-best-seller of non-fiction by a Western author.

At a time when Japan's double-digit growth and omnipresent manufacturing goods were the toast of the town, few Americans felt familiar enough with the outside world to acknowledge (let alone accept) Japanese success. 

"To expect Americans," wrote Vogel, "who are accustomed to thinking of their nation as number one, to acknowledge that in many areas its supremacy has been lost to an Asian nation and to learn from that nation is to ask a good deal."

Emphasis on the traits that were supposedly unique to "Japan" in Vogel's eyes—basic education, low crime levels, an all-wise-all-powerful bureaucracy, even a well functioning democracy—were also areas that made Japan work.

But today that fundamental zeitgeist has shifted. To quote former Japan journalist, Jon Woronoff—"Japan is - anything but - Number One."

Its prolonged recession, seeming inability to effect the reforms necessary to make the economy competitive in today's global business environment, and news headlines ranging from "Police admit their inability to prevent crime" to "Angry youth runs amuck with baseball bat" occupy more headlines than previously imagined.

By the 21st century, Vogel and company told us, those Americans still lucky enough to have jobs would have been relegated to flipping hamburgers and delivering pizzas, while Europe would be nothing more than a play-pen for Japanese jet setters.

What happened?

To be sure, there is no shame in changing one's mind. But even with Japan, the propensity to go with the flow and reinvent its people for foreign consumption seems unsettlingly familiar.

"A number of Japanese readers who remembered that in the preface to the Japanese edition of Japan as Number One, I warned against arrogance, later asked if I thought arrogance had been at the heart of Japan's problems...I do believe that excessive confidence blinded Japanese to the importance of taking steps to deal with [their economic] problems."

Still, Japan's politicians were once praised for being part of "a more effective democracy than America"—able to satisfy the diverse interests of its people. They are now the opposite: lacking the knowledge and vision to make necessary reforms demanded by its citizens.

Whereas Japan's "educational system was well adapted to the needs of manufacturing," Japan now "needs to provide an environment that allows more individualism, initiative, creativity and multicultural contacts and higher levels of skill in English" for the service age.

And what about the bureaucracy? Once thought to be all-wise, all-powerful, they are now the lapdogs of entrenched interests, unable to reform themselves.

To put the point as soberly as possible: "Japan" seems forever damned to be a pastiche of fashionable stereotypes. Finding any long-term, consensus about its people, culture or history is virtually impossible in this day and age.

It may have looked once as if the Japanese would be released from Sisyphus's fate. But scholars have ironically tried their best to push its people back into damnation.

Paul J. Scalise. "Sisyphus, the Japan Specialist." Japantoday.com. January 12, 2001

In his long-awaited sequel—"Is Japan Still Number One?" - published this year, Vogel takes up the issue of Japan's "lost decade" by attributing it as the natural outcome of the very system he once praised.