LITMIR.BIZ

In this perceptive novel of interracial marriage, the author of Japan Unmasked again exposes the harsh realities and strange contradictions of life in post-WWII Japan.Alice Burns, the canny and compassionate daughter of Glasgow workingman, knew almost nothing about her employer's homeland when she started to work in London office of the Tozai company, a great international trading firm. But when she married Saburo Tanaka, a member of Tozai's managerial staff, she began to share and then to understand her husband's hard–driven existence as a «salary–man,»bound in lifelong, vassal–like servitude to his company.When Alice accompanied Saburo back to Japan she was doomed to the loneliness of the dutiful Japanese wife, who waits at home as her husband devotes himself to company business, company entertaining and company social life. Through her eyes, the author reveals a world of lavish expense–account spending and squalid, cramped living conditions, of cumbersome social obligations and smouldering rivalries, in which individual initiative is smothered and private life hardly exists.

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This classic book on Japanese culture and etiquette takes a candid look at Asia's most modern, yet misread society.Here is a different book about the Japanese. A far cry from the purple prose of the starry-eyed Western visitor or the sterile style of the government gazette, The Japanese Are Like That is a down to earth scrutiny of the so called «inscrutable» Japanese. Armed with a cool head, the gift of clear expression, and an objectivity born of years of foreign residence, the author discusses with refreshing candor the national traits and ways of life of his countrymen, and compares them with those of other peoples, letting the chips fall where they mayDespite his background as a career diplomat, Mr. Kawasaki in this book dispenses with top hat and striped trousers and pulls no punches in exploding some popular myths and romantic illusions about Japan and the Japanese.This book is certain to provide the reader with new insights into little known facets of Japan which very few authors have cared or dared to treat so openly.

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