Career Memoir – education and deconstruction.com

Breaking With Moscow

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Breaking With Moscow” by Arkady N. Shevchenko, published in 1985. In this wordy volume, whose language is slightly awkward in spots, the author recounted his life and what he did when his cognitive dissonance (which everyone experienced in the former USSR) reached the breaking point.

Born in 1930, the author did his doctoral thesis on disarmament, a trendy topic in the mid-1950’s. He began working at the Soviet Foreign Ministry in October 1956. There, office resources were in short supply. He had to wait more than six months (!) to get his own desk.

In 1958, in order to have a career, he was forced to join the Communist Party; in order to move up the political ladder, he was forced to spend countless hours in Party organization, and self-criticism meetings. Prior to getting an overseas assignment, he had to be vetted backwards and forwards.

Soviet Premier Khrushchev thought president JFK was weak after he witnessed the JFK administration’s failure to: oust Castro in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and stop the construction of the Berlin Wall. So Khrushchev thought he could secretly assemble ready-to-launch missiles in Cuba and the US would do nothing once they were discovered. But he was impressed when JFK finally got tough and ordered the missiles removed in October 1962.

Beginning in 1973, Shevchenko became the UN Under Secretary General for Political and Security Council Affairs. His employer-provided housing was cramped, as he and his wife had to share a three-bedroom suite with two other tenants on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Thirteen of the twenty comrades (whom he didn’t hire and over which he had no control) he supervised were either members of the GRU or the KGB.

The USSR’s government in Moscow required that every Soviet employee pay a kickback to it; it was also the ultimate authority on approving all of Shevchenko’s communications with UN ambassadors. Messages therefore got garbled through misunderstandings in a game of “telephone.”

Spring 1977 saw the Politburo cracking down on its diplomats’ palling around with Westerners. The Politburo imposed draconian rules on its foreign-policy employees in trying to keep them from becoming influenced by bourgeois values. For the umpteenth time, it proceeded to hysterically propagandize that foreigners were national-security risks (similar to the way American media company Fox has been doing for the past ten years!).

The bloated staff of Soviet bureaucrats at the UN consisted of overpaid noisemakers doing make-work, desperately clinging to their jobs, trying to feel important; skilled in ideological propagandizing. They knew nothing about worldwide affairs and troubles, or history. Their job was to further the USSR’s goal of world conquest, but their power was limited to the role of ceremonial messengers at social events. Sounds familiar.

In 1981, Premier Brezhnev theorized that all countries of the world would inevitably practice socialism. It is unclear at this point how much further the US government will go in taking financial control of its healthcare, education and housing services.

Since the mid-twentieth century, numerous American men and a few women and their families have received government-subsidized (socialist!) education, healthcare and some housing, because they have served in the military. But as there has been no military draft in the last fifty years, that number has dropped dramatically.

The Soviet bureaucrats dismissed as cliche, the kinds of crimes America’s president Richard Nixon committed. On a daily basis, they hushed up their own routine behaviors of ruling by fear and force, spying and corruption.

Andropov and Chernenko maintained the charade of allowing the old, sick Brezhnev to continue to serve as top leader of the USSR because they needed time to consolidate their power bases to win their respective power struggles.

Read the book to learn a whole lot more about Shevchenko’s adventures stumping for the USSR.

Far From Home

The Book of the Week is “Far From Home, An Alaskan Senator Faces the Extreme Climate of Washington, D.C.” by Lisa Murkowski with Charles Wohlforth, published in 2025.

Murkowski was born in 1957 in Alaska. Since the federal government owns more than thirty percent of Alaska, its policies play a large role in the state’s economy and well-being. More than a quarter of the land is owned by the state government; a little more than a tenth—by corporations owned by Native Americans, who comprise about seventeen percent of Alaska’s population.

Alaska has more than two hundred rural villages, and, as of the book’s writing, some still had the living standards of a Third-World country—no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no paved roads. It is quite cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive for politicians to make campaign visits to those villages, via a few different planes, boats or cars. Murkowski, a moderate Republican U.S. senator who votes pursuant to her conscience, not the Party line, takes the time and trouble to meet her fellow residents, because she passionately cares about them.

