....Johnson for his seminal work on Japanese political economy, MITI and the Japanese Miracle was dubbed by Newsweek's Robert Neff as "godfather of the revisionists" on Japan. Neff also tagged Clyde Prestowitz, James Fallows, Karel van Wolferen and others like R. Taggart Murphy and Pat Choate as the leaders of a new movement that argued that Japan was organizing its political economy in different ways than the U.S. This was a huge deal in its day -- and these writers and thinkers led by the implacable Johnson were attacked from all corners of American academia and among the crowd of American Japan-hands who wanted to deflect rather than focus a spotlight on the fact that Japan's economic mandarins were really the national security elite of the Pacific powerhouse nation....
The author, Steve Clemons, also writes of Johnson's efforts outside the Japan/China field.
23 Nov: I wonder how Johnson would have felt about called a "Japan hand" as he is in many obituaries.
Glad I read Clemons' whole obit. I'm not sure Johnson would have otherwise appreciated being mentioned in the same paragraph as Prestowitz and Choate, neither of whom could probably have found Japan on the map before 1987.
ReplyDeleteDoubt the others would have had much of a chance had Johnson not paved the way.
ReplyDelete