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Can a nation turn its back on its own myths? Can people bred to conformity change their ways?
"Yes" is Clayton Naff's resounding answer in About Face: How I Stumbled onto Japan's Social Revolution. In this strikingly crafted and highly original book he shows how a society traditionally identified with rigid conformism is radically changing itself in the face of a basic human drive: the need for personal fulfillment.
No one is better qualified than Clayton Naff to explain to American readers the grassroots social revolution that is sweeping Japan. As a journalist based there for much of the past decade, and as a member of the Japanese family he married into, his view of this revolution is intimate and revealing. Alternating captivating scenes of his cross-cultural courtship with Rumiko Hirata and probing sequences of sociological interpretation, Naff offers us a compelling dispatch from this newly emerging society, a palpable portrait of a nation undergoing a collective ABOUT FACE. As in a satisfying novel, all of Naff's characters come alive for the reader: from Rumiko's father - an aging businessman who enters his golden years not only with a new American son-in-law, but also with a baby granddaughter - to Naff's own co-workers and neighbors.
An unprecedented flowering of healthy individualism is replacing the old group mentality in Japan. Women are chucking the "good wife, wise mother" role, seeking personal fulfillment outside the home, and often spurning marriage in the process. Young men are quitting their jobs in droves to look for better work, or just to play. With his unqualified affection for the Japanese, Naff introduces us to a newly minted country, one whose long-held traditions and assumptions are in flux and being questioned as never before.
Naff shows that, like a butterfly shedding its cocoon, a new Japan is slowly but steadily emerging from the old Japan. He predicts that regardless of which party or prime minister is in power, the forces of change driving Japan's social revolution are irresistible and irreversible. He urges American businesspeople and politicians to identify themselves with these forces of change - for our own good, and for the benefit of all Asia. Enormously enjoyable and remarkably informative, Clayton Naff's lucid dispatch from the new Japan is an essential guide for American readers that illuminates our changing relationship with Asia's greatest power.
