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Inside Japan, Inc.
Item Name:Inside Japan, Inc.
Reviewer Name:Osawa, Terutomo
Reviewer Affiliation:Colorado State University
Review Source:Association for Asian Studies
Review Source URL:http://www.aasianst.org
Review Citation:Osawa, Terutomo. (1993). "Video Review of The Pacific Century: An Introduction to Modern Asia." Journal of Asian Studies, 52: 512-521.



REVIEW

This is a powerful series of video programs on the political and economic developments in the Asian Pacific, explored in a continuous historical perspective from the nineteenth century onward. This telecourse was organized by the Pacific Basin Institute as an introductory Asian Studies course and is part of the Annenberg CPB Collection. The program is composed of ten one-hour videos, supplemented by a package of (a) one main textbook, Pacific Century: The Emergence of Modern Asia, written by Mark Borthwick and his associates, (b) an accompanying reader, The Pacific Century: America and Asia in a Changing World, written by Frank Gibney, (c) a faculty manual, and (d) a study guide--a package divided into 13 units of instruction.

The series is highly informative and enlightening; how many of the viewers knew that Britain--and other Western powers, including American China traders who connived and succeeded in processing opium in India (by British) and in Turkey (by Americans) and selling it to China because the "modern" West had not much to offer in exchange for then-coveted Chinese merchandise such as tea, china, and silk? How many knew that 20,000 Chinese soldiers were in Europe as an ally during World War I? How many knew that Ho Chi Minh's rise to power in Vietnam was initially supported by the United States (three American officers participated in his army as advisers by parachuting down into Ho's jungle stronghold) and that when Ho Chi Minh celebrated Vietnam's independence in 1945, the people jubilantly waved American flags and carried President Harry Truman's portrait in their parade. Ho even quoted the U.S. Declaration of Independence. How many really knew that when a Peace Treaty was signed between the U.S. and Japan in 1951, the tacit agreement was that Japan's mercantilistic economic recovery efforts would be tolerated by the United States in exchange for the latter's right to station American forces on Japanese soil? (This rapprochment provided the basis for the so-called Yoshida doctrine under which the Yoshida administration concentrated on the reconstruction of the Japanese economy under the protective military umbrella of the United States.) Even those who think they are familiar with the Asian region and history will surely learn a great deal from this program.

As rightly claimed, the program is unique; "At first glance, there would seem to be an abundance of [general guides to the Pacific Basin that are accessible to the non-specialist], but none of them provides a survey of major themes in the economic and political development of the Pacific Asian region in ways that integrate the past with the present (italics added) (Pacific Century, p. xiii.). " Indeed, the topical coverage is quite interdisciplinary, though somewhat more strongly skewed to history and politics than to economics in the video, if not in the accompanying reading materials. All sorts of institutional and historical forces, as they were shaped in one period, altered or even dissipated in another, are reflected in this unravelling epic of the Pacific Century. Going through the video, one would probably feel as if one were browsing through Foreign Affairs, National Geographic, Life, Fortune, The Economist, and Time all at once. Such is the intricate nature of this program.

Because of the complexity and diversity of the region's political and historical experiences, combined with the fast-changing undercurrents of modern capitalism and technology that sweep throughout Pacific Asia, the program proceeds from one topic to another with kaleidoscopic dizziness and at a highly condensed pace. Nearly two centuries' interactions between East and West are explored in this ambitious and energetic manner, perhaps an appropriate feature consistent with the nature of the dynamic topic explored: "a mutual transformation of the United States into a Pacific power and of Pacific Asia into a 'modern' interdependent world region (Pacific Century, p. 3)." The recurring basic themes are (a "progress" and tradition, (b) collisions between East and West, (c) democracy, authority, and power, (d) the United States in the Pacific, and (e) economic resources and interdependence (These five themes are emphasized in the faculty manual to assist the instructor in maintaining an overall coherence for the entire program.).

Since the core of this program is the ten video hours, each unit's major theme will be briefly reviewed to assess how the entire story is pieced together in a mosaic of the recurring themes.

