Secrets of Home Delivery Pizza

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「宅配ピザのひみつ」の秘密 by おだぎ みを, 佐藤 守, and 吉原 徹 or (in English) the Secret of Secrets of Home Delivery Pizza by Mio Odagi, Mamoru Sato, and Tooru Yoshiwara

The mystery of this book is the scarcity, so the main reason I am writing this review is in the hope that someone who knows the secret will find the webpage and add a comment to reveal the hidden truth. If you don't want to share the secret in public, then say so in your comment and when I moderate the comment, I will act appropriately. In other words, it won't be published to the Web unless you say it's okay. (Again, apologies for the policy of comment moderation, but I will NOT support the spammers by helping them broadcast their garbage.)

Here is the background of the mystery. This book is Volume 13 of the widely distributed Gakken series, which in a literal translation would means something like 'Gain good understanding by studying comics' (学研まんがでよくわかるシリーズ). The distribution mechanism is unusual. As near as I can tell, you cannot buy these books anywhere, but they are distributed to many public libraries throughout Japan. It appears the libraries can't buy they either, but all of the costs are covered by the sponsor of each volume, which is a prominent company in the industry that the book is describing. For example, Volume 1 in this new series is called Secrets of Hamburgers (ハンバーガーのひみつ) and was sponsored by McDonalds Japan. Gakken has published various series of books over the years, but this seems to be the most successful, with around 90 volumes so far, and presumably more to come.

Now for the details of the mystery. In general, many branches of a library system will each receive a copy or even two. For example, Koto Ward currently has six copies of Volume 11 (which was published around the same time), three copies of Volume 1 (which was published a few years earlier), ten copies of Volume 68 (which was published in 2012), but zero copies of this Volume 13. There may be some loss through wear and tear, but the books are well made and seem to last quite well, but Volume 13 is amazingly scarce. After some fairly heavy research, I was able to discover that there seem to be only four circulating copies left in Tokyo, none at all in the neighboring prefectures, and a few more copies scattered around Japan. Hard to estimate from the data I have, but I'd be surprised if more than 50 copies were ever distributed, and quite probably it was more like 20 copies.

The publisher refused to say anything about what happened, but simply said the book was not available, even when I offered to buy a copy. The author never replied to a query about the book, though she has done a number of other volumes in the series. My next idea is to contact the corporate sponsor of this book, Pizza-La, which is still one of the largest and most successful pizza delivery companies in Japan. However, at this point I have to predict they won't be talking about it. (Just sent the query to Pizza-La, but not holding my breath.)

Once I finally obtained one of the circulating copies of the book (though there are rumors of a scanned PDF version), I read it carefully searching for some explanation of the mystery. The plot is actually more intricate than the average for books in this series (though typically unrealistic), but the story of the company itself is unusually interesting. The founder of the company, Asano-san, appears to have gotten the idea of starting a pizza delivery company from watching the 1982 movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial many years ago, possibly when he was living in Hawaii as a young tour guide. I don't remember the details of the movie, but I'm guessing they must have ordered a pizza, and perhaps that was even related to the 'phone home' part of the movie. It was probably after seeing the movie that Asano-san was badly burned when his first restaurant burned down, but he survived, and after some more adventures he started his pizza delivery company. More evidence of my limited Japanese capability, but I'm not even sure when he moved back to Japan... All in all, I would rate it as one of the better books in the series because the different plot threads ought to hold the childrens' interest and the company founder has an interesting real-life story to tell. In terms of academic content (the secrets part of it), I'd rate it below average, but I doubt that would bother the target audience. If the book were sold on a regular basis, I'd expect it to sell well above the average (rather than being the rarest book in the entire series).

The only possible hint I can see to the mystery is on page 58, where there is a growth chart of the number of stores, suggesting that the Japanese market for home delivery pizza had become effectively saturated a few years before this book was published, and the total number of shops had actually started to decline. This data looks worse than the sales figures that appear on page 49, but maybe Pizza-La got into a major financial crunch at the time the book was ready for publishing and was unable to pay for a planned print run that was surely intended to be much larger than 20 copies.

