Cartels of the mind

As Washington and Tokyo sort out their new power relationship and roles in post-Cold War Asia, Japan continues to black access of foreign professionals, Westerners and Asians alike. These cartels of the mind - market barriers - serve neither the professed goals of Japan nor those of the United States. Despite repeated promises to open up, Japanese legal, media, academic, and research organizations run an intellectual closed shop. American lawyers are stymied in efforts to help U.S. firms enter the Japanese market. Foreign correspondents are systematically walled off from the most important sources. Resident Western and Asian academics in search of stable and productive careers and education find the roads blocked. Foreign scientists and engineers are kept out of Japan's state-of-the-art laboratories. Japan aspires to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and a larger political voice, but its grand intellectual parsimony, argues the author, is simply not worthy of a world economic power. Cartels of the Mind looks deeply into the causes of these cultural and institutional barriers and examines ineffective past attempts to challenge them. In a time when many American scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals have been fearful of criticizing Japanese practices, Cartels of the Mind provides an insider's perceptive study of Japan's professional barriers, both institutional and psychological, against the entire outside world.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.