“White people in Washington were a substantial minority but they had created a kind of bubble of affluence, an apartheid in which they didn’t have to interact with people of color and could willfully ignore their own prejudice.” Murkowski (who is herself white) found that out when her sons (also white) were on a Virginia soccer team with diverse members. White parents cheering on their kids, spewed the most offensive slurs, but they didn’t consider themselves detestable creatures. They still considered themselves good people.

Other adults behaved badly, too. In the single-digit 2000’s, in Washington, D.C., prosecutors in the Justice Department put oil-industry lobbyist Bill Allen on trial for corruption, but suppressed evidence that allowed Allen to go free, and at the same time, ruined the reputation of the wrongly accused late Senator Ted Stevens, Republican from Alaska. The moral of the story can be summed up in two cliches, “A man is known by the company he keeps” and “When you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.” Stevens knew that Allen was “bad news” but allied with him, anyway.

In the early single-digit 2000’s, when Murkowski was running for reelection, she lost the primary to yet another sleazy piece-of-work of an alleged grownup. However, her father impressed upon her the fact that, as his daughter, she should never give up! So she continued her campaign as a write-in candidate. Her victory would thus be extremely unlikely. Nonetheless, Murkowski’s cousin took particular delight in posting the opposing candidate’s sordid, hypocritical history on social media, and journalists picked up on it. An opposition research firm gave her free publicity by also doing the same.

Read the book to learn much more about Murkowski’s life experiences that led her to end up in the U.S. Senate, and the trials, tribulations and triumphs in her career.

Fight Back and Win

The Book of the Week is “Fight Back and Win, My Thirty-Year Fight Against Injustice – and How You Can Win Your Own Battles” by Gloria Allred with Deborah Caulfield Rybak, published in 2006.

Allred, a civil-rights attorney, was born in southwestern Philadelphia in July 1941. She wrote about the lessons she learned from her activities, and tried to inspire readers to stick up for themselves if they had been the victims of discrimination. However, her method of settling disputes through the courts is extremely expensive and emotionally wrenching. It was obviously in her best financial interest to promote the launching of lawsuits.

She recounted some of her most famous court cases, many of which involved tabloid-celebrities. She admitted to staging publicity stunts to get attention, thinking they would help her clients. Some people might think the actions she took were unbecoming an attorney. In the United States– the staging and scripting of media events (or non-events but merely pushing propaganda) is nothing new for people from all walks of life who protest perceived injustices.

Jerry Rubin, a member of the “Chicago Eight” spread disinformation just before the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Three TV stations bought his lie and reported on the local news that ten thousand “Yippies” (slang for members of Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Party) planned to protest-march in the nude at the Convention. The media had visions of naked demonstrators getting their heads bashed in by law enforcement. Indignant letter-writing to Chicago newspapers ensued. Actually, fully-clothed demonstrators got their heads bashed in, and the idiot box and newspapers still got their sky-high fill of viewers and readers.

Political-front groups are nothing new. They are secretly funded by big-money donors who hire a handful of troublemakers who incite violence at street-demonstrations. Most of the people who attend such events are brainwashed into thinking they’re helping make political change, peacefully. They clearly haven’t read their history. They never learn!

Through the decades, street demonstrations alone have never effected significant political change in America. Not even when people died, as happened at “Kent State” in May 1970. The Vietnam war still dragged on and on.

The major historical events during which street-protests have worked (in other countries) include: the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution in 1918 (as seen in the treatment of the Romanovs) and in Romania in 1989 as seen in the treatment of the Ceausescus. Other instances (with ample help from the United States via the CIA), to name a few, include: the Marcoses in the Philippines, Duvaliers in Haiti, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. There is insufficient room here to elaborate on why, in these cases, citizens who took to the streets, were able to oust their country’s leadership.

Anyway, Allred’s political stunts have largely faded from the public’s memory, to be replaced by more recent ones staged and scripted or incited by the biggest publicity hound in American history, Donald Trump. Despite the number of lawsuits Allred has won against powerful people– even politicians– in her decades representing victims of discrimination, it seems the nation has regressed, because it tolerates Trump’s abuses.

In 1992, there was still a double-standard in connection with racism versus sexual harassment in the workplace. “If he [Oregon Republican Senator Bob Packwood] had racially harassed members of his staff, he would have been forced to resign. Why was it acceptable to sexually harass women?” It took three years to bring him to justice.