For the so-called record, let me include a brief summary review of the entire series of books. At this time I've read over 60 volumes of the series, mostly in the last two years. The unifying theme is that all of these companies have been unusually successful in their respective industries. In most cases it seems that these companies were positioned for rapid growth right after the war, though there are many variations, and there aren't any clear unifying patterns to their successes. Also, there is a lot of variation induced by the different artists and authors, and also by the various companies that sponsored the individual volumes, presumably through their marketing departments. For example, I would say that Otsuka Pharmaceuticals has an unusually aggressive marketing department... In spite of the wide variations, the books have been quite educational and I hope they have given me a lot of the background information that every Japanese elementary school child takes for granted (since it appears that fifth graders are the main target audience for the series). Almost all of the books have been quite enjoyable, too, though some of the story lines were pretty ridiculous, even allowing for the children's strong imaginations. Probably worth noting that the series does a good job of covering topics of special interest to children. Food-related topics are probably the leader, with about 25 books (so far) features such themes, including the Volume 13 of this review.

Bailout Nation

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Reactions to Bailout Nation by Barry Ritholtz

Quite an interesting book and worth a recommendation just because it didn't have any obvious political slant. After finishing it, my opinion would be that there are some holes in his reasoning and even in his data, but it has a lot of good background information and I didn't feel like he wasn't grinding any axes.

Let me start with some of the data points. One category I liked was the references he provided, ranging over a wide range of topics. On pages 17 and 18 he mentioned Stephen Mihm and Bruner and Carr on older background topics. The book by Tim Metz mentioned on page 54 sounded quite interesting. Page 61 cited Paul Krugman and Philippe Jorion. On page 72 he mentions Roger Lowenstein's interesting-sounding book. I've read some of these authors and he motivated me to want to read many of the new ones. My conclusion here is that he has looked at a lot of data.

However, another kind of data point involved places where I disagree with his interpretations of his data, or even his reasoning. Kind of a triple-play from pages 131 to 135. For example, he cites Disraeli's aphorism that "What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history." However, the point he had just made was exactly the opposite, that the bankers should have learned from the bailout of LTCM that they should expect to be bailed out.

Next he describes Reagan as "the intellectual father of the modern radical deregulatory movement." He actually repeated that claim on page 237. I just can't buy Reagan as "the intellectual father" of anything. Perhaps an "ideological father", "emotional symbol", "charismatic leader" or even "religious driver", but NOT "intellectual". Actually I think he makes my point most clearly by the key words that appear later on page 237: "unwavering belief", "distaste", and "advocacy". Nothing intellectual in there. Reagan knew what he wanted to believe, and he really cared about his beliefs, but Reagan's main reality was today's teleprompter. (To contrast with Dubya's relationship with reality, Reagan didn't know but really cared, whereas Dubya didn't know and didn't care.)

Back to page 135, where he almost contradicts himself. He says that Clinton believed in both government and markets, and then says that Dubya went farther, whereas his actual argument is that Dubya believed ONLY in markets and basically hated government. This is not "a huge step farther", but actually heading off in a completely different direction.

On page 149 I disagreed with the assertion that the consequences of government are especially troublesome. It's a matter of size and force, not the simple reduction to "government" that matters here. If the consequences of the American national government tend to be large, it's just the correlation with that governments size and strength.

On page 168 I was interested to notice how one of my banks (in Japan) lost so much money with a belated investment in Merrill Lynch. Heck, I might as well name names and say it's Mizuho Bank, which is actually a post-forced-merger name. (Then again, based on my experiences, ALL of the Japanese banks can only be measured on the scale from "bad" to "terrible", and Mizuho (probably Fuji when I opened my account) is just somewhat towards the worse end of the scale. Near as I can recall, ALL of my Japanese banks have been forcibly reorganized and renamed over the years.)