Video 1: Asia and the Challenge of the West

This first unit briefly reviews an ancient Chinese history in which, while Europe was in the Dark Ages, the Middle Kingdom of the Tang Dynasty flourished and attracted admiration from throughout the Asian world, as well as the Middle East, for its advanced culture, civilized system of government, and its social order governed by the thoughts of Confucianism. But later, China was invaded and conquered by a northern tribe, the Mongol, whose leader, Genghis Khan and his offspring, especially Kublai Khan, built a trade oriented far-flung empire, covering present-day Iran, Russia, Poland, Hungary, and reaching as far as the Danube and the Adriatic Sea. The world's most famous caravan route, the Silk Road, was then opened and protected for commerce by the Great Khan. Marco Polo and other European merchants marveled at China's technologically superior goods, such as gunpowder, compasses, printing machines, and paper money.

However, the Ming and Manchu Dynasties that replaced the Mongol empire became increasingly inward and insular; in fact, the present remnants of the Great Wall of China are the fortifications built during the Ming Dynasty. To the southeast, China had felt safely protected by the vast ocean of the South China Sea. This insularity, however,was nullified when seaborn barbarians, Western powers, in a quest for colonies and in fierce rivalry with each other, made incursions into the coast of China. Initially confined to Macao and to the trading factories in Canton, the western nations, including the United States, eventually divided up China after the Opium Wars. Pacific Asia became mainly an European domain throughout the nineteenth century, as the West possessed formidable modern weaponry (iron steamships, powerful cannons, and a well-trained navy).

The fruits of the Industrial Revolution, combined with the rise of imperial capitalism, set in motion the expansionism of European nations throughout the world, and China could no longer hide itself from the vortex of modernization gushing toward its shores. In the first place, China had several valuable goods, such as tea, porcelain, and silver, too valuable to be ignored by the West. China trade, centered on opium smuggling from the West, was enormously profitable. Trade was forced on a reluctant China--and soon on Japan as a supply base for America's Far East trade.

Video 2: The Meiji Revolution

A group of Japanese samurai called "shishi" (man of high purposes) were alarmed by the visit of "black ships" under the command of Commodore Perry in 1853 and by China's plight--and were soon humiliated by the guns bombarding the southern provinces of Japan, their home areas. They realized that the most effective way to cope with the threat of Western imperialism was to learn from--and join--them, since there was no chance of winning by fighting back with Japanese swords. The Japanese were also ready for change as the old Tokugawa regime was internally disintegrating after its 250 years' seclusion from the outside world. Perry's visit served as a spark to ignite the social change that soon culminated in the Meiji Revolution of 1868.

The video persuasively illustrates how swiftly and in how determined a manner Japan set about absorbing Western ways of social life, governance, and manufacturing, along with the Western style of military arts. A scaled-down working locomotive Perry brought as a gift demonstrated in a telling manner the West's scientific and technological advances--and motivated the Japanese to emulate. By 1872, a railroad was in service between Tokyo and Yokohama "with telegraph lines to match. By 1895, they had built their own steam locomotive (Pacific Century, p. 126)." But the cost of modernization was high; a mining labor camp on Mitsubishi's so-called "battleship island" was a vivid reminder of how cruelly workers were exploited by capitalism. The viewers can clearly see that industrial development was not at the hands of an imaginative "invisible"--and benign--market but was an institutional change adopted and imposed on the public by the central government.

Video 3: From the Barrel of a Gun

This unit begins with footage of battle scenes in the Vietnam War, in which 58,000 young American soldiers died. "Even today, few Americans understood it," says the narrator. The underlying theme is that Western interests collided with the powerful force of nationalism, and that the myth of Western supremacy came to an end. Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Sukarno in Indonesia are featured as the primary examples of leaders of Asian nationalism. It shows that Ho Chi Minh became a communist (He was one of the founders of the French Communist Party, while he was in Paris.), but that he was more an ardent nationalist, having purposely lived "at the gate of a tiger's lair" to gain first-hand knowledge about the French colonizer. He even counted on the United States, the self-claimed--and so globally recognized then--bastion of true democracy, to come to the rescue when the French returned and recolonized Vietnam. His declaration of independence was a recitation of Thomas Jefferson's words, and the Vietnamese people, in their celebration parade, waved the Stars and Stripes and marched with President Truman's portrait, a newly sworn-in American president at that time. Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter to Truman, who, however, never replied. Vietnam had to turn to the Soviet Union as a matter of survival. What followed thereafter is now a well-known history, the tragedy of the Vietnam War in which the United States ended up paying a huge cost for its earlier diplomatic mistake.