Read the book to learn additional details, and about lots of other legal fights in which Allred engaged in her decades-long career.

All the Worst Humans

The Book of the Week is “All the Worst Humans, How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians” by Phil Elwood, published in 2024. This short volume was authored by an alcoholic adrenaline-junkie and occasional drug addict who was happiest when he was afforded opportunities to use his creativity to help his clients weasel out of image-trouble, burnish their image, or launch a smear campaign.

Born around 1980, Elwood began to acquire valuable contacts in Washington, D.C. when he did a summer internship in the U.S. Senate. Elwood was pleasantly surprised that, after ruining his own reputation, one such contact wrote a recommendation letter on his behalf to help him get accepted to a different college.

Most of the time, the following publications are the major influencers on breaking news: Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, Politico, Axios, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. The last three have a paywall– users must subscribe to them, and pay to read their articles. As is well known, in the last several decades, elected officials and their staffs in Washington, D.C., the media, the entertainment industry, Silicon Valley, professional sports and Wall Street have all incestuously melded together to create one big gossip circle. Readers who are no longer willing to pay for news, miss out on the gossip.

The author commented that there are currently a few tens of thousands of people who call themselves “journalists” while there are a few hundreds of thousands of people employed in the public relations industry. Very nearly all (except for this blog!) global communications are now sponsored-opinions, after so many decades of changes to information-sharing. Four of many milestones that set shameful precedents include:

In 1963, a journalist broke the taboo against prying into the personal lives of professional athletes when he revealed that Sandy Koufax was adopted. After that, privacy invasion became the norm.
In 1982, the New York Times eliminated the firewall between its editorial and advertising departments. Sports Illustrated did the same in the late 1980’s.
The year 1984 saw Republicans launch a fishing expedition of, and vicious smear campaign against Democrat vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro’s husband. Even for modern times, the high level of nastiness was extreme– and Republicans have continued such behavior to date, more than the Democrats.
Beginning in the 1980’s, the FCC relaxed its antitrust laws, allowing Rupert Murdoch to create a monster-sized multimedia empire (by purchasing the New York Post newspaper, Twentieth Century Fox, HarperCollins and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few propaganda outlets) with its attendant extremely large concentration of resources that allowed for infinite conflicts of interest that afforded him and his cronies the kinds of growth opportunities that free-market competitors couldn’t possibly hope to match.

To get additional information on how money, power and political hacks have corrupted every aspect of how people find out what’s going on in the world, feel free to read all the posts in this blog’s category “Publishing Industry Including Newspapering.”

Anyway, the author planted the following naive passage in his writing: “Salaries in some newsrooms are going up. Private equity is buying up media companies left and right. Foreign nations are investing heavily, too. Lines of ethics are blurring.” Newsflash: all these trends are decades-old!

Nonetheless, read the book to learn of the author’s adventures in image-management.

Along these lines, here’s a song about yet another downfall of someone once-rich and powerful (brought to you by Elwood-style PR.). This is what the Democrats are singing to the American president, whose name rhymes with “rump” and “dump.”

MIDTERMS-KARMA

sung to the tune of “Instant Karma” (1970 version) with apologies to the Estate of John Lennon and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Midterms-karma is gonna get you.

Gonna flip the states that are Red.

You’ll try to give yourself a pardon.

No one will shut up and take your bread.

All the world has had enough,

laughing behind your back,

all over the earth you’re a TACO.

They know you go low, yeah, low.

Midterms-karma is gonna get you.

A man like you is once-and-always.

Even the “new” Nixon wasn’t the “new” Nixon.

Yours is an open and shut case.

Your sins, the whole world is gonna see.

You’ll be blasting the fools in your GOP.

Everyone on earth knows who you are. A has-been tsar.

Far Right you are.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone.

Well, we all pile on. Everyone. Come on.

Midterms-karma is gonna get you.

You lay down with dogs, you got fleas.

You know a man is known by,

the company he keeps.

Everyone knows you’re outa here.

You’ve made so many live in pain and fear.

Why are you there, when you should be nowhere?

You got more than your share.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone.

