NONFICTION - May 3, 1992

THE OUTNATION A Search for the Soul of Japan by Jonathan Rauch (Harvard Business School Press: 200 pp.; $18.95). At a time when strident anti-Japanese sentiment is on the rise--witness the increasing number of “Buy American” bumper stickers, or the recent successful move to take a transit contract back from a Japanese company and award it to a Southern California concern--Rauch, a Washington-based journalist and a 1990 fellow of the Japan Society Leadership Program, has written a surprising, accessible book about the nation that everyone loves to hate. Rauch spent six months in Japan and offers an idiosyncratic, anecdotal record of his experience that promises more to readers than a more theoretical work, simply because the information Rauch provides is so easy to get at. The book is, in a strange way, the world’s most intelligent, analytical travelogue, and readers who believe that understanding comes more quickly from the inside out--from detail to generality, rather than the other way around--will be mesmerized by the specifics of Rauch’s journey. He has an elegant way of poking holes in the reader’s assumptions: He addresses our beliefs about a society that crushes individuality by seeming to agree, quoting a Frenchman on the conformity of the anti-individual state--only to confess, in the subsequent section, that the Frenchman who just confirmed our worst suspicions was, in fact, writing about America in 1927. Yes, Rauch found examples of young people who were “corporatized” and seemed to lose any sense of inquisitiveness once they went to work. On the other hand, he saw parks full of families on the weekends-- both parents present, he points out, in a gentle nudge to all those careerist American moms and dads who send junior off with one parent while the other one pursues a professional dream.