The Nones of Perry Mason 77

Note: I’ve read so many goddamn Perry Masons. ESG uses a recipe, but the recipe has different ingredients. One constant is Mason's sympathy. He is never so hard-boiled that he doesn't feel sympathy for a client in trouble deep through malice, poor judgement or sheer bad luck. Mason is often attracted by the prospect of examining an unusual wrinkle in a case.

The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom - Erle Stanley Gardner

Michael Garvin spins money in mining businesses like Rumpelstiltskin spins straw into gold. Outside of the boardroom, however, the one-trick pony stumbles into one personal mess after another. He gets married to red-headed Lorraine even though he has not confirmed that his first wife has really divorced him. 

Garvin belatedly comes to the decision to consult Perry Mason to check if his quicky Mexican divorce will hold up in the Home of the Brave. Then, wanting a romantic get-away despite a looming stockholders meeting, he traipses off on a second honeymoon without letting anybody know where he’s going. Finally, in the crisis following the shooting death of his first wife, Garvin lies to Mason about his movements on the night of the killing.

Trust Gardner to treat us to a relatable defendant. Lots of readers fantasize about retaining a supportive lawyer who will fight for us no matter how lame our excuses sound or how many silly decisions we’ve made. Even, in our surprise and shock, when we’ve picked up the murder weapon at the scene of the crime.

Not so relatable is Virginia Colfax, the kind of smart devious active woman we quiet guys are scared of at work. While working late in his office, Mason spies a comely woman on the fire escape. When Mason queries her as to what she’s up to, the hottie says she works upstairs for Garvin’s extraction companies. Mason notes she’s carrying something that glints, which she tosses away, saying it was a flashlight.

He wants to confirm her identity by checking out her car registration, but out on the street she lays a mitten on him (translating 1949ese: slaps him), making onlookers think she’s a pretty baa-lamb fending off a wolf. In celeb-addled LA, this spectacle is noted and thus appears in the gossip column in the paper the next morning. His secretary Della Street rags Perry, but stoical Mason shrugs it off as one of those things that just happen.

But things get complicated mighty quick when Perry finds himself enmeshed in a case that involves two convoluted situations. One is bigamy involving a Mexican divorce that may or may not be legal. The other is a proxy fight looming at a stockholders meeting.

As usual, Gardner paints an unflattering portrait of the guardians of our criminal justice system. The cops arrest their person of interest by using trickery. At the trial two bumbling prosecutors are more intent on puffing themselves up by making Perry look bad than on building a strong case. They are helped out by Perry’s client, who lies to Perry. The one lesson we regular folks can draw out of Mason mysteries is never lie to your lawyer.

A good, not great, Mason mystery.

No Woman Ever had Such a Lover

Note: The Gail Patrick film festival continues. Some of her previous movies have been reviewed: If I Had a Million, Murders in the Zoo, and The Phantom Broadcast. In this movie she plays an American rich girl. She sets her cap on Death. She plays the part as frank, direct, and open, not a haughty rich at all, as she was destined to be typed after she played mean sister Cornelia in My Man Godfrey a couple of years later. To readers wondering why a forgotten actress is appearing in what could be taken for a Perry Mason blog, she was the executive producer of the greatest courtroom drama of teevee's first century - you guessed it in one - Perry Mason.

Death Takes a Holiday
1934 / 1:19
Tagline: “No one can die - while he makes love!”
[internet archive]

A rich English family and their American friends are enjoying a festival while the intended of the family’s son prays in church. Her piety and seeking of the illimitable contrast with the frivolity, heedlessness, and worldliness of the family she will marry into. Speeding back to their villa they escape being killed only because Death decides to take a three-day vakay at their Italian villa.

Death feels curious as to why mortals have such terror and revulsion regarding his reality. Death desires to know the reasons few people can think straight about death, taking their individual extinction personally indeed. Shunned, Death feels lonely. At first, only the host knows Death’s true identity. Death impersonates charming Count Sirki.

Frederic March plays the title role. His Death is stern and preemptory but also stiff and pompous as if unused to having a body of flesh and blood and wearing clothes. March does not overdo Death being taken with sensual pleasures like wine; after a sip, he says wonderingly but not too, “Already I have learned a fact of importance.” His lines are delivered deadpan, heavy with meanings given his identity. Meeting an experienced diplomat, he says, “Given your age, it’s a surprise we have not met before.”

Much of the humor is nonverbal. Death looks ever so slightly bemused as if just struck by the fact when he says, “I have something in common with doctors” and “They were such heavy drinkers that they weren’t afraid even of me.” He looks earnest and reassuring when he says of war, “Your sacred privilege of blowing each other to bits is quite safe.”