The role of the Japanese military in the liberation of Indonesia from Dutch colonialism is presented in connection with the rise of Sukarno as the leader of that resource-rich country. The video shows that when Sukarno was captured by the returning Dutch and accused as a Japanese collaborator during the war, the United States intervened in a timely manner and persuaded the Dutch to release Sukarno and give independence to Indonesia--without repeating the error made in Vietnam.

The ugly side of three hundred years of Dutch colonialism is documented in the photographs of exploitation of labor, labor needed to extract Indonesia's natural wealth--first, nutmeg, and then coffee, sugar, tea, oil, minerals, lumber--and brutal suppression of uprisings. These events made the Indonesians believe in their thirteenth-century mythology that a "yellow ox" would eventually liberate the people and identify the Japanese army as the messiah they had long awaited. But the Japanese turned out to be another colonizer, only interested in Indonesia's raw materials such as bauxite, rubber, and tin. The work battalions, whose formation was assisted by Sukarno in collaboration with the Japanese army, were shipped out to the Japanese empire, resulting in slavery; Indonesian youths died by the thousands from malnutrition and illnesses.

Video 4: Writers and Revolutionaries

This video unit focuses on representative intellectuals in Asia who had enormous influence on those revolutionaries, men of action, who were eager to translate and actuate the intellectuals' idealism into reality. Lu Xun in China and Kita Ikki in Japan, who both lived around the turn of the century, are featured as influential writers whose ideas had historical consequences. The story is that "ideas are as powerful as guns." Indeed, native-born ideologies gave directions to guns in both countries.

Lu Xun criticized the old culture of China as backward, a prison house into which China trapped itself. In his famous novel, The True Story of Ah Q, he characterized the Chinese national traits as stoic, apathetic, and morally cowardly, as best personified by Ah Q, a petty street thief. Xun's idea was that the old China needed to be destroyed to create a new China, an idea that was later acted upon by Mao Zedong and his Red Guard.

Kita Ikki advocated a mixture of socialism (land reform to liberate tenant farmers and urban workers from landlords, and better working conditions for urban workers), imperialism (emperor worship), and fascism (the projection of Japanese national power over Asia in the name of pan-Asian independence from Western dominance). His policies, spelled out in his work, Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan, reflected the chaotic socio-economic conditions (the rising income disparity between the rich and the poor, the dissatisfaction of the Japanese army, especially among the young officers, about the West's treatment of Japan --and Asia--at theVersailles Conference) that prevailed in the aftermath of World War I. A military mutiny occurred in 1936 with the assassination of key cabinet members, a coup d'etat that nearly succeeded in overthrowing the civilian government. In the end, however, militarists prevailed and won over a fledgling democratic Japan. The Sino-Japanese War (1937-38) soon ensued, and then Japan plunged into the Pacific War.

Video 5: Reinventing Japan

How the United States went about demilitarizing and democratizing Japanese society right after the Pacific War is the focus of this segment. Particularly interesting (or even hilarious) is the story that only a handful of American advisers, none of them an expert on constitutions, was given the assignment to draft a new constitution for Japan within six days. Thedraft was handed over to the Yoshida administration, which presented it to the Japanese parliament for ratification; everybody knew that it was "imposed" by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), but its democratic tenets were irresistibly attractive to the Japanese public, especially the opposition parties; rearmament was renounced as unconstitutional, and the emperor, now merely a symbol of unity for the nation, was allowed to exist in that new capacity.

Cleverly enough, just like the Meiji Restoration, the emperor was again used by the occupation authorities as a means to unite the people by preventing psychological uncertainty and social chaos. The Japanese fully knew that the real emperor then was Douglas MacArthur, who directly instructed the Japanese bureaucrats (who were able to retain a centralized system of governance) to remold Japan into a democratic society in the image of America. The people as a whole felt relieved from wartime hardships and eagerly embraced the democratic principles of free speech and individual freedom. They cooperated with, and learned avidly from , the occupation authorities, who initially tended to be overly liberal, so much so that at one point in time, socialism (or even communism) threatened to take over Japan. Prime Minister Yoshida was concerned with the "excesses of democracy."

