Straitjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan

Miyamoto, a Tokyo-born psychiatrist who spent 10 years in the U.S. as a postdoctoral student at Yale and as a Cornell Medical College professor, returned to Japan in 1986 to join the Ministry of Health and Welfare. His years in the West ill-prepared him to accept Japanese group-think, which he perceives as an adolescent syndrome and a form of institutionalized masochism. He refused to sacrifice his personal life to it; chafed against the officially sanctioned gold-bricking that constituted much of his job; argued with his supervisors; and became isolated from his peers. Far worse, he shocked the bureaucracy by publicly criticizing it in articles and in this book, which was published in Japan this past September and became a bestseller. While Western observers have made similar criticisms of Japanese society, none have offered the same insider's detail and credentials. Miyamoto's account of his absurd experiences is streaked with outrage, but his descriptions of how laws are written, how budgets are made, how careers proceed and how workers behave contribute valuable social and psychological insights into Japanese society. (Jan.)