Well, we all pile on.

Gone and gone and gone, gone and gone.

Yeah, yeah, alright, uh-huh, uh.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone.

Well, we all pile on.

Gone and gone and gone, gone and gone.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone…

Speaking Out

The Book of the Week is “Speaking Out, Inside the Reagan White House” by Larry Speakes with Robert Pack, published in 1988.

Born in September 1939, the author grew up in a small town in Mississippi. He suffered from impostor syndrome when he began working in the Reagan White House as deputy press secretary in early 1981. However, he gained confidence as he witnessed the gaffes committed by self-important alpha-males amid their power struggles in his rarefied workplace. There were the usual inter-agency rivalry and scapegoating when things went wrong. “State blamed the White House, the White House blamed Defense, and the CIA blamed everybody.”

As is well known, in March 1981, Reagan was shot in the chest, but survived. Immediately after the president had become incapacitated, Alexander Haig, then-secretary of state, made a major misstatement to the press, saying HE was in charge of the administration, and could act on the president’s behalf. Haig was a publicity hound, stopping for a photo opportunity whenever he could.

Speakes, pursuant to the U.S. Constitution, clarified the succession of power of the president: vice president; speaker of the House; and then president pro tempore of the senate; after that, secretary of state.

Pat Buchanan was another troublesome coworker. In March 1986, he wrote an inflammatory Op-Ed piece–unvetted by Speakes’ department– that was published in the Washington Post. That piece said if Congressional Democrats voted against the bill giving financial aid to the Contras, they were as evil as the Commies supporting Daniel Ortega, leader of Nicaragua. Additionally, Buchanan praised Oliver North after the Iran Contra scandal broke.

Reagan finally made a speech equivalent to Nixon’s “Checkers speech” when his people were forced to admit that Israel helped the United States sell weapons to Iran; a secret operation orchestrated primarily by Oliver North, John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane. The president declined to pardon them, because pardoning them would indicate they had committed a crime! He maintained they were innocent.

Another interesting factoid: During president Reagan’s eight years, approximately seventeen hundred people were provided with press passes to report on the administration.

Read the book to learn of Speakes’ experiences managing the optics of the administration, given the tenor of the times and the difficult personalities involved.

Chasing Hope

The Book of the Week is “Chasing Hope, A Reporter’s Life” by Nicholas Kristof (not to be confused with Bill Kristol!), published in 2024.

In 1959 the author was born in a lower middle-class rural area in Oregon, where boys saw violence as an admirable trait to be used to used to achieve frontier justice. Although his neighborhood was rife with alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence and crime, Kristof grew up in a stable, intellectual, loving home environment. That could be why, as a teenager, he chose to become a journalist who revealed the world’s ugliness– to try to reduce it.

Kristof witnessed martial law in Poland and China, and the nature of the heroin trade in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While in Congo (formerly Zaire) he heard firsthand about the atrocities and genocide in Rwanda. He wrote stories on the dictatorships and crushing oppression in North Korea, Venezuela, Turkmenistan and many other places.

After a few decades of reporting on human rights abuses, he took a break to run for office. Professionals told him to change his language, so that “gun control” became “gun safety” and “inequality” became “opportunity.” To be fair, he admitted that Portland had serious problems that were caused by Democrats because it was mostly Democrats who governed it.

But the bottom line for him was, “What matters is improving opportunities and quality of life, and that’s achieved not by waving fists and shouting slogans but by a painstaking process of following evidence, building coalitions and solving problems.”

Read the book to learn much more about Kristof’s life and global times.

Unleashed

The Book of the Week is “Unleashed” by Boris Johnson, published in 2024. This large volume was a bragfest, but it also explained the author’s opinions and his government’s policies for laypeople.

Johnson was born in 1964. “Disaster” was his favorite word. As London’s mayor starting in May 2008, he began implementing some of the same crime-fighting and environmental initiatives taken by former New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

Beginning in June 2016, after 52% of the UK’s 17.4 million population voted in favor of Brexit, heated discussions were had by everyone, including Lord Chief Justice, Master of the Rolls, and President of the Queen’s Bench Division. In 2019, Johnson was elected UK prime minister, and he became the nation’s biggest Brexit booster. The nation’s moneyed classes, and those who were pro-immigrant, wanted to remain in the EU.