Eventually, America's policy was modified to rebuild Japan as a bulwark against the rising tide of communism which by then had swept over China. Japan was allowed to restore its old ways of strengthening itself economically by using its own mercantilistic formula of capitalism. A combination of the Dodge Plan (the first IMF-style austerity program designed to balance the national budget) and the Korean War procurement boom (a $3 billion shot in the arm) revitalized the Japanese economy and set it on its course for reconstruction and expansion. This video segment ends on the commentary: America "had no idea that [the Japanese] were developing an economic pattern of their own which will make history."

Video 6: The Birth of Japan, Inc.

While the United States continued to be preoccupied with its foreign policy to serve as the free world's policeman protecting Japan--and Europe--from the danger of communism, Japan studiously strove to build itself into an economic superpower. It is shown that Japan adopted its own brand of capitalism by organizing a unique tripartite coalition among businesses, politicians, and bureaucrats, i.e., Japan, Inc. The end result is, as observed by the narrator, that between 1985 and 1992, the United States spent over $30 billion "to defend Japan" by maintaining military bases there but that Japan spent $100 billion to buy up American companies and properties. The implication is clear: Japan is the commercial winner of the cold war while the United States is the lonely military victor with no war trove.

On the other hand, the birth of an industrially focused country, Japan, Inc., was not without its throes. It came out of a period of political and social instability and violent protest demonstrations, involving labor strife (such as strikes at the Mi'ike coal mine and Nissan Motors) and the ratification of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, which was ridden roughshod through the parliament by the Kishi administration over the opposition parties. A film clip of the assassination of Socialist leader, Inejiro Asanuma, by a rightist with a sword, vividly reminds the viewers of the nationalistic/feudalistic vicissitudinary remnants of Japanese society.

After the sociopolitical turmoil at the start of the 1960s, Japan began to concentrate on building its economy under a series of economic growth policies beginning with the National Income Doubling Plan introduced by Hayato Ikeda. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) spearheaded the national efforts to set up high-tech industries; it squarely targeted development of the electronics industry by recognizing that semiconductors were fundamental to any future-growth industries. In 1966, for example, MITI organized a joint research project, in which every Japanese TV manufacturer was involved, to replace tubes with transistors for color TVs. While American makers nearsightedly emphasized styles and repair services, their Japanese counterparts sought quality, new technology, and lower production costs. The final outcome is the well-nigh decimation of America's TV industry; in 1955, America had as many as twenty-five TV producers, and Japan ten companies, whereas today America has only one (Zenith), and Japan has all its ten producers still in business.

The rest of this video segment covers the rapid expansion of Japanese overseas investments throughout Asia, the suddenly emerged status of Japan as the world's largest donor of foreign aid to the Third World (internationalization of Japan only in pecuniary terms, with its own people, society, and polity still embedded in narrow-minded, selfish, nationalistic insularity), the unfavorable overseas reactions and criticisms of the Japanese as an "economic animal," and the scandals of political corruption stemming from cozy relationships between big business and the Liberal Democratic Party. The video ends on the note that Japan is clearly at another historical juncture where it needs to reinvent itself as a new economic superpower that can fulfill its global responsibilities and obligations.

Video 7: Big Business and the Ghost of Confucius

How is it that Asia's rapidly industrializing economics can mobilize their people for hard work and individual sacrifices for the sake of economic growth, particularly in the early stages plagued by mass unemployment and poverty? This video unit examines a view that the Confucian ideology--consisting of fidelity and obedience to authority, a high respect for education, self-discipline and a strong work ethic, and the submerging (relegation) of self-interest for higher goals for society--is the spirit behind the successes of Asia's new brand of capitalism. Apparently accepting this view, communist China is now resurrecting 2,000-year-old ancient Confucian teachings, together with the temples and rituals once viciously attacked by Red Guards.

South Korea's Park Chung Hee, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, and Taiwan's Chiang Ching-kuo all purposely invoked the traditional Confucian codes of ethics to legitimatize governmental authority (control and guidance) and to extract loyalty from their people--not so much to subjugate and suppress the public as to mobilize their energies for modernization and prosperity.

To illustrate, the video shows how a Korean company whose chairman is a devout follower of Confucianism, is inculcating its workers with Confucian thoughts so that their devotion to the company may be secured for its own business expansion, as well as the prosperity of Korean society at large. Another scene zeros in on a successful bicycle producer, a small family business in Taiwan with a network of sixty closely affiliated small parts suppliers--a paragon of the family as a key social unit and efficacy of flexible cooperation among group-based business units. Not only an organizational principle at the company level, the Confucian ideology is also instrumental in facilitating the macroeconomic policy of catching up with the advanced West, since it stresses the virtues of learning from superior teachers or models. It justifies a hierarchical relationship in which benevolent leaders (employers) treat devoted workers as if they were family members. Hence, the prevalence of industrial paternalism.