Chapter 14 is called "2008: Suicide by Democracy", and I felt this argument is ridiculous. The problem is NOT democracy but the kleptocracy or plutocracy that is running things. My philosophic position here is that most businesspeople are fine and upstanding, but the game is crooked, which is quite compatible with his message. However, he is suggesting it is a democratic problem, whereas I am convinced the source is that the crooked game is created by bad laws written by the most cheaply bribed professional politicians, and they are working for a tiny group of the greediest and least ethical businessmen who see bribery as a great investment. He does touch on the theme in the book, but actually quite lightly. On page 249 he even divides the problems between "bad philosophy" and "mob rule", but I strongly disagree. Greed is not a real philosophy, and the democratic "mob" is not paying the bribes. 

On page 178 he says there wasn't any pattern to the bailouts, but I think that he is ignoring some of the political factors. My own hypothesis is that much of the reason that Lehman wasn't bailed out was partisan political factors.

On pages 179 and 180 I have to confess I was quite amused by his jokes and cited jokes about Dubya's withdrawal from the financial problems. The joke on page 216 about Citi was also funny.

On page 232 he listed and ranked the culprits, but I disagree with his inclusion of "Borrowers and home buyers". His argument was based on the irresponsibility of such borrowers, but at least twice in the book he notes that they lacked even basic financial skills. The situation as he represented it was that skilled expert salespeople were trying to persuade them to take out these mortgages, and I can't blame suckers just because they are suckers for some new scam. Even if the suckers objected that they could not afford the mortgages, the scam artists were experts in telling them why they could afford them, mostly with the idea of selling at a higher price or just walking away.

Though he mentioned philosophy, I think he never makes his clear. To me, the philosophic problem is the worship of cancerous growth. Therefore my solution would be the amoeba growth model. I think that large companies should be divided just on principle. It actually should be an objective of government to encourage more freedom, where freedom involves meaningful and unconstrained choice among several alternatives, not the single non-choice of the monster that is too big to fail.

A final conclusion? A thought provoking read, and it had a lot of good history here. However, I think his philosophy is weak or shallow and you have to treat it as data with some opinions, and not a solid set of reasoned conclusions.

Accidental Office Lady

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Errata for The Accidental Office Lady by Laura Kriska

Good book about her first years with Honda, though judging by her reported frustrations, I wonder how long she lasted with the company. Not sure if the title was really justified, since she didn't really do much OL-type work.

Quite a bit of insight into the cultural differences between Japanese and Americans, with the usual focus on the facade (建前 (tatemae in Romaji)) versus the reality (本音 (honne)). My own take on that topic is that most Japanese are content to keep them apart, and they don't even regard it as false or misleading because everyone is supposed to do it and everyone is supposed to know that everyone else is doing it. In contrast, most Americans regard the separation as a kind of stress that should be reduced by bringing the two into alignment, even when it jeopardizes the social harmony (和 (wa)). She didn't mention that term explicitly, though she did write quite a bit about building and maintaining good relationships, especially among groups of coworkers.

However, editor that I am, I was struck by a few mistakes:

Page 87: "Even though no one in the office would discuss her difficult behavior, I found some in the knowledge I wasn't the only one suffering." There's a missing word after "some", probably "solace" or "consolation".

Page 198: The Fuji Highland Resort must be Fujikyu Highland.

Page 229: "...I wouldn't need to be involved in the preparation but that they need me to help accompany..." The second "need" should be "needed" or possibly "would need".

Page 266: The Romaji form of the famous sumo wrestler's name is "Chiyonofuji", and the misspelling really stuck in my eye.

Compass of Pleasure and Sleights of Mind

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A Comparative Review of The Compass of Pleasure by David Linden and Sleights of Mind by Stephen Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, and Sandra Blakeslee in Light of the Twitter

Now I realize that I probably bit off more than I can chew. I definitely feel like there is a unifying thread running through these 2 books and some of the recent research that I have been reviewing on Twitter, but it's rather hard to figure out how to weave the thread into words. It involves the unified focus of human consciousness. In other words, we really only think clearly about one thing at a time, and that's why research based on sampling of the Twitter on a broad scale is doomed to failure.