Gail Patrick glares at her rival for the Count’s attentions. She plays an engaging American rich girl, disarmingly direct. Death naively insults her, saying the wrong thing in the wrong way. Seeing he’s blown it somehow, he observes, “The Baron will be disappointed,” because the Baron taught him the main game in life was love.

One gets the feeling the budget for this movie was not all that generous. Although shot on only a couple of sets, the production avoids feeling stagey. Considering the script is based on a play, it is a little talky but not oppressively so. There’s much movement and the story goes straight and true.

I suppose with regard to theme, movie-goers could see this movie as an example of Pre-Code risk-taking. Examining issues concerning death in a buoyant fashion is not exactly an enterprise people-pleasing Hollywood is famous for. Messages are delivered, I think, indirectly, to avoid singeing movie-goers who think a frank treatment of death is tantamount to taking their granny’s death lightly. While the lessons here don’t depart from what wise people have been saying about Death for centuries, they are not on the level of greeting cards either. Only connect. Love one another. Relish the time you have, here and now.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 76

Note: Vintage mysteries can often be read as snapshots of life as it really felt to the people living it. Astute readers will find things not mentioned even in popular histories. The background to the story reviewed this month is an example of Gardner unwittingly writing the first draft of the history of the home front during WWII. The backdrop of the war adds credibility and depth to this forgotten mystery.

The Case of the Smoking Chimney  - Erle Stanley Gardner

In the early 1940s, the creator of Perry Mason wrote a pair of mysteries starring Gramps Wiggins. The first was The Case of the Turning Tide (1941) and this novel was the sequel. Gramps must have been psychic, able to anticipate the trend of the American retiree to live on the move in a trailer. Gramps is apt to show up in the driveway of his grand-daughter Milred’s house in a swanky neighborhood of a Californian small city. Milred is married to Frank Duryea, who’s the DA for Santa Delbarra County, which may be a pun on Santa Barbara.

Gardner opens the mystery by introducing the rum characters. Ralph Pressman, with sharp elbows in the oil business, is buying up leases in Santa Delbarra County. Due to the human tendency to assume the future will not be so terribly different from the present, the local farmers have figured that nobody was ever going to use the leases to extract oil. So when Pressman sinks a test well, they remember what happened to their ancestors and accordingly get nervous about being tricked and exploited and robbed of their land and livelihoods. Not above working with main-chancers as bad as Pressman, Hugh Sonders, the leader of the farmers, works with George Karper, another hardhearted opportunist in development and extraction.

Harvey Stanford is Pressman’s auditor. Young and so dumb he thinks he’s smart, he plays the casino game with a mean house edge: roulette. Inevitably he finds himself in debt to the tune of $17,000, about $300K in today’s money. His girlfriend is a “gifted amateur with commercial tendencies” Eva Raymond, who likes excitement too much for her own good (how she puts up with sitting at Harv’s side at the slow-paced roulette table is a poser; she sounds more like a gal for the craps table).

Pressman has a wife Sophie that is twenty years younger than him and feeling unloved because Pressman is cold, austere, undemonstrative, and dedicated to the pursuit of wealth and property. Pressman’s loyal secretary Jane Graven tries to hide a private eye’s report about Sophie’s cheating with young rich guy Pelly Baxter but Sophie is too ruthless for Jane and gets her mitts on the reports and the negatives of her and her Pelly doing stuff to make poor Jane blush.

Basically, the verisimilitude comes out of many believable characters having believable personal and professional agendas. Also feeling true to this scheming world is the business background of outside interests in the extraction business catching small-town folks unawares. Gardner was from a mining family and lawyered in small-town California so he was familiar with thorny legal and social issues connected with mining and oil drilling ventures.

As a character, Gramp Wiggins is as American as hot dogs in his frank manner, independent ways, humor, warmth, and friendliness. In his seventies, he’s a ball of energy, always into new enthusiasms. He’s friendly, talkative, sociable and milks information out of people in spite of their initial suspicion of his interest in the inevitable murder. Gramps treads warily, never exploiting his in-law relationship with Frank the DA.

But Frank has to be patient when Gramps horns in on the murder investigation by possibly fabricating evidence to protect somebody he likes and point Frank and the cops in the direction he thinks they should look. After all, at the next election half of the public will trash him for disloyalty if he puts a relative in jail. And the other half will trash him if he shows nepotism by not putting a relative in jail. Gardner had a good feeling for the political and social pressures small-town DA’s had to face. It’s also a change from the Mason novels to view the murder investigation from the DA/cop point of view.

