My room owns a small fortune in Japan-related books. Yes, the books belong to the room, not to me. I have been pitifully working on reading things in Japanese lately, such as my AnAn issues and Ryu Murakami's 限りなく透明に近いブルー, and in hopes of mixing things up a bit (aka: in despair of how long it takes me to read things in Japanese) read a couple of the English books on the shelf.
The first one was Japanese-American Cultural Battle: A Family Approach by Motofusa Murayama.
There were several interesting sections, but overall you get the feeling that he took it as an opportunity to complain about how his wife didn't magically transform into a Japanese woman as soon as he took her to Japan. His wife does have a little say in the translator's note in the beginning, and her tone makes it seem like things aren't as terrible as her husband makes them sound. The book was written for a Japanese audience, too, and it tends to pander to the idea Japanese-special-ness instead of offering a balanced look at the dynamics of a international marriage. This book is one of several (or just two? not sure), but I won't be reading any more of the series.
The other book I finished reading was Funny Business: An Outsider's Year in Japan. This was a much more satisfying read.
Apparently the Luce Scholarship has a requirement that the scholar headed to a foreign country should have relatively little knowledge about the destination and no experience living there. I personally find this to be a crazy requirement, why should someone be subjected to reinventing the wheel by trial and error in a new country? They can learn so much from people before them, and someone who has experience in the country can get over culture shock and get down to business faster. And in this case, it was absolutely ridiculous to send someone who has only had 2 months of Japanese training to work at Sony and have the company expect him to be able to speak and read business-level and technical Japanese. (This point was not lost on Gary-san.) While I do see that there is a special novelty in visiting a place without any prior prejudices (which really is impossible in this day and age, even the author talks about all of the praise for Japanese business practices he heard in his Master's/ college courses), I just don't know that the novelty is special enough to make inexperience a requirement.
Enough of my ranting about the program, Funny Business is a great story. It's depressing at some points to hear about the realities of Bubble Era Japan -- the author spends some time on gender issues in addition to general business practices, and while I know that things can't be exactly the same now as they were in 1983, I still cringe to think how little change there might be in the business world of Japan today. I highly suggest it, but it's important to keep in mind that it is dated by nearly 30 years.
I think I'll try to find some more current books to read next...