Congratulations on publishing the book! Pre-ordered. 日経BP is a fantastic publisher. I co-translated Hans Rosling’s “Factfulness” into Japanese (2019) and it was also published by 日経BP. It printed over 1 million copies in Japan in 2 years. Email me at shu.chibicode@gmail.com if you want to brainstorm promotion strategies. I’d also like to write a book review once it’s out!
I think the most effective promotion strategy if you can pull off is to appear on this economics/business YouTube channel called ReHacQ and have a fireside chat with 後藤達也さん, who is ex-Nikkei and one of the most famous economics influencers in Japan. Example: https://youtu.be/QPmOX-9hDpY?feature=shared
(David was a fellow Presidio Graduate School student, and I worked with Avary for a while.)
I also know plenty of more "traditional" households that just rent out space in their homes to friends on a long-term basis. (Including my own. My spouse and I have been doing the thing of finding a 3-4 bedroom place, becoming "anchor tenants", and then subletting a room or two, since we first moved in together. When we transitioned from renting to owning, our then-subletter became a renter in our new home. We also built an ADU, which is also rented out to somebody from our social network.)
Then you have larger scale co-ops, like Tortuga in Mountain View, where a bunch of people bought up a couple small apartment blocks. (I forget exactly how many units it is, eight maybe?)
I also know two different groups of six adults in the Cambridge / Somerville area who went in together buying a classic triple-decker, so each couple has one floor, the basement is done as a common TV / party / playroom, and assorted kids go up and down the back steps to visit each other.
While this violates the norm of the "nuclear family", with mom-and-dad having a household with their kids, surrounded by a white picket fence, that norm was always more or less a myth. The _vast_ majority of people through American history have lived with more complicated arrangements, with extended family, friends, and boarders.
When I was growing up, in a nice suburb of the Baltimore / DC area, my parents did own their own home. But there were a _bunch_ of periods where family or friends who were going through a rough time (getting divorced or whatever else) would stay with us for a month (or three, or six).
Welcome to the Nikkei BP club! (They published the Japanese edition of my book "Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World," too.)
>Why did Japan stagnate starting in 2008? It’s not clear.
I wonder if the lost decades played a role in this, or more to the point one specific factor. Companies pretty much stopped hiring new grads in 1994, triggering what is widely known as the Employment Ice Age (就職氷河期). It ended around 2004, but you had this generation of young people who failed to, or were prevented from, launching careers when they "should have" (traditionally). They were forced to work gig-economy stuff rather than the stable corporate jobs their parents' generation enjoyed. Could the late-Aughts stagnation be a delayed aftereffect?
Congratulations. I may get this book in Japanese just to practice my Japanese. I many of your articles have been translated, is there an archive of those? I would love to practice by reading them. Thanks
I might need to get the Japanese version of your book and do what you said, i.e. translate it back into English. I spent a little time in Aomori prefecture. Hachinohe (八戸市), 8 door city in Japanese. 三沢市, 3 marsh/swamp city. Languages are fascinating. 日経 (Day Biography ?) I am too busy learning German and Italian. It would be difficult to learn hiragana, katakana and kanji.
日経 is an abbreviation, commonly done in Japan using the first character of each word, for the phrase Nihon (日本, Japan) and Keizai (経, economy ) and is pronounced nikkei, which means Japanese economy. This also the name of the top financial newspaper there 日経新聞.
The first character 日does mean sun or day, and 本hon means root/book Japan is the farthest east country in Asia so is named the root of the morning sun. 経, kei means sutra , longitude or warp, and 済 sai/zai means finish, so I guess the word economy is based on warping to a final state.
Hopefully your book is featured on this YouTube channel called Pivot - they invite “it” people and often feature ppl with academic background who write books for normies. (A high school friend of mine who is a researcher of business and management at Todai wrote a book about GenZ and was featured on Pivot and Abema TV. I can ask him how he got the offers lol)
Yoi can self publish the English language original on Amazon, assuming you haven’t already sold the English language rights to the Japanese publisher, and make some money without the middleman. If you do eventually get a publisher for the English language version, you can pull the Amazon book at any time. Not an expert in this business, and never published a book, but worth exploring.
This jogged my memory of something I read about Wilf Corrigan and LSI in Japan. LSI had a subsidiary in Japan that Wilf had Japanese expats from America run it. They knew Japanese culture and American business culture. I don't know how that turned out in the long run.