In The Compass of Pleasure, the primary focus was on the group of brain circuits that are frequently involved with pleasure responses and addictive behaviors. This was kind of a magic lever (with a deliberate play on the next book) into human behaviors, but the contributions from elsewhere in the brain were nebulous and far from clear. Being able to sample random signals going through other parts of the brain is kind of meaningless, as though you had a few random samples of neural responses and chemical samples from responses that are actually connected, but there is no way to explain the connections. You might detect that one particular neuron in the visual cortex is responding to a vertical line, while another fairly close neuron is responding to a movement, and somewhere else in the brain there is a clear signal that is activating a movement in the right leg, but the fact that these are all connected is not going to be something that can be inferred from this kind of data. Random sampling is wrong. You need highly directed searching, even if you have an anchor point such as the pleasure circuits.

In Sleights of Mind the the key notion is that magicians manipulate your mental focus so that you are mentally locked into the place where the trick is not taking place. In fact there's sometimes even automatic inhibitions of neighboring neural areas to help you focus on the place where the magician has specifically persuaded you to go with your mind's focus of attention. Often that involves friendly and empathic feelings that cause any human to respond to the interest expressed by other people, but feelings that are deliberately manipulated by the magician. The classic example is when one person stares up, and other people stop and stare in the same direction to see what it is. It's kind of like a shared social focus, though the authors used a more precise term for it (which I've already misplaced).

The intersection with Twitter is that no amount of analysis of random samples of tweets is going to produce anything useful. The metaphor is strained, but I think it's like having reports of the activities of random neurons from a brain. There are patterns to be found in the Twitter information, but your disconnected like the links between distance neurons. Again, the key is intelligent search. The hashtags can be clues, but even there things are very mobile. There are multiple competing foci among the hashtags and only a few of them ultimately rise to high levels of activity and visibility on Twitter. I'm not actually convinced that any of the information flowing around Twitter really amount to any decision points., but that is evidently what the people who are studying Twitter think they are looking for. Even President Obama was involved with Twitter this last week. I think he was just wasting his time, but he deserves some recreational time, too.

These ideas are actually linked back to my current thinking abut the recent election, where I am now feeling that the race between Obama and Romney was essentially the distracting focus that the magicians wanted you to look at, but far away from the the real action. Now I'm beginning to think the key thing was that all of that SuperPAC money wasn't really being wasted, though that is now the "magicians' patter" (from the pundits) about the election. In actuality, the money was effectively bribing the mass media to continue playing the election game in the same old way. Sure, it looks like the Romney got essentially nothing for a billion dollars, but especially in the swing states and in some key districts, the large flows of campaign advertising must have been enormous windfall profits for someone. I read that the nonpublic SuperPACs had to pay as much is 10 times the low basic rates that were guaranteed to the official advertising of the candidates. The money didn't disappear like a magic trick, and whoever got it will be glad to get more from the next election...

Not sure what insights to draw from this comparative review, such as it is. My problem remains that I'm fundamentally a replay machine, just executing the mental models that have been created by the real authors. It's not that I don't have anything to say, even when I can say it relatively easily using voice dictation (which I used for most of this post), but I'm more like a mirror than a light source.

2-D Framework for Explanations in Why

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An Interesting 2-D Framework for Explanations in Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons... and Why by Charles Tilly

Not doing justice to a rather interesting book of applied epistemology, but wanted to record the key analytic notion because it struck me as unusually interesting. The book is much longer of course, with a long chapter on each of the four cells, but it's also a rather heavy read and I don't even feel I could do justice to it on the basis of one normal reading. This is the kind of book that you could easily build a college course around, probably in psychology, but perhaps in another department such as philosophy or sociology or even within a law school or medical school (since many of the examples are specific to those two professions).