In the Mason and Cool & Lam novels of the 1940s, Gardner, to my mind, was at the top of his game. But I thought without the familiar characters this would be mediocre. But this was way better than middling. The story, setting, and characterization are utterly plausible.  The humor moves the story along and Gramps provide comic relief in funny dialogues. The third-person omniscient narrator causes us to hear conversations among persons of interest, handling each other with antsy mistrust and fearing that they are being set up to be the fall guy.

Gardner was careful not to date his novels with topical references, but uncharacteristically, he dates this 1942 story by referring to wartime austerities. In the shadow of tire rationing, Gramps offers his grandson-in-law a ride to “save rubber.” To spit in the eye of rationing, foodie Gardner gives suggestions for eating magnificently. No sugar? Hotcakes with maple syrup. No flour or eggs? Strawberry shortcake. No meat? Make hash more palatable with lots of garlic.

European Reading Challenge #3

Sharks and Little Fish: A Novel of German Submarine Warfare - Wolfgang Ott

Based on the author's WWII experience as a young sailor and submariner, Haie und kleine Fische
(S&LF) stands with classic novels of the U-boat genre such as Das Boot by Lothar-Guenther Buchheim and Run Silent, Run Deep by Edward L. Beach.  S&LF gives raw, ferocious accounts of men in dangers posed by the mistakes of crewmates, the incompetence and mania of officers, the relentlessness of weather, water, and salt, and the physical foulness of submarine life.

Wolfgang Ott was almost seventeen when he got called up into the Navy at the beginning of WWII.  As Willi Heinrich fictionalized his experience as a grunt on the Eastern front in the best-selling Cross of Iron, Ott also wrote an autobiographical novel and published it in 1957.

The first half of S&LF finds us with the main character Teichmann, also barely seventeen, on his tour of duty on a mine sweeper. Ott displays control of scene-setting and action, deadpanning his way through brutal, perilous situations but never resorting to a callous or hard-boiled tone.  It’s a rare book whose tone, incident, characters mesh so finely that I, a lover of sleep, stayed up past my bedtime. But I read the first 150 pages or so, enthralled, until my eyes smarted. Such a thing never happens.

With only sometime lapses into overwrought prose, Ott stays matter-of-fact. He implies that the young are too dumb and green to be panicky and that the older, more practiced soldiers and sailors become experienced enough to be scared brickless. Only seventeen as Ott reminds us, Teichmann is too young to recognize as possibilities getting killed and being dead forever. For instance, stuck in a rubber raft and menaced by a half-dozen sharks, Teichmann feels only mild concern till it only gradually dawns on him that he’s really in tight spot. Indeed, the word “sharks” in the title refers not only to the war, which chews almost everybody up, but also to the marine carnivorous fishes with forked tails that will happily munch down a teenage sailor as a quick snack. Mortal danger in this novel takes forms both figurative and literal: on one hand, the caprices of fate and on the other, English bombers and corvettes and destroyers.
 
Against such bad odds – eight of ten U-boats did not return to port – bravery helps only so much. For Heinrich in Cross of Iron, an officer observes why men continue to fight even when the situation looks hopeless, “To fight for a conviction does not require heroism. Heroism begins where the meaninglessness of the sacrifice remains the last, only message the dead can leave behind.”

Ott is more skeptical about heroism. The professional warriors know how and when to fight and they never think of why. They are ironic about their business. When one officer asks another how he spent one of his days on leave, the other replies with a straight face, “Reading Ernst Jünger.” Jünger wrote the solemnly hard-boiled WWI memoir Storm of Steel, which the Nazis kept in print, unlike their banning and burning of All Quiet on the Western Front by anti-war Erich Maria Remarque.

Ringing true is his account of brutal officer training, which came out of the inferiority complex of the German navy of the time. Without being too satirical, Ott exposes the unnecessary and pointless discipline of the naval establishment, who seems to assume mere military formalities will induce esprit de corps and an authentic martial tradition.  Such exalted emotions can’t be imposed, it’s like kidding yourself that something is true because the authorities merely assert that it’s true.

In contrast to Heinrich in Cross of Iron, Ott does not neglect the social and political side of the war. For instance, the midshipmen return to Germany for a couple of Christmases as Germans become poorer and more guarded. Talking about the war and national psychology, the cowed civilians babble ready-made phrases on the order of “If you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to break eggs.” As for the leaders, two sailors dismiss with scorn the “fairy tales” told by the “club-footed Jesuit” of a propaganda minister.