Our daughter did work for Wilf's wife and she and my wife and I did enjoy their hospitality.
Congrats on the book Noah. Sadly my Japanese isn't up to reading complex economics (i get stuck at books for 7 year olds and restaurant menus!) but I've loved reading your posts on Japan and have found a lot of interesting ideas that help explain the changes I've observed.
I first went to live in Japan after university in 1998. It felt like a country of infinite possibility and it swept me along. Partly that is being 21 years old and being exposed to so many new ideas. It was extraordinary. Everyone was middle class (an introductory pamphlet from the British embassy informed me that 95% of Japanese referred to themselves as middle class which struck me as utterly extraordinary) and had disposable income. It felt incredibly wealthy compared to where I was from (Bristol in the UK). And it felt so much more developed than the UK. The wonder of high-speed rail travel!). Tiny mobile phones with email and internet! As you say, incredible household gadgets. I was based in Toyota City and had the pleasure of driving a prototype Prius in 1999. Japan felt like the future. And it challenged the implicit assumption at the heart of my whole education that the Western way was somehow superior.
But you could see the oddities of men waving sticks instead of traffic lights. Of over employment. People doing unnecessary jobs. There were NO COMPUTERS in City Hall. None. Even my mum working in the NHS at that time had a brick of a laptop. It seemed there was an unwillingness at an institutional level and specifically government to embrace the future that was fast arriving. I also noted the complete absence of women in the workforce past getting married and very few immigrants. And the very poor treatment of the Brazilian immigrant population in Toyota, a subject you touched on in another post.
I returned to the UK and with a friend set up a Japan tour operator so as to keep my connection with Japan and share something that had such a profound impact on my thinking and outlook. That business has done very well and enabled me to travel back every year and I have seen huge change. Mass immigration brought in under the radar (but only for low grade jobs). Far more women work but the glass ceiling is still firmly in place for most women. When I visited recently I felt the country lacked the confidence and sense of unlimited possibility it once held. I have plenty of my own theories on this but Japan for me lacks a sense of purpose as a nation. It doesn't seem to understand its place in the world or have confidence for its future. It is just a feeling and it isn't for me to pronounce on a while national identity! I have no right to do that. It's just my personal feeling.
Japan is still an extraordinary place. The artisan culture, the food, architecture, the shopping (my word! I hate shopping in the UK but Japan is a retail dream). The art and creativity and of course many places of extraordinary beauty. And the trains are still great (although less great since removal of the trolley food and drink service in the Tokaido Shinkansen...grrrrr).
I highly recommend Japan Unbound by John Nathan. Published in 2004 it is a series if essays looking at different aspects of Japanese culture and the profound social challenges and Japan wrestling with its sense of self and what is it for. It is hugely insightful and unusually for this sort of book, is largely based on going to talk with people. Ultimately I suspect it is the struggle to meet this challenge which lies at the heart of Japan's malaise (and the UK too actually).
Amazing work as always Noah. I don't know how you do it but I'm very glad you do!
You're right about Japanese people not knowing what a "weaboo" is. When I was last in Japan, I explained the term to a Japanese bartender in Osaka and she thought it was かわいい haha
Well they have a similar term in Japan for the opposite: Japanese people obsessed with older American youth culture, but it has negative connotations (mostly 1950s rocker style, with motorcycle boots or saddle shoes, leather jackets and pompadours) called ヤンキー (Yankees). Don’t see too many of them around as much these days.
Thanks for the serialized version of the first half of the book. Very interesting. The Japanese population peaked in around 2008 (and is now back at about it's level in 1990/1). Could population decline be the key to the decline/ slowing growth in GDP per capita in Japan?
Taking some liberties here, because the last kanji is usually pronounced AN not A, but a possible suggestion is 角数脳安 (sumisu noua) or in western order 脳安角数with the four kanji meaning square/angle, number, brain, easy/cheap, which I guess could be applicable.
Congratulations on publishing the book! Pre-ordered. 日経BP is a fantastic publisher. I co-translated Hans Rosling’s “Factfulness” into Japanese (2019) and it was also published by 日経BP. It printed over 1 million copies in Japan in 2 years. Email me at shu.chibicode@gmail.com if you want to brainstorm promotion strategies. I’d also like to write a book review once it’s out!
Thank you!!
