Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

» He longs for the old days when Japan produced an economic miracle without having to update or rationalize its internal systems. «Free-market ideas of legal contracts, impartial regulations, and transparency are all fine, and perhaps these are all portfolio investors need,» he says with some bitterness. «But can we rely safely on markets for long-term investment for industrialization, technological development, and, above all, human-resources development?» Shiraishi's question – what to rely on? – touches on many of the questions raised in this book. The value of free markets is only one issue; there are numerous others, such as the role of bureaucracy and the importance of clear and correct information to the efficient running of a modern state. Getting Southeast Asia to «choose now» between the United States and Japan is Japan's last big bet at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Perhaps Japan will indeed win the bet and succeed in reviving its old hegemony over Southeast Asia. Backed by new industrial might based on control over Southeast Asia, and with a whole new continent of rivers and valleys to profitably cement over, Japan's academics and bureaucrats will not then feel that they need to give a backward glance at home to ravaged cities, sterile countryside, and a culture of big-eyed baby faces. All complaints can be easily dismissed as «Anglo-American triumphalism,» and Japan can revert happily to business as usual. Perhaps, but then again, perhaps not. For one thing, Southeast Asian nations may not feel that their only choice is between the United States and Japan, or that they have to make a choice at all. The world is a far more complex place than Shiraishi dreams – including a newly unified Europe, a powerful China, and wealthy tigers and dragons in Asia itself, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Meanwhile, Japan's internal problems affect its position in Southeast Asia, as the elites of these countries discover that Japan is not the cultural or economic paradise they expected. «Korean business is following America rather than Japan,» says Kang Dong Jin, director of Paxnet, a South Korean financial-information Web site. «Korea has seen America enjoy a decade of prosperity and Japan the opposite, so in some ways the choice is easy.» Foreign observers, Western and Asian alike, are asking whether ideal "human-resources development" means millions of construction workers flattening valleys at government expense- and lackluster tourist and software industries.