A Book Review: Confucius Lives Next Door by T.R. Reid

     Just finished re-reading Confucious Lives Next Door: What living in the East teaches us about living in the West by T.R.Reid and was reminded of the incredible insight Reid provides into Japanese culture and how aspects of Confucianism are interwoven into many facets of everyday life in Japan. I feel it is particularly well-written, with the structuring for many anthropological theories, and Reid isn't even a social scientist! I think more social scientists should be reading books like Reid's because it demonstrates an effective way to write about social science WITHOUT being overly jargon-filled and boring-and-dry-beyond-recognition (face it, we've all read that dry, academic text that, although fascinating, makes us want to fall asleep).

     Although I feel that the book is written with enormous theoretical value, it is written in such a way that academic and non-academic reader alike will enjoy it very much because the auto-biographical stories he tells paint an in-depth picture for the reader rather than presenting them with theory after theory and fact after fact. One of my complaints about Anthropology (and many others complain about it to) is that the discipline doesn't work hard enough to get its teachings out there for the general public. Or maybe, it's that not enough social scientists have the time or money to devote to making sure that social science is made available to more people and taught in more high schools (and middle schools, even!). I wish disciplines of social science would get more writers to present ethnography and the like by weaving facts and theories into a successful narrative that will teach more people and allow the knowledge to probably last over a much greater span of time than if it falls into a book nobody will ever see again (or won't see the light of day outside a library ever again). I'm not saying strictly academic thesis need to disappear, just that it would be nice to see version of these thesis show up in ways that more people outside the disciplines would read them. But alas, I believe this cry has been made before. I'll move back to the topic at hand...

     Reid brings us into the life of his family (he has a wife and two children in elementary school) and presents us with narrative that allows us to see through his eyes and understand what it was like for his family to move to Japan. Not that Reid is trying to demonstrate what it would be like for every American family to move to Japan - it's more that the topics he presents and events he brings to life for us are something that a lot of readers would be able to relate to because they are attributes of family life that are somewhat constant (IE: Children go to school. Children acting out. Going out to eat as a family. etc.).

     Although the book opens up with what I feel could be seen as an enormous amount of statistic quoting about Japanese life, crime, birth rates, death rates, life expectancy, etc. it is necessary to present these facts because, as Reid mentions, many Asian politicians like to quote their preferably low crime rates (and other "pretty" statistics) as a point of how well they are doing in comparison to western nations with skyrocketing murder rates and other similar, "not-so-pretty" statistics. Again, these facts are not presented in a dry manner - it's very cohesive.

   (Above: an old woodblock print of Confucius - with students, I believe.)

Pay extra attention to Reid's discussion of the term/word "Wa" - it means social harmony in Japanese society and is extremely important to understanding the social mechanisms within Japan.When a person breaks the "wa" they are violating a social principle and often bringing shame onto themselves and the groups they belong to! Violating the wa can sometimes be as simple as playing bass guitar too loud and disturbing the neighbors (in the book, Reid's son accidentally becomes "Meiwaku" - a disturber of the wa - when playing his electric bass too loud and distrubing his neighbors. Being labelled a Meiwaku is very bad for an American outsider because it can make getting along in the neighborhood very difficult!)

     Reid provides the reader with a fairly objective (as objective as one can be, really, when you're living a life in another country and admitting your personal biases and cultural upbringing as sometimes inextricable from your observation) review of the differences between nations brought up through Confucian, Eastern morals, and those of western nations (mostly he is referring to America), and certainly these culturally defined differences are what so many people focus on in their writing about Japan, but for some reason Reid does it in a way that is very successful, clear, objective, and not...well it's not boring! It's not some PhD-essay diatribe overly drenched in theory and jargon. The presentation of this book is down-to-earth in a way that still is of academic significance and an excellent insight into Japanese culture. Although I finished the book wanting to read more, I feel that he ended it at a good place for most readers. Perhaps it is just the information-hungry anthropologist inside me that craves more and more theory to compare and contrast with my own!
 Either way, pick this book up if you are hoping to learn more about the educational and cultural backdrop of the nation of Japan through the eyes of a well-written reporter and his family. It's a fantastic read, in my opinion.

 "But you don't have to take my word for it!" - L.Burton

Signing out for now,
 Lady Jones

I have to say I was a little sad when I found out Reading Rainbow was ending this year. It was one of the greatest children's television shows of my childhood, for sure, and it will definitely be missed. Apparently the network execs said that it wasn't appropriate for modern children because it couldn't effectively teach children to read and that encouraging the passion of reading wasn't enough anymore. I think that's a bunch of crud, but then again I'm no television executive so what do I know?

 Here's the intro for anyone who remembers watching the show as a child. I'll be quoting Burton for a little while when I do a book review, so I thought I'd explain why. Maybe it's just to keep the memory of the show alive a little longer.