The EU leadership in Brussels controlled many aspects of the economies of member-countries because it set the terms and conditions on trade unions, customs fees, currencies, factories, distribution of goods, national-border policies, etc. Johnson felt the UK was hamstrung by all the petty rules. He claimed that Canada was able to export its goods to EU’s markets absent the regulations to which the UK was subject.

In April 2020, when the prime minister ended up in the intensive care unit with a bad case of COVID, “Outside in the corridors of the hospital, though I never saw them, were representatives of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, despatched by Donald Trump to revive me with drugs not licensed or approved in the UK.”

The COVID pandemic in 2020 was a game-changer. Johnson contended that because the UK was no longer a member of the EU, certain forward-looking, skilled members of his administration were able to secure a vaccination program that was more widespread and implemented sooner than EU members’ programs. Harm done to the UK’s people and its economy was therefore significantly less than that done to comparable countries.

Nevertheless, the line graph of COVID deaths followed a largely similar pattern for each nation where COVID’s effects on the population was tracked– regardless of the actions leaders took. Sweden’s policies on quarantining were optional, while China’s were draconian, but both of their graphs showed two peaks during which the death toll went up and down during the course of the pandemic.

Another political issue shared by all major governments of the world, is immigration. Johnson heard how Australia supposedly deterred uninvited people fleeing their homelands, from arriving on its shores. Its federal immigration agency transported those people– to have their asylum claims processed to– not the nicest destination, to put it mildly, 4,500 miles to the island of Nauru. Perhaps the U.S. could look into such a policy, given that it too, is overwhelmed with asylum-seekers who have arrived on its soil illegally.

Read the book to learn much more about Johnson’s political life and times.

The Face Laughs – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries, The Education of A Doctor” by Stephen L. Hauser, published in 2023.

Born at the dawn of the 1950’s, the author grew up mostly in Bayside, a section of Queens in New York City. He began conducting medical research in the 1970’s, when knowledge and resources were extremely limited. His first drug-study involved 58 multiple-sclerosis patients selected from two hospitals in Boston. He got to know every patient personally.

Around 2010, the author was a small cog in the wheel of a much, much more extensive multiple-sclerosis-drug study that involved 2,500 patients affiliated with more than 300 hospitals on 5 continents. There were data galore from MRI’s, test results from clinicians and blood and spinal fluid, and integrity- monitoring of the whole extravaganza. Nine million pages of information.

Read the book to learn much, much more about the doctor’s experiences with his medical research and the U.S.’s drug-approval process.

ENDNOTE: The author recounted a few medical cases of people who had lost their minds. They turned out to have brain damage from multiple sclerosis.

Regardless of the cause of the inability of the patients to do their jobs– they couldn’t do their jobs competently. When such workers are responsible for leading a sprawling entity, where people’s lives or livelihoods hang in the balance, there can be extracurricular activity because no one is minding the store.

Two particular cautionary tales in the United States come to mind in connection therewith. It is true, no one person, not even the top leader is entirely to blame when things go wrong, but they get blamed because one thing leads to another, due to their impaired brain function.

Authors of personal accounts have documented how Ronald Reagan had reduced brain function in his second term as U.S. president; among them, George Shultz and Lesley Stahl. Peggy Noonan claimed Reagan had a hearing aid that was only sometimes on, so he was blissfully unaware of a lot of events he should have known about. The head of the CIA, Bill Casey was dying of a brain tumor. One subordinate of his, Oliver North, went rogue– played a large role in secretly selling weapons to the Iranians, with the help of Israel and Saudi Arabia!

The other instance involved Bill Paley, who was head of the international corporation, CBS, into the 1980’s. He would come into board meetings with a walker and two nurses by his side. Due to extensive memory loss, he was clueless as to what was going on. Since he wasn’t truly running the company anymore, a rogue department at CBS, having zero experience, decided to try to make movies. That division generated disastrous losses that resulted in layoffs in unrelated departments, causing trauma for all stakeholders associated with CBS.

In both of the above instances, there would have been a lot less trouble had the leader been removed when his incompetence due to reduced brain function became evident. Hint: the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution can be invoked when a president is deemed sufficiently cognitively impaired to warrant his removal.

