Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japan's Greatest Men and Women by Mark WestonReview by: Lucian W. PyeForeign Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1999), pp. 148-149Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20049428 .

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Recent Books

stability and muddling through, however,

Jiang will find it difficult to advance China

through political manipulation alone.

such enduring political power, given that cities usually dominate politics in

developing nations. He argues that the

institutionalization of electoral politics occurred before industrialization, which

allowed peasants to learn the power of

the ballot from the start. Soon thereafter, bureaucrats and politicians became

enmeshed in agricultural policy. Like

Hansen, Varshney sees the Congress

Party split as seminal in switching the

roles of the central and state authorities

and in granting further advantages to the

rural sector. Yet he also sees the growth of rural power as limited because religious and caste cleavages continue to divide the

countryside and inhibit collective action.

As a result, he is less concerned over the

threat of Hindu nationalism. Time will

tell whether identity politics or economic interests will determine the next phase of

India's development.

The Saffron Wave: Democracy and

Hindu Nationalism in Modern India.

BY THOMAS BLOM HANSEN.

Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1999,328 pp. $49.50.

Democracy, Development, and the

Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in

India. BY ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 229 pp. $21.95 (paper).

Is Hindu nationalism about to subvert

India's remarkable democracy? Why can't India do a better job of reforming its economy? In tackling these questions,

Hansen goes back to the two antidemo

cratic constraints that have flawed India's

secular democracy since independence. First is the exaggerated attachment to

a technocratic administrative culture, which has caused Indians far more trouble

in the transition to a market economy than the Chinese ever faced. Second is the

government pledge to respect all religious communities and the affirmative-action

demands of the lower castes. The system worked in the early years because state and

local bosses wielded enough authority to

accommodate diversity. But after Indira

Gandhi split the Congress Party in

1969, the central government had to

address India's diversity directly?which opened the door to religion-based politics and the "saffron wave" of Hindu nation

alism. Although Hansen advances a subde

and sophisticated argument, he also

muddles his presentation with dense

postmodern rhetoric.

Varshney takes a different tack and asks

why the Indian countryside has enjoyed

Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japans Greatest Men and Women, by mark

weston. New York: Kodansha

America, 1999,352 pp. $30.00.

Everyone knows that consensus and

conformity rule in Japan, right? Wrong,

says Weston, who uses the biographies of outstanding Japanese to better under

stand Japanese economics, history, cultural

traditions, and politics. Starting with the

founders of Japan's great corporations?

Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Honda, and

Sony?Weston devotes more discussion

to business life in Japan than to individual

personalities. His treatment of historical

figures provides a vivid picture of Japanese

feudal society, and his recounting of

the great shoguns serves as an excellent

introduction to Japanese history. His

unique approach allows! him to fill the

[148] FOREIGN AFFAIRS- Volume78N0.4

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Recent Books

pages with interesting anecdotal informa

tion, but Weston also verges on excessive

awe of the Japanese, especially in economic

matters. He balances that approach with

personal accounts exposing the warts of

individuals and Japanese politics alike?

with former Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei as one good example.

Africa GAIL M. GERHART

Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, by Stephen howe. New

York: Verso, 1998, ^7 PP- $27.00. America's recent culture wars have in

cluded many skirmishes over afrocentrism, an ideology expounded by assorted black

writers such as Molefi Asante of Temple University. Howe enters the fray with

two objectives: to trace afrocentrism's

intellectual genealogy from its myriad antecedents and to evaluate the contem

porary ideology as history, myth, and

social theory. Fifteen well-researched

and relatively dispassionate chapters

survey pan-Africanism and n?gritude, Caribbean and Masonic influences, nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas about ancient Egypt and Nubia, cultural diffusion, and ethnonationalism.

One chapter critiques Martin Bernal's

Black Athena and another evaluates the

seminal ideas of Senegal's Cheikh Anta

Diop. Howe then comes out with guns

blazing to deride the contemporary

purveyors of the myths of afrocentrism.

Bogus as historians and fraudulent as

Africanists ("Their Africa is an imagi nary place"), they advance "something akin to a new religion" that dispenses

"compensatory therapy for the disad

vantaged" along the way. Worst of

all, he says, afrocentrism offers no

strategies to alleviate black poverty;

people need accurate information, not fantasy, about the world in order

to change it. A serious introduction

to a controversial subject.

The Guerrilla Dynasty: Politics and

Leadership in North Korea, by adri?n

buzo. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999,

323 pp. $26.00 (paper). A thoughtful and well-researched book at a time when North Korea's missile

and nuclear development increasingly dominates Washington's diplomatic

agenda. Buzo, an Australian diplomat

scholar, finds the enigmatic state's ori

gins in the life and personality of Kim II

Sung. First a teenage guerrilla who never

finished middle school, Kim came of age as a true Stalinist. Having spent his early life trapped in a Leninist organization that was literally fighting for day-to day survival, it is not surprising that

he developed into a secretive, paranoid leader. In turn, his son (and successor)

was brought up in the pervasive aura of

Kim's cult of personality. Buzo traces

with keen interpretation the skillful

ways in which Kim blended communism and nationalism at home and manipulated

Moscow and Beijing for diplomatic advantages abroad?all while American

officials saw only Korean weaknesses.

He carries the story through the current

negotiations between Pyongyang,

Washington, Beijing, and Seoul, but does not make predictions, being

wisely committed to the principle that

prophesy is voluntary folly.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS July/August 1999 [l4?]

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