In addition, Asia's economic miracle is born from the close government guidance and management of key strategic industries--the critical feature of state-guided capitalism, as seen in South Korea and Taiwan. It is a "miracle by design," in Frank Gibney's words--or, more specifically, a miracle by government design.

Yet the video points out an internally contradictory process in which the very success of an economy of economic growth leads to rising expectations and desires for individual freedom, and the Confucian values (many of which are egregiously undemocratic) become less relevant,especially for the younger generations reared in an increasingly affluent society.

Video 8: The Fight for Democracy

The internal contradiction of state-sponsored economic development (as thematically developed in the previous segment) is followed up, elaborated, and vividly illustrated. When a country is poor, as South Korea was in the aftermath of the Korean War, the people are willing to accept low wages and long hours of hard work for the cause of national economic development. But as the country succeeds in development, along with the rise of a new, younger generation that has no experience with hardships and dire destitution, the people's demand for democratic values and equality ineluctably rises. They no longer see any justification in--or reason to remain loyal to--their authoritarian government that once served as a catalyst of the state-guided economic miracle. And when the government refuses to democratize the country, street and campus protests erupt into violent confrontations between the police (and army) and the general populace. The Korean tragedy of the Kwangju Massacre is shown as an exemplar of this poliltical denouement.

What made the massacre more tragic is that the United States, in which the Korean people had hopes as the staunch defender and promoter of democracy, did not come to the rescue of the oppressed people of Kwangju. The film clip shows how President Chun Doo Hwan, a man who dispatched Korea's crack soldiers to suppress the student insurrection, was warmly welcomed at the White House after the massacre--in the name of a joint defense against communism. No wonder the Korean people turned violently anti-American. Only when another wave of mass demonstration and protest swelled in an ardent outcry for democracy on a nationwide scale, was an emissary sent from the United States, and the Korean government was finally persuaded to hold a general election. The United States was initially willing to encourage merely capitalism but not democracy; as the video clearly shows, however, the time had come to promote democracy and human rights in South Korea.

Video 9: Sentimental Imperialist: America in Asia

This unit is essentially a continuation of the previous theme, "The fight for democracy," the theme that America supported dictatorships in the name of anti-communism in the Philippines and Taiwan. The video also reveals the history of America's experience as an imperialist and Christian proselytizer in Asia. Looking at the whole Pacific Asian region as a backward and primitive land, America began to take an active role as a self-appointed governor of the region after it had defeated Spain in the Philippines, thus starting the American century in the Pacific. How America once colonized ("Americanized") the Philippines and how America tried to modernize and "Christianize" China is well described and illustrated.

America was innocently led to the tragedy of supporting dictators such as Ferdinand Marcos and Chiang Kai-shek as champions of democracy largely because of its small understanding of Asia and because of strong lobbies at home. For example,Time magazine's Henry Luce effectively organized a China lobby, which took a paternalistic approach toward the Chinese and supported the Chiang Kai-shek regime in Taiwan, despite its brutal suppression of the native Taiwanese opposition.

Video 10: The Pacific Century: The Future of the Pacific Basin

Asia's unexpectedly swift industrial growth and its ever-rising export competitiveness, first in Japan, then in the Asian NIEs (newly industrialized economies: Hong Kong, Singapore,Taiwan, and South Korea), and most recently in the new NIEs (Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia), are perceived as both threats and opportunities by the United States and other Western countries. The video shows how Asian-style capitalism, in which government closely cooperates with--and guides--private business in attaining national economic progress (namely, the "visible hand" of government), had worked wonders for the Asian countries, but that the United States, still operating under the ideology of laissez-faire-oriented capitalism (namely, the "invisible hand" of market), had fallen victim to the new form of competition emanating from the Asian Pacific.

