Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan

A bitter elegy for an incontinent nation that happily abandons its architectural and natural heritage without any thought or even much regret. Captures a people in the grip of a very depressing neophilia.

An analysis of what went wrong with Japan's growth in the 1990s and beyond. The author calls out bureaucratically driven construction of useless monuments, cronyism, fake financials, environmental degradation and isolationism. Some arguments were more about the author's preferences, eg. cinema, Hello Kitty. The outlook was depressing bu it made me wonder what has transpired for Japan since this book was written in 2001. It predicted more decades of stagnation for Japan -- which has pretty much occurred (as of this writing in 2019) with the addition of the Global Financial Crisis (2007-2008) and the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011). Concerning the latter, the book specifically mentions a culture of shortfalls and cover-ups concerning show more safety in the Japanese nuclear power industry, and talks about the Tokai nuclear accident in Tokyo in 1999 (at that time the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl; since eclipsed by Fukushima). show less

An unflinching, objective look at Japanese culture & systems, political, financial, and international. The author does not fall into the typical trap of most 'Japanophiles,' in glossing over Japan's problems. He takes an unwavering but compassionate look at the problems facing Japanese society today, and gives voice to many Japanese frustrated with their own society. If Japan is to overcome its problems, it must first summon the courage as a society to acknowledge them, and we as international friends and neighbors do not do them any favors by continuing the farce of 'all is well,' when we ignore or gloss over the problems plainly covered in this book. Honesty is it's own form of compassion, and the purest.

This book was published in 2001, and some things improved during the Koizumi and DPJ eras that have passed since then. However, much of the basic problem described remains, namely that Japan still runs on pork-barrel spending by unaccountable and not particularly competent ministries and their corporate cronies. Dogs and Demons is in principle a good introduction to that problem and its roots.

However, while I found myself mostly agreeing with its general conclusions, the problem lies in how the book arrives at those conclusions. To put it bluntly, this book badly needs a cold-hearted editor and fact checker armed with chainsaws to work it over. As it stands, it is an unending parade of factoids cherry-picked to support the author's show more polemic. I often ended up skipping pages at a time when the author went off on a long, questionable digressions about P/E ratios, how manga and Hello Kitty symbolize the infantilization of culture or such. To make matters worse, some of these digressions appear in several chapters in slightly different guises.

While Dogs and Demons is a much-needed antidote to the hype regarding Japanese customs, culture and economy (the latter has fortunately dissipated during the past 20 years, though it has still not entirely disappeared), I really can't recommend it as a book, especially for readers without some background knowledge regarding Japanese government and society. Even overlooking the huge number of loose facts of varying quality thrown at the reader, the torrent of barely-founded beside-the-point material is too staggering.

That said, while investigating the background of some pronouncements, this book did lead me to some particularly tasty treasure troves of bureaucratic absurdity, such as the "Relocation of the Diet and Other Organizations" committee (running since 1992) of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. It's like real-life Monty Python. show less

"Lost Japan" perfectly encapsulates the sadness one can feel when history slips through our fingers like so much sand, and one knows that a beautiful culture is being eroded.

"Dogs and Demons" illustrates what happens when that sadness turns to anger and frustration: here Kerr researches what is actually going on in Japan right now, and makes some terrifying conclusions.

I'd felt nostalgic about a Japan I was living in and didn't really know when I read "Lost Japan." This time, and reading in England, I was kind of glad to be out.

YouTube review: https://youtu.be/POAjhACkvds

A laundry list of problems plaguing contemporary Japan.

You could just read chapters 1, 3,4 and 5