It's actually somewhat difficult to clarify his two dimensions. He labels the horizontal dimension popular versus specialized, where "popular" is in the sense of general use by the entire population while "specialized" is for use by specialists. The other dimension is for formulas versus cause-effect accounts, but I think of the "formulas" more in terms of purely descriptive records of observation.

As he applies the typology, popular formulas defines the cell for "conventions", which are reasons that are basically just standard expressions and somewhat mindless. In the morning, everyone says "good morning", and that's a convention that doesn't involve a lot of thought. The popular cause-effect accounts usually take the form of "stories", where the key is a reduction from the complexities of life and the storyteller's insertion of reasons and rationales for the events, often leading to a moral or illustrating some teaching point. The specialized formulas are the "codes", explicitly in the case of codes of law, but implicitly in such situations as standards of good medical practice that physicians are expected to follow. In applying the code, the intention is to fit the real-world situations into the closest matches of the code and then follow the specified procedures. The judge attempts to match prior cases and follow the precedents of earlier decisions, or the physician attempts to match prior diagnoses and follow the standard treatments for those illnesses or injuries. The specialized cause-effect accounts are called "technical accounts", where the experts are talking to each other about their deep justifications of what was observed in the real world where the codes were applied.

Not sure if writing that will help me internalize the deep concepts here, but it's definitely a thought provoking book and worth the reading, if you are interested in having your thoughts provoked. The part that is harder for me to follow is how our selections among these kinds of reasons determine or are determined by the relationships among the people giving and receiving them. The most concrete example is how physicians relate to other physicians as peers when they exchange technical accounts, whereas they relate to patients from a superior perspective when they present the code of standard medical practice.

In the chapter on technical accounts, he includes some general works targeting non-specialists, and based on my reading of Blood, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, I regret that none of my accessible Japanese libraries seem to have the books he mentions by Charles Pasternak and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza--at least not in English.

Art of Strategy

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Comparative Errata for The Art of Strategy by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff

This quasi-review has a kind of funny story behind it. A couple of things I read in the the book struck me oddly, so I wanted to find the errata and wound up emailing the authors in search of it. One of the authors responded with a link to a page of "Corrections" that I'd been unable to find, presumably because I was searching around the idea of "errata". Therefore I now claim the first erratum is that there "Corrections" page should include the search target "errata"--but my claim must be wrong, since my first test search now returns the authors' page in question... No, they didn't add "errata" in the meantime. I checked the HTML source just to be sure. I just overlooked it?

Anyway, in the meantime, I had mentioned the book to a few researchers in related fields, and one of them said that he hadn't read it, but the reviews made it sound like the author's earlier book on the same subject, Thinking Strategically, might be more interesting. He asked me for my opinions about the book, which helped lead to this review and which also caused me to start considering the book in terms of the question "Is this new version a classic text that people will read and reference for years?" It covers newer examples, but I was trying to decide if it was a better book. Of course I can't answer that question without access to the earlier book, but my tentative answer would be that "No, it doesn't seem like a great classic, but it's a sound introduction." I have read a number of related books, and none of them really seem to stick in my mind like The Selfish Gene by Professor Dawkins or Professor Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, just to pick a few examples that come to mind.

However, I've decided to go through my own notes as I read the book and consider them while going through the authors' own errata.

Let me begin by saying that my initial concern involved the unnumbered "quick trip to the gym" on page 50. Professor Nalebuff responded to my question by saying that the second paragraph should be regarded as the answer, though I think the wording is ambiguous. I did feel that it felt like a trick question, basically reversing the direction without any real change, but at a minimum, it created confusion as to the format of the actual trips to the gym... Does that count as an error?

Anyway, I have to say that I feel that their first erratum for page 17 does appear to indicate a minor error on the webpage. The text of the paperback version matches the webpage, but there is no asterisk on the webpage, which is supposed to indicate a mistake from the original hardbound version that was corrected in the paperback. Well, the paperback has been corrected, but if there is no asterisk, then something must be wrong. No asterisk has to mean that both the hardbound and paperback printings are wrong and will disagree with the webpage. The other possible case is that both versions were correct, in which case there's no erratum to report on the webpage. (The last theoretical case is impossible because I have the paperback here, and it is correct according to the webpage.) Anyway, this was weird enough to get me to reread the correction and the book several times to make sure they were the same... If there's a difference, then I missed it several times, though that would mean the website could be regarded as okay...