What’s Left Unsaid

The Book of the Week is “What’s Left Unsaid, My Life at the Center of Power, Politics, and Crisis” by Melissa DeRosa, published in 2023.

Born in the early 1980’s in Rochester in New York State, DeRosa worked in New York State politics. By April 2017, she had achieved a high-level job in governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration.

The author wrote that the federal government under president Trump handled the 2020 COVID pandemic in a way reminiscent of the movie, The Hunger Games, pitting states against one another for scarce medical supplies.

In mid-April 2020, the president declared that lifting the COVID lockdown in different areas of life nationwide, would rest on his authority. But conditions varied widely nationwide. Governors in seven northeastern states banded together to invoke the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which allows state governments jurisdiction over local law enforcement in the event of a public health emergency. Trump reversed himself in short order.

In late April 2020, DeRosa had a falling out with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. He was more worried about: voter-polling results (opinions) on COVID policies in swing states (that indicated whether his father-in-law was winning the then-presidential race!) than statistical medical data used to take actions to minimize the death rate.

According to the author, Cuomo’s people didn’t pick their battles with the media. They tried to fight them all– over every word in their every communication, making them appear contentious and petty. By May 2020, the collective mood of the nation was downright hostile over the COVID situation. The media took out its anger on Cuomo’s personnel.

As is well known, Cuomo became the victim of various acts of mean, nasty political retaliation. “Suddenly, you had a bizarre coalition calling for the governor’s resignation: Democratic Socialist AOC on the same side as MAGA Elise Stefanik in Congress, locking arms with the Democratic and Republican extremists in the state legislature.”

Read the book to learn about DeRosa’s experiences as a close Cuomo adviser in one crisis after another.

ENDNOTE: In order for public officials to achieve effective leadership of the United States: Numerous, diverse people must take years to analyze contemporary political issues while considering historical perspectives in order to understand how to make the necessary compromises required for workable solutions.

The top leader of the country has no time to do so after he or she has been elected. So, the public servants who accomplish the most to improve the lives of the highest number of people, are those who not only possess sufficient maturity and social skills, but those who have specific proposals that have been shown to work long-term, at-the-ready, before they get elected.

Not those who play well with the political machine, the media and their donors.

tokyo junkie [sic]

The Book of the Week is “tokyo junkie [sic], 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys… and Baseball” by Robert Whiting, published in 2021.

Whiting was born at the dawn of the 1940’s in northern California. In January 1962, while in the U.S. Air Force, he was assigned to Fuchu Air Base in a Tokyo suburb. He fell in love with Tokyo and the culture of its people, despite its sexism, pervasive sex trade, hatred of foreigners, and government censoring of its media.

Tokyo was undergoing a makeover to prepare for its debut as the venue of the 1964 Olympics. During the Vietnam Era, American college campuses exploded in protest against the war. The Japanese government supported the war. By 1969, Japanese students were protesting, too.

Over the course of decades, the author witnessed how the city changed from a war-ravaged backwater to an economic powerhouse. After WWII, the U.S. maintained a military presence in Japan, and nursed it back to economic health. This process was reflected in Japan’s education system, which mandated rigorous, nerve-racking entrance exams, which had a decidedly capitalist bent.

Another aspect of Japanese culture that showed its emulation of the United States, was the popularity of its professional baseball. However, the Japanese put their own twist on it. They allowed a few Americans to play on their teams, but criticized them for doing too well or too poorly. Too much competition would make the opposing team feel bad, but a player yielding too much to an opposing team, would be told to do better for his own team. Cooperation and sacrificing for one’s own team were key aspects of play.

The author noted one positive behavior pattern the Japanese were taught from birth. That was– maintaining the highest respect for other people’s property, and for public property. Their “lost and found” returned personal items to their owners (even cash, without a penny missing!) as a matter of the right thing to do. Tokyo is one of the cleanest cities in the world because the people feel a collective sense of ownership of their streets, so they don’t “foul their own nest.” Ironically, their politicians are notoriously corrupt.

Read the book to learn much, much more on the author’s take on how Japanese culture changed following major historical events such as Olympics, financial ruin, earthquakes, tsunamis, and globalization.