The Japanese mind : the Goliath explained

Since Japan first began to emerge as a significant factor in world affairs, Britain has never wanted for perceptive students of that country and its culture. The elegant translations of Arthur Waley and Sir George Sansom's seminal explorations of the Japanese past, to cite merely two of the most obvious examples, still stand as landmarks in the history of Western scholarship on Japan, and the ground that men such as Waley and Sansom broke continues to be very actively tilled by contemporary British scholars. To be sure, the work done by some of Britain's present-day Japanologists verges on the arcane and occasionally seems designed more to demonstrate the author's intellectual virtuosity than to enlighten his readers. But that, of course, is true of a certain amount of all academic writing on any subject; and what is far more important is that a notable amount of intelligent and original analysis of Japan and matters. Japanese is today available to anyone in Britain who wishes to take advantage of it.

The difficulty is that, relatively speaking, not very many people in Britain actually do take advantage of the wealth of specialized material on Japan available to them. Largely, I believe, because Japan's rise to its present importance has been so rapid and was foreseen by so few of those who present themselves as experts on Japanese affairs, most educated people in Britain today possess little knowledge of Japan beyond that which they are able to extract from the media. And that is simply not enough to enable anyone to form intelligent judgments about the policies toward Japan that the United Kingdom might most usefully pursue.

This is not a state of affairs purely confined to Britain. The situation is little if any better in the United States and Canada and, so far as I can determine, is even worse in the countries of conti nental Europe. Everywhere in the Western world, in short, it is more often than not the case that otherwise well-informed people possess lamentably little understanding or knowledge of a country which, amongst non-Communist nations, now stands second only to the United States in terms of economic power.