At the time the fictionalized memoir was a best-seller, the heavy-hitting Times Literary Supplement said, "It is as uncompromising, vivid, and unfalsified an account of war-time naval life as has appeared." The book is not a multi-layered classic on the order of James Jones’ The Thin Red Line but it’s better than memoirs of the “I Fought in Okinawa” variety.  Because of the occasional over-writing and melodrama, I’d place it next to Jones’ classic potboiler From Here to Eternity.

Of interest to those into the topic of minesweeper/sub warfare or ambitious fictionalized war memoirs.

The Skeleton in the Cupboard

Note: Maugham has been popular with hardcore pleasure readers (like me!) for going on a century now. In the parables The Razor's Edge, The Painted Veil, and The Moon and Sixpence, he gives implicit advice on how to live a flourishing life.  Where else will busy readers be exposed to Epicureanism? Life is short, so live and let live, and seek out delight as often as you can.

Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard - W. Somerset Maugham

Set in England, this novel’s time periods are the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, as seen from a writer looking back from around 1930.

The death of elderly writer Edward Driffield, by 1930 esteemed as the Last of the Victorians and recognized as an inimitable man of letters, gives the high-minded widow the opportunity to commission a biography that will relate the life and times with proper reverence. Having selected a best-selling writer to assist her, the two pump for background information a third writer - the narrator Willie Ashenden - one of the few still among the quick, of proper taste and station, to have known Driffield in youth.

The interview prompts Willie to hark to his youth and to his first meetings with Driffield in the 1880s, when Ted was still just an unknown with a passion for writing and his masterpieces were far from anybody’s wildest fancies.  Willie also reflects on Driffield’s first wife Rosie. Though the widow and the hack want Rosie conveniently forgotten, it is the mysterious Rosie who plays a major role in Willie’s story and in the story of the famous writer himself.

A free spirit, Rosie liberates Willie from small town conceit, pig-ignorance, and quirkiness. Her bolting also gives another woman the chance to work her PR magic to make Driffield the famous man of letters. Maugham hints we can’t always be sure about what is good or bad in every situation nor can we predict whether things will turn out good or bad in the long run.

The first-person narrative persona (the mask is maybe the most prominent modernist thing about Maugham) reveals the rest of the story of the skeleton. At first, we readers are made to think that there is not much to this tale but a Forster-like tweaking of respectability (Howards End) and advocacy for individual freedom (Where Angels Fear to Tread).

We soon find ourselves dealing with twists, however. The prose is spare, which contrasts with muddles and tangles the characters land themselves in.  The world-weary Maugham persona provides urbane asides about literary fashions, style, taste, and so-called Beauty (as subject to fashion as clothing). On the happy citizens of the Land of the Free:

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [ready made phrases*] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

Maugham started his career in the late Victorian era and is one of the few major figures whose writing career spanned so much change. A doctor, Maugham brought to his narrative persona a matter-of-factness about the body and its vagaries; unsentimental about birth, death, and marriage; and for 1930 frank about women’s sexuality. Of the modest persons, gentlemen of small means, clergymen, retired officers in the countryside in the 1890s, candid Maugham says:

…People who were condemned to spend their lives within a mile of one another quarreled bitterly, and seeing each other every day in the town cut one another for twenty years. They were vain, pig-headed, and odd. It was a life that perhaps formed queer characters; people were not so like one another as now and they acquired a small celebrity by their idiosyncrasies, but they were not easy to get on with.

The skeleton in the cupboard of the sub-title is Rosie. Her free and easy ways express a tolerant attitude about life in this uptight and messed-up world. At the end of chapter XVII pleasure-seeker Rosie reasons Willie out of his irrational jealousy over her sexing it up with other men. She argues by obsessing about her other affairs, Willie himself undermines the sexual satisfaction and emotional contentment he can get in the here and now. She argues her affairs don’t offer him any harms or threats so he is much better off not worrying about concerns that are none of his business.

Rosie advises that Willie had better take the long view. Soon enough, everybody we know will be gone and the things we thought so important will be dust. Nothing is so important that we need to make ourselves miserable and self-pitying and frustrated by fretting and stewing and ruminating about it. Nothing.

Take other people as they are, life as it really is. The tolerant acceptance of reality, both good and bad, will inspire and set Willie free. He had better focus on managing his own responses to his feelings, other people, events, and then nothing can hold him back. 

Maugham is often beaten up for his alleged icy detachment, his harsh cynical take on ordinary people who do their best only to screw up time after time. But I think he implicitly advocates the ideas above – being present, minding your own business, view from above (a.k.a. taking the long view), disputing irrational beliefs, using free will to embrace necessity - as reasonable ways to deal with the inevitable troubles life throws in our path. And Maugham’s enduring popularity with hardcore readers like us - outsiders, dreamers, rebels, seekers, malcontents, beats, scamps, and slackers – is due to his focus on the ethical question, “How should we live.”