I think the most effective promotion strategy if you can pull off is to appear on this economics/business YouTube channel called ReHacQ and have a fireside chat with 後藤達也さん, who is ex-Nikkei and one of the most famous economics influencers in Japan. Example: https://youtu.be/QPmOX-9hDpY?feature=shared
I'd love to!
"But the shift to dual-income households can only happen once"
tell that to my polycule
Oh dear 😅
I know some three- or four-adult households that are families, like these folks:
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/09/how-build-three-parent-family-david-jay/616421/
(David was a fellow Presidio Graduate School student, and I worked with Avary for a while.)
I also know plenty of more "traditional" households that just rent out space in their homes to friends on a long-term basis. (Including my own. My spouse and I have been doing the thing of finding a 3-4 bedroom place, becoming "anchor tenants", and then subletting a room or two, since we first moved in together. When we transitioned from renting to owning, our then-subletter became a renter in our new home. We also built an ADU, which is also rented out to somebody from our social network.)
Then you have larger scale co-ops, like Tortuga in Mountain View, where a bunch of people bought up a couple small apartment blocks. (I forget exactly how many units it is, eight maybe?)
I also know two different groups of six adults in the Cambridge / Somerville area who went in together buying a classic triple-decker, so each couple has one floor, the basement is done as a common TV / party / playroom, and assorted kids go up and down the back steps to visit each other.
While this violates the norm of the "nuclear family", with mom-and-dad having a household with their kids, surrounded by a white picket fence, that norm was always more or less a myth. The _vast_ majority of people through American history have lived with more complicated arrangements, with extended family, friends, and boarders.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/3/making-normal-neighborhoods-legal-again
When I was growing up, in a nice suburb of the Baltimore / DC area, my parents did own their own home. But there were a _bunch_ of periods where family or friends who were going through a rough time (getting divorced or whatever else) would stay with us for a month (or three, or six).
Welcome to the Nikkei BP club! (They published the Japanese edition of my book "Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World," too.)
>Why did Japan stagnate starting in 2008? It’s not clear.
I wonder if the lost decades played a role in this, or more to the point one specific factor. Companies pretty much stopped hiring new grads in 1994, triggering what is widely known as the Employment Ice Age (就職氷河期). It ended around 2004, but you had this generation of young people who failed to, or were prevented from, launching careers when they "should have" (traditionally). They were forced to work gig-economy stuff rather than the stable corporate jobs their parents' generation enjoyed. Could the late-Aughts stagnation be a delayed aftereffect?
That could definitely be a factor.
I enjoyed your book and highly recommend it.
Congratulations. I may get this book in Japanese just to practice my Japanese. I many of your articles have been translated, is there an archive of those? I would love to practice by reading them. Thanks
Yep! Here's an archive!
https://econ101.jp/category/translation/noah-smith/
I might need to get the Japanese version of your book and do what you said, i.e. translate it back into English. I spent a little time in Aomori prefecture. Hachinohe (八戸市), 8 door city in Japanese. 三沢市, 3 marsh/swamp city. Languages are fascinating. 日経 (Day Biography ?) I am too busy learning German and Italian. It would be difficult to learn hiragana, katakana and kanji.
日経 is an abbreviation, commonly done in Japan using the first character of each word, for the phrase Nihon (日本, Japan) and Keizai (経, economy ) and is pronounced nikkei, which means Japanese economy. This also the name of the top financial newspaper there 日経新聞.
The first character 日does mean sun or day, and 本hon means root/book Japan is the farthest east country in Asia so is named the root of the morning sun. 経, kei means sutra , longitude or warp, and 済 sai/zai means finish, so I guess the word economy is based on warping to a final state.
Hopefully your book is featured on this YouTube channel called Pivot - they invite “it” people and often feature ppl with academic background who write books for normies. (A high school friend of mine who is a researcher of business and management at Todai wrote a book about GenZ and was featured on Pivot and Abema TV. I can ask him how he got the offers lol)
Yoi can self publish the English language original on Amazon, assuming you haven’t already sold the English language rights to the Japanese publisher, and make some money without the middleman. If you do eventually get a publisher for the English language version, you can pull the Amazon book at any time. Not an expert in this business, and never published a book, but worth exploring.
Yep I'll probably just do that
How about that; I just landed in Tokyo. I'll have to pop out tomorrow and try to find a copy.
This jogged my memory of something I read about Wilf Corrigan and LSI in Japan. LSI had a subsidiary in Japan that Wilf had Japanese expats from America run it. They knew Japanese culture and American business culture. I don't know how that turned out in the long run.
