The Samurai's Embrace: The Japanese Challenge, Dominique Nora

Devastated yesterday by war, deprived of an offensive army, Japan is today crushing Western societies on their own economic performance ground, in the very name of their capitalist values. The two richest men in the world are Japanese. The largest company and the seven most powerful banks are Japanese. The capitalization of the Tokyo Stock Exchange has surpassed that of Wall Street. Japan has become the planet's leading creditor, the leading provider of aid to developing countries, and the privileged banker of the United States. The international financial balance is maintained under the shelter of Japan's all-oxygen tent, on a drip of yen.From heavy industry to automotive, from real estate to consumer electronics, from high technology to finance, from the American dream of Hollywood's major studios to the French symbol of Bordeaux wines, Dominique Nora writes here the great novel of the armies of the Rising Sun on the march... Faced with this irresistible surge where the wound of infiltration vies with strategies of influence, the West seems disarmed. A vast experimental laboratory for a true global game of Go, America is today divided, as Europe will be tomorrow. Is Japan the savior of our growth or the gravedigger of our power? A normalized partner or an irreducible adversary? Is the Samurai only wooing us to gradually suffocate us, in a long kiss of death?Dominique Nora, born in 1958, a journalist in the economic department of Libération (1984-1988), permanent correspondent in the United States for Libération and L'Express (1988), then for Le Nouvel Observateur (1989), senior reporter for Le Nouvel Observateur, is the author of the best-seller Les Possédés de Wall Street (Denoël, 1987), which won the Prize for the best financial book in 1988.She investigated for several years in the United States and Japan to write this great epic of Japanese expansionism.