‘Cartels of the Mind’ part 2

→Japanese

By the way, why is it that I did not notice this book ‘Cartels of the Mind: Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop’ and its Japanese translation until recently?  This concerns me a bit because I have been repeatedly pointing this (closed system of Japan) out to public in my writings, lecturings, and in this blog postings for quite a long time.

Number of people working for universities expressed support for my opinion or at least showed concerns about the problem I have pointed out, but of course I assume that there were also many of those who thought that I was a ‘big mouth’ that annoy them.  I know that quite a number of officials at the MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) were also aware of my discussion.

Perhaps there were very few book reviews and no ads were on the newspapers on this book translated in Japanese.  Mainichi Shinbun, the publisher, might have issued some advertisement on their newspapers, though (I am not a subscriber to it).  It could be that since this book also clearly criticizes the closed system of Japanese journalism, the Japanese newspapers did not have much willingness for book review or advertisement of this book to public.  Does anyone know what really happened?  Well, it could be that I merely overlooked those book reviews or ads.

It seems that Professor Kobayashi at Princeton University was also concerned about this.  He sent me 5 book reviews from USA as below, but said that he could not find any in Japanese.

a. Japan Review.net: Interview of Ivan Hall by Victor Fic, January 26,
2002.

b. “Apartheid Japan-Style,” Reviewer: J. Marshall Unger, Professor of
Japanese, University of Maryland, in THE (Times Higher Education), July
17. 1998.

c. “The ‘Keep Out’ Signs on Japan’s Professions,” Reviewer: Robert Neff,
Nov. 20, 1997, Business Week.

d.Review by Raymond Lamont-Brown in Contemporary Review. Oct, 1998.

e. Review by J. Mark Ramseyer (Harvard University) , Journal of Japanese
Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 365-368

‘Cartels of the Mind: Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop’ is without doubt another book that I strongly recommend to you.

Do we still need ‘Kurofune’ to open up our nation to the outside world?  The chances are that ‘Kurofune will not come any more’ ……  It’s so sad.