As regards the actual body the footnote in this erratum, I still find it extremely dubious. It was supposed to support the textual contention that "[The incumbents'] advantage in fundraising is what gives them job security," but it does not. The famous quote is that correlation is not causation, and it is possible that the money is directed to the probable winner simply because donating to a loser is pointless. In other words the money is following the safe winner rather than making the winner safe, and I contend that the actual cause is not the money, but the collusion of both parties in the gerrymandering that makes incumbents safe. In the winner-take-all American elections, the two parties may disagree on every other issue, but both parties still agree that they want to be reelected and that negotiated gerrymandering is the mechanism that insures their reelections.

What actually happens in the real world is that the weaker party sometimes gets gerrymandered into fewer districts, and then there will be a sincerely contested election, but only in the primary election of the weaker party. In fact, it is in the strategic interest of the stronger party to destroy the districts of the strongest politicians of the weaker party, because that forces those stronger opponents into primary contests against entrenched incumbents, hopefully eliminating their strongest adversaries. However as far as the actual elections are concerned, the effectiveness of modern computer-enhanced gerrymandering is such that the outcomes are almost certain--and of course the smart donors know better than to waste their donations on sure losers.

The authors' next acknowledged error is on page 94, but I doubted the accuracy of their footnote on page 24. Buying stocks only provides capital to the firm when the shares are purchased directly from the company, and that is not true for most share purchases. They say that share purchases provide investment resources to the firm, but actually it mostly works the other direction these days. Firms use cash that could be used for investment to repurchase some of their own shares and often then give those shares away as performance incentives. Maybe this benefits the companies, but you have to wonder since the terms of the rewards are too often determined by the same people who get rewarded...

I felt that page 43 had a kind of self-contradiction. At one point they say that "greater freedom of action can never hurt", but a few lines later they say "...can quickly get too complicated to draw or use." In other words, too much freedom of action becomes so difficult to analyze that the choice becomes overwhelming, which seems kind of hurtful to me. Is it sufficient to say that "paralysis by analysis" can be quite troublesome, or do I need to make a more elaborate argument about the time spent in researching the options?

Why do the authors seem to get into so much trouble with footnotes? On page 59, the footnote seems to be confused about how chess programs work, since those programs do exactly the same thing that they attribute solely to good human players.

The erratum on page 94 is wrong in the paperback and has no asterisk on the webpage, which supports the interpretation I mentioned that both printed versions are wrong, but the erratum on page 95 is printed correctly in the paperback and has no asterisk on the website.

Their errata on pages 95 and 150 are correct in the paperback and properly have asterisks on the webpage, so I hope these cases don't need to be checked... However, on pages 138 and 163 they were back to corrected errors without the asterisks... I think it's time to quit worrying about either side of the asterisk here and just suggest that the authors go ahead and make one list of errors for the hardbound version and a hopefully much smaller list for the paperback. At least that's how it seems to be working out so far. However, that makes me realize there is another possibility. Perhaps my paperback is a later printing that has corrections for errors that appeared in both the hardbound and earlier paperback versions?

Focusing on my own questions, on page 136, they conclude with an observation that the caller has the number, but ignore the fact that most modern phones also show the caller's number to the callee. I think the norm these days is for both sides to know, so their resolution is a kind of error.

On page 212 they say "his defeated bid for reelection", which should be "defeat in his bid for reelection" or "his unsuccessful bid for reelection". Okay, so it's a minor one, as is the mistake on page 340, which should be "one in San Francisco".

On page 465 in the Notes, they said that Rumsfeld's use of English was good, and want to defend his analysis, though he only considered three of the four cases. They say his analysis is not "foolish", but I cannot regard it as complete or profound without consideration of the "unknown knowns". Some of our greatest mistakes really are described by "I knew better."