Our daughter did work for Wilf's wife and she and my wife and I did enjoy their hospitality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Corrigan
Congrats on the book Noah. Sadly my Japanese isn't up to reading complex economics (i get stuck at books for 7 year olds and restaurant menus!) but I've loved reading your posts on Japan and have found a lot of interesting ideas that help explain the changes I've observed.
I first went to live in Japan after university in 1998. It felt like a country of infinite possibility and it swept me along. Partly that is being 21 years old and being exposed to so many new ideas. It was extraordinary. Everyone was middle class (an introductory pamphlet from the British embassy informed me that 95% of Japanese referred to themselves as middle class which struck me as utterly extraordinary) and had disposable income. It felt incredibly wealthy compared to where I was from (Bristol in the UK). And it felt so much more developed than the UK. The wonder of high-speed rail travel!). Tiny mobile phones with email and internet! As you say, incredible household gadgets. I was based in Toyota City and had the pleasure of driving a prototype Prius in 1999. Japan felt like the future. And it challenged the implicit assumption at the heart of my whole education that the Western way was somehow superior.
But you could see the oddities of men waving sticks instead of traffic lights. Of over employment. People doing unnecessary jobs. There were NO COMPUTERS in City Hall. None. Even my mum working in the NHS at that time had a brick of a laptop. It seemed there was an unwillingness at an institutional level and specifically government to embrace the future that was fast arriving. I also noted the complete absence of women in the workforce past getting married and very few immigrants. And the very poor treatment of the Brazilian immigrant population in Toyota, a subject you touched on in another post.
I returned to the UK and with a friend set up a Japan tour operator so as to keep my connection with Japan and share something that had such a profound impact on my thinking and outlook. That business has done very well and enabled me to travel back every year and I have seen huge change. Mass immigration brought in under the radar (but only for low grade jobs). Far more women work but the glass ceiling is still firmly in place for most women. When I visited recently I felt the country lacked the confidence and sense of unlimited possibility it once held. I have plenty of my own theories on this but Japan for me lacks a sense of purpose as a nation. It doesn't seem to understand its place in the world or have confidence for its future. It is just a feeling and it isn't for me to pronounce on a while national identity! I have no right to do that. It's just my personal feeling.
Japan is still an extraordinary place. The artisan culture, the food, architecture, the shopping (my word! I hate shopping in the UK but Japan is a retail dream). The art and creativity and of course many places of extraordinary beauty. And the trains are still great (although less great since removal of the trolley food and drink service in the Tokaido Shinkansen...grrrrr).
I highly recommend Japan Unbound by John Nathan. Published in 2004 it is a series if essays looking at different aspects of Japanese culture and the profound social challenges and Japan wrestling with its sense of self and what is it for. It is hugely insightful and unusually for this sort of book, is largely based on going to talk with people. Ultimately I suspect it is the struggle to meet this challenge which lies at the heart of Japan's malaise (and the UK too actually).
Amazing work as always Noah. I don't know how you do it but I'm very glad you do!
The space sector in Japan is impressive — relatively small, but destined, I think, for rapid growth via government subsidies.
You're right about Japanese people not knowing what a "weaboo" is. When I was last in Japan, I explained the term to a Japanese bartender in Osaka and she thought it was かわいい haha
Well they have a similar term in Japan for the opposite: Japanese people obsessed with older American youth culture, but it has negative connotations (mostly 1950s rocker style, with motorcycle boots or saddle shoes, leather jackets and pompadours) called ヤンキー (Yankees). Don’t see too many of them around as much these days.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AD%E3%83%BC_(%E4%B8%8D%E8%89%AF%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4)
Thanks for the serialized version of the first half of the book. Very interesting. The Japanese population peaked in around 2008 (and is now back at about it's level in 1990/1). Could population decline be the key to the decline/ slowing growth in GDP per capita in Japan?
I am curious about ノア スミス Noa Sumisu
Are there other ways you considered transliterating your name? Does the kanji have any meaning or connotation in Japanese?
I could adopt some kanji for my name, I suppose.
Taking some liberties here, because the last kanji is usually pronounced AN not A, but a possible suggestion is 角数脳安 (sumisu noua) or in western order 脳安角数with the four kanji meaning square/angle, number, brain, easy/cheap, which I guess could be applicable.
Ordered! Luckily Amazon jp ships to the us as well
Any chance your book will come out in English?