The Japanese industrial strategy of focusing on high quality, low costs, and new mass-production technology for conventional manufactures such as automobiles and consumer electronics had decimated the American producers, who had grown rather lackadaisical and complacent in the afterglow of America's temporary economic dominance at the end of World War II. Nowadays, America's governors make pilgrimages to Asia in search of potential investors who could create local employment in their states. The video illustrates how Mazda's transplant in Flat Rock, Michigan, operates with the Japanese managerial philosophy of kaizen (or constant improvement), and how its American workers are reacting, both favorably and unfavorably.

The tables have clearly been turned on the United States; for the first time in its history, the law of international economic competition is forcing America to learn from the Orient. Detroit is adopting many Japanese techniques of manufacturing, including the team approach on the shop floor. Sematch, a research consortium patterned after the Japanese experience of creating new manufacturing technologies for semi-conductors, has also come into existence, with $100 million in matching funds from the U.S. Congress.

In the meantime, Seattle, a coastal city on the Pacific Rim, is actively exploiting the new opportunities created by the Asian boom. The scene of a delivery ceremony of the seventy-fifth Boeing 747 to the world's largest buyer, Japan Air Lines, convincingly demonstrates how powerful a buyer Japan has become for America's high-tech products. Similarly, a joint development program between Boeing and a group of Japanese companies for a new B-777 model is telling evidence of the importance of Japan as a financier for R&D and as a critical supplier of new complementary technology (particularly, composite materials for fuselage and wings).

How Japanese industry became an efficient commercializer of new inventions into marketable products is explained through the example of theVCR. In 1956 an American firm, Ampex, invented the videotape recorder. Today, about one quarter million VCRs are manufactured-- almost all of them by Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Korean companies. One of Ampex's engineers involved in the original R&D on the machine now works for a Japanese company, Panasonic. He admits: "We just lacked the vision, we lacked the courage to make long-term investments. We walked away from it."

The video concludes on the ironic twist of fate that, while many Americans are growing more and more pessimistic about the future of their country (a scene from the Los Angeles' riot in the summer of 1992 is shown), the number of Asian immigrants in the United States has been rising rapidly; for the latter, America is still a land of immense opportunities, and the American dream is attainable. In sharp contrast to their older generation immigrants who worked on the railroads and the mines as low-wage workers, the new Asian immigrants are, on the whole, better educated and skilled professionals--in fact, many are U.S. educated. They are joining America's mainstream of professionalism.

Thus, the series of videos, which began with the relentless incursions, both imperialistic and paternalistic, of Western powers into Asia, ends with a story of role reversal in which the West is jolted by the rising industrial power of Pacific Asia --especially by its economic impacton the United States. As Karl Marx once observed, an advanced capitalist country only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. The one-sided dominance of the United States (the American century) is clearly over; the mutual trans Pacific dependence (the Pacific century) has just begun.

All in all, the program is highly ambitious in covering all sorts of interactions and evolving relationships--political, colonial, diplomatic, socio-cultural, as well as economic--over two centuries between the Pacific Asian countries and the United States. But it does succeed in threading out a coherent whole, a story of how two basically different-- Oriental and Occidental--cultures and societies have come into contact with each other and become mutually interactive and inextricably dependent across the vast ocean of the Pacific, with an accompanying shift in fortunes. It is a story of human integration, with its inevitable tragedies and conflicts, as well as of mutually uplifting opportunities.

The story that is told is not a pretty one. It has many ugly sides. The program is full of many shocking and gory pictures (which certainly keep the viewers' attention riveted to the screen and to certain pages of the textbook) of human cruelties including hangings, firing executions, and beheadings, all interspersed throughout the telecourse. One is constantly reminded of the incivility of the human race, the brutality toward fellow humans--not only to different ethnic groups (e.g., Brigadier General Jacob Smith's "everything over ten" execution in the Philippines) but even within the same ethnic group (e.g., the Nanjing Massacre, the Guomindang's execution of communist suspects in the street, and the Kwangju Massacre).

The main textbook, Pacific Century: The Emergence of Modern Asia by Mark Borthwick and associates, contains a wealth of many excellent, detailed accounts of the specific events and aspects of the Asian Pacific countries written by a number of experts. It is more than a textbook; it is almost an encyclopedia--mini, if not full--on the Asian Pacific. It is a solidly academic, valuable reference book. Frank Gibney's reader, The Pacific Century: America and Asia in a Changing World, can--and should--be adopted as another textbook. In fact, it follows the contents of the video program more closely. The book appears to be an elaborated version of the scr

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