Coming War with Japan

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Can an Non-credible Book like The Coming War with Japan by George Friedman and Meredith LeBard Stimulate Ideas about Credible Threats?

Really, that's about the best I can do to justify reading this book. It's a crazy book, but that also makes it thought-provoking. The threat it proposes and the analysis is ridiculous, but I was able to devise a possible real threat chain--but not involving Japan. I actually conceived of that threat just as I started reading the book, but these authors aren't going anywhere near it. However, the book mainly fails because it makes lots of predictions that have already been invalidated by boring old reality.

The attraction to the book was obviously the title, but as soon as I read that George Friedman was associated with the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation, I knew where it had gone wrong. In brief, this book is just crazy money talking. I started by believing that I understood the Japanese pretty well after living in Japan for more than 20 years, but as a scientific sort of person, I was still willing to look at their evidence. Maybe he really meant an economic war or something plausible? No, they are arguing for military war. Maybe they have some compelling new evidence? No, not only are they using old and well known evidence, but they are using it in ways that are highly selective and even contradictory. (However, perhaps real scientists should be tested by how willing they are to believe things they don't like? In contrast, posers like these authors have already decided what they want to believe, and the key tactic is rejecting all of the problematic facts.)

It seems easiest to dismiss their military threat claim by pointing at their own evidence. The book spends a lot of pages explaining why America fundamentally can't afford to fight ground wars in Asia--but it works the same in reverse and is even less plausible for Japan, which has a much smaller pool of possible soldiers and almost no physical resources compared to America. (Too bad Dubya hadn't read the book before starting the war in Iraq, and perhaps Obama should have read it before ramping things up in Afghanistan...)

This fundamental problem of manpower and resources actually links to my idea for a plausible threat even though I was inclined to dismiss their thesis as soon as I knew they really did mean war in the military sense. This is actually an idea and analysis that came to me almost as soon as I opened the book and before I had read very far at all. It was obvious to me that Japan cannot and will not field a large number of troops, but is there some way they could plausibly fight a war anyway? My thought was that it could be conceivable with robots. The book was written long before that was plausible, but the science fiction authors have been there long ago. What I realized was that it might be conceivable for Japan to make a fleet of drones. Actually this is related to Rumsfeld's mumbling about asymmetric warfare. The cost of destroying an aircraft carrier with a swarm of drones would be extremely low compared to the cost of building the carrier. However, if Japan has the technology, the resources would still be a strain, but... What about the Chinese or the Russians or even the Iranians? Certainly the Chinese could do it using the students who earned masters and PhD degrees in America before they were kicked out of the country. Anyway, it's so obvious that nothing more needs to be said on that topic.

Therefore I'll loop back and point at a few of the glaring flaws in the book, just focusing on a few of the largest ones that caught my eye in the first 50 pages. On page 9 I noticed a citation of Yuddan, which was described as a Japanese bestseller that supports their position. They didn't provide an author, but if it's a bestseller then it should be easy to find, right? Maybe it's even been translated? No, they must have meant a book called 油断 (Yudan) from around 1975 by 堺屋 太一, but I'm pretty certain there was no bestseller called Yuddan, no matter how you spell it in Japanese. At that point I was expecting sloppy research, but they could have waited a bit longer, eh?

On page 29 they seemed to think the the Tokugawa Shogunate was a weak and divided government, which is basically ridiculous. Even the transition to the Meiji Restoration was relatively smooth and efficient, and the country never became fractured or seriously disrupted. Again, a book about Japan should start with a realistic understanding of Japan's history, eh?

On page 50 I saw an especially glaring example of the bias with the statement "The U.S., torn by internal dissension and bureaucratic infighting, ..." The thing that annoys me about this kind of thing is the projective aspects of it. THEY are the ones that are the masters of crippling the government based on the ideological perspective of destroying most of the functions of the government.

