March 2003
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Who’s Bamboozling Whom?

I read with interest your interview of Dr. Hall in the JapanReview.Net, including his comments pertaining to the review I wrote of his book, Bamboozled: How America Loses the Intellectual Game with Japan and Its Implications for Our Future in Asia, in The Asian Wall Street Journal.

Allow me to make a couple of comments of my own.

First, it is unfortunate that my careless error with a couple of dates when paraphrasing from page 70 of the book have provided a convenient escape hatch for Dr. Hall. In fact, the dates are not germane to my argument, but the mistake provides the opportunity for Dr. Hall to discredit my analysis. That’s too bad, because the analysis is right on, as Mr. Geoffrey Tudor—who first brought the mistaken dates to the attention of the Journal editors—implied when he called my review “thoughtful.” But the best evidence is Dr. Hall’s feeble effort in the Review to discredit my conclusions about his book.

In defending his argument that telephone calls to Tokyo Mayor Shintaro Ishihara—in response to his use of the pejorative term “sankokujin”—point to increasing racism in Japan, Dr. Hall asks, “If the moderates are so numerous, why didn’t more of them call in to be counted?”

As Dr. Hall well knows, of course, unorganized moderates don’t generally participate in spur-of-the-moment public debates, and that would be especially so when the dustup involves a loose political canon like Mr. Ishihara, who is well known for his wild, off-the-cuff remarks (It might be another matter if Mr. Ishihara said something that wasn’t outlandish, which would be a shock!). Rather, it is activist minorities who resort to such—obviously organized, undoubtedly by Mr. Ishihara’s support group—tactics to fight an uphill battle for acceptance and respectability. By giving credence to a small group of outright fanatical racists, Dr. Hall does exactly what they wanted: He makes their cause a legitimate issue, which Dr. Hall then attempts to institutionalize.

Second, Dr. Hall gets personal, stating that I am “ignorant of Japan,” as evidenced by my unfortunate carelessness with dates. Maybe so. But I can say that I lived close to a decade in Japan, completing my undergraduate studies at the same Ichigaya Campus of Sophia University which, I must admit tickles me pink, decided it could do without one of Dr. Hall’s lectures. I was an active participate in the business community in the city where I lived, Maebashi in Gunma prefecture, not a mere observer and fund raiser. I founded and ran a successful business, joined and played a key role in local business associations, and taught at Gunma University.

So while I may have some embarrassing problems with dates, and should have been more careful, that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize—or reasonably competently review—a bad book on Japan when I read one.

Michael Alan Hamlin
Reviewer, The Asian Wall Street Journal
Metro Manila, Philippines