A photograph of a newspaper book review: The single best book on Japan The Asian Bookshelf DONALD RICHIE MIRROR, SWORD AND JEWEL, by Kurt Singer, edited with an introduction by Richard Storry. Global Books, Inc., Folkestone, Kent: Japanese Library Classical Paperback, 1997, 174 PP., 1,499. All of us who have lived here are asked at one time or another, what is the single best book on Japan. When questioned, I name "Mirror, Sword and Jewel," by Kurt Singer. I feel no more honest book has been written about the country. Though it was completed just after the Pacific War and all of its material comes from the Japan of 1931-39, there is very little that does not describe in the most objective terms the Japan of today. Originally subtitled "A Study of Japanese Characteristics," it is the only book I know which truly describes Japan — and that description is unmarred by ideological or political considerations, or by special pleadings. It is the product of extraordinary insight supported by unusually broad cultural concern. As the late Richard Storry says in his admirable introduction, Singer's approach was meta-physical: He was an economist with the soul of a poet. In this edited version, Singer begins with a description of what it is like to be Japanese, a subjective exercise carried out with the greatest tact. Asking what this might be like, he was told by his informant: How should I be able to define the nature of the Japanese, being one of them my-self? Singer thus inferred that to conceive of a structured identity or unity was an alien idea; that the local attitude was not cognitive. Further, "the Japanese' learns to move "within a tightening set of restrictive rules" which can (and usually do) structure him The Western freedom for " finds its equivalent in "constraint from" and the person is built to a common cut more openly and more often than is thought usual in the West. This self-constructed "self" which is all that any of us can boast in the way of "personality," is seen as muted. Certainly "no people could be less entitled to complain of being misunderstood, unknown or neglected than the Japanese, whose first and last urge is to lead a life unseen by others." Singer points out that Japanese writings suggest rather than express, that traditional singing demands the repression of the voice, and that "in every gesture of daily life, in the style of conversation, in the proper form of giving a present, the point, it seems, is how to wrap up things, ideas, and feelings. Wherever these people go "they make a network of walls and fences behind which to retire: unwritten rules, ceremonies and taboos." The Japanese language, for example, so rich in ambiguities is well equipped for this life, with the result that "no-body deplores the resulting measure of haziness. It is by higher degrees of clarity and precision that the Japanese would feel inconvenienced." One of the results of this style of life, of which language is but an example, is that conflicts are not battled out rather they are es- chewed. "Conflicting powers are reduced to ceremonial forms allocated to well-defined places and times and occasions." We of the West may not approve, but there are strong and natural arguments tor such enforced harmonies. Let the Westerner sincerely try to live by Japanese custom, says Singer in one of his most felicitous passages, "and he will instantly feel what a cell endowed with rudiments of human sensibility must be supposed to feel in a well-co-ordinated body." All of this, and much more, is argued with precision and logic. A friend and one of the first German disciples of John Maynard Keynes, Singer knew, as did his economic mentor that nations are people and that people practice plurality. Thus Singer's book is no Nihonjin-ron at least not in the pejorative sense the term now deservedly enjoys). The author knows that society is made up of individuals, and so his work is about individuals who happen to be Japanese, rather than that many-headed myth "the Japanese. In this, as in so many other ways, Singer was extraordinarily prescient. A German scholar who fled the Nazis, and was eventually forced to leave this country by order of the Ministry of Education which was pressured by the Nazi Teachers' Association in Japan he went for a time to Australia, and then to Greece, where he died. In the meantime, the single copy of his magnificent manuscript (written in English) languished noticed by Dennis Keene and the late Richard Storry. The latter meticulously edited about two-thirds of the manuscript and then set about finding a publisher, which he eventually did: Croom Helm, a small English publisher, who put out a small edition. (This new issue is a photocopy copy of the 1973 edition). The Croom Helm edition promptly went out of print and was not republished until, to its eternal credit, Kodansha put out an 1981 edition, the one most of us own and cherish. The other third of the manuscript has not been found and its whereabouts remain unknown. Storry knew the entire manuscript and told me that it was just as fine as the work we now have it was left out of the original edition entirely for reasons of space. At least we now have the original edition of this extraordinary volume, the best single book ever written on Japan. It is being distributed locally by Tuttle Shokai or may be ordered from Global Books, Ltd. P.O. Box 219, Folkestone, Kent CT20 3LZ, England (Global Books Ltd was dissolved on 23 September 2025.)