Getting out of the first 50 pages, but on page 198 they were arguing that America wasn't involved for the money with this gem, "...economic considerations playing an insignificant role." Again on page 200, with "... devoid of economic interests" just before twisting out "In any event, the reemergence of imperialism is intellectually challenging to a world that is essentially liberal democratic." However on the next page was the what struck me as the most plausible idea in the entire book: "Economics speaks to human greed, while politics speaks to fear." An example of a good idea from a bad source? Or more likely they borrowed it from somewhere and just forgot to mention the source?

Anyway, I mostly feel like I've written more than the book deserved. Lots of other flaws there. I forgot to say China got short shrift... Enough. Suffice it to say you should have a lot of leisure time before spend some of it with this book.

Even worse, I now confess that I wrote that much before finishing the book, and now that I've finished it, I feel I have to say more, even though I even more strongly feel the book was silly and not worth as much of a reaction as I've already written... Onward through the fog:

Some eye-catching, projective, self-contradictory, ridiculous, preposterous, other negative adjectives, or worse (including multiple adjective lists, of course) examples of rightwing bias and slant:

Page 256: "The power is there, but the thought of using it is quite alien to the American mind. Brute interference in free trade is anathema to American moral principles and the American psyche itself. But ideologies change, ...." In other words, American are deeply crazy, but we might change our minds, and history doesn't count, either.

Page 304 favorably cites Paul Wolfowitz, who writes books on crazy for a living.

Page 309 says "This [joint imperialism with the Koreans] would, of course, be a tremendous test of Japanese racism, for Japanese contempt for Korea runs as deep today as it ever did." This caught my eye mostly as a predictive statement that has been completely invalidated by current pro-Korean trends in Japan. It is possible that it was valid when they wrote it--but I did NOT see the evidence and I was living in Japan during the "today" of this book. In some ways I agree with the racism accusation, but "contempt" seems extreme unlikely and implausible as the substantive summary of the complex Japanese feelings towards Korea. I'm trying to make allowances for my having recently arrived in Japan at that time, but I can't buy it.

On page 310, "There is nothing more to conserve" with regards to energy. Absurd and extremely rightwing.

Pages 318-9 has a map predicting the state of the Pacific Ocean in 2000, and in comparison to reality it's completely incorrect, to put it politely. The funniest detail is probably the idea of North Korea being aligned with Japan.

On page 329 they say "How the [Japanese supreme] court could rule that Article 9 permits self-defense when it specifically bans the creation of an armed force is a matter best left to lawyers and theologians." Okay, so you could dismiss it as silly hyperbolic statement, except that it's part of a long section that is attempting to dismiss Japanese pacifism AND on page 328 their attempt to quote Article 9 is mangled. Poor editing is no excuse, eh?

On page 332 they argue that hundreds of bombers are cheaper than individual nuclear bombs. It would actually be possible to make the argument if they had gone into analysis of research funding, but they didn't bother.

In the next section there was a long and confusing passage where they first seemed to be arguing in favor of strategic bombing, though it eventually becomes clear that they are actually arguing against it. Or maybe the authors are on different sides of this topic and just got confused during the editing process?

Eventually that led to the hilariously naive comment on page 338 that "... Shinto Buddhism contains pacifist tendencies is beyond the scope of our discussion." Duh. They are separate religions. Is basic understanding of such fundamental knowledge supposed to be within the scope of authors claiming to write authoritatively about Japan? (No the book never mentioned the actual State Shinto and religious veneration of the emperor that was incorporated into the war effort.)

From page 390 there is a section of predictions, many of which are highly specific or even dated and therefore absolutely refuted, but all of which are completely ridiculous. My guess is that the draft of this section was the first thing the authors wrote, and then the rest of the book was an attempt to justify what they'd already decided they believed. There is a paragraph on page 401 about the 'trap of empire' that seems to doom America, but at this point the reader may be laughing to hard to notice.

As I already said, I spent too much time on this book. I do think it's a good idea to see how other people think, but it's even better to base my thinking on evidence from the real world.