* We're still good at them <sigh>: the bottom line; it is what it is; at the end of the day; iconic; silver bullet; obsessed; side-hustle; and wait for it.

The Crooner Lay Dead...

Note: Gail Patrick's film debut was in 1932, a scene in If I had a Million. After a couple of uncredited parts in 1933, she got a speaking role Murders in the Zoo. In the movie reviewed here, she plays a cheerful optimistic woman that must choose between marriage and a singing career. Radio was filled with live programming in the days before widespread recording so it is in fact conceivable that singers, no matter in what genre, could make a living in big cities. Gail Patrick Jackson found retirement tedious in the 1950s, so she became the executive producer of the greatest courtroom drama ever Perry Mason.

The Phantom Broadcast
1933 / 1:12
Tagline: "The Crooner Lay Dead...Yet His Voice Haunted 20,000,000 People!”
[internet archive]

Grant Murdock has become a radio star with song and charm that entrance women of all ages. He’s earning so much money that gangsters want to take over his management and skim his earnings. After all, they are facing a loss of revenue due to the Repeal of Prohibition in December and mobsters have bills to pay too. To accomplish this end, the mugs must knock off Norman Wilder, Grant’s business manager, accompanist, and singing coach.

Ironically, the hoods don’t know that killing Wilder would tank Grant’s career. Wilder, in fact, is the singing voice behind Grant, since this kind of faking was easier to pull off in the bygone days before Milli Vanilli stole our innocence. Not explained was how sensitive sensible ethical Wilder got himself neck deep in such a sham. Maybe he got sucked in because he loved singing so much and he knew music brought comfort to Americans hard-pressed by the Depression. A noble artist! An idealistic soul!

Grant, not an artist but a star, is a total ingrate and brute, mocking Wilder’s spinal deformity which makes it impossible for him to become a heart throb. Inserted in this talky drama for the sake of a modicum of action, an attempt is made on Wilder’s life involving a car chase and tommy guns. The attempt fails but gallant Wilder finds himself implicated in another killing.

As a fickle puritan, I must opine on the Pre-Code aspects of this picture. While Wilder is a paragon of the lofty and high-minded, morally iffy is the gangsters having Elsa sleep with Grant in order to insert a wedge between Grant and Wilder. Much to the mobsters’ disgust at mixing business and pleasure, Elsa falls in love with Grant, who treats her like trash because, in the tradition of "ladies' men," he holds women in contempt. Plus, Grant has hit on the grubby idea to defile wholesome Gail Patrick.

Also lowering the moral tone is everybody mocking the afflicted Wilder for his kyphosis. On the upside, Wilder takes these insults philosophically, since it is easy to assume that he has been hearing put-downs about his body his entire life. He would have had to develop a thick skin to stay sane.

Bold is the sexuality of the characters played by Vivienne Osbourne and Pauline Garon. They both move like women who know they are free, though Osbourne’s Elsa is using her charms with an eye to future big bucks, furs, diamonds, etc. Most shockingly, the culprit gets away with murder. Getting a movie-goer to pull for a culprit to get away with it is about as Pre-Code you can get, I imagine. I’m down with the guilty party walking away every once in a while, just for the contrast to the glop and pap Hollywood was later to so cautiously churn out.

Hey, I said I was fickle.

Attractions include not only sophisticated Art Deco decorations in Grant’s apartment. The acting and writing make up a garland of antique charms. The acting has carry-over from the silent era, with lengthy shots of overwrought faces expressing profound emotions. Actors talk real slow, as if the audience were not used to voices coming from the big screen yet. The ending is as corny as Kansas in August. There are many weak lines that call to mind short stories in romance magazines. “A heartening phrase.”  “To reach people you must have sympathy.” As a budding star torn between career and marriage, Gail Patrick does what actors have to do, i.e. make feeble lines persuasive: “I've reached a crossroads.” “Music is a zealous master,” Wilder sagely warns her.

Also of interest to movie-goers into the history of pop culture, the word “crooner” is twice used indignantly in “He’s not a crooner.” By the early 1930s, the term “crooner” and “crooning” had taken on a pejorative nuance. Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston and the New York Singing Teachers Association (NYSTA)* both denounced crooning in the papers. Perhaps fearing that women would be emotionally manipulated by libertines who sang in that style, Cardinal O'Connell called crooning “base,” “degenerate,” “defiling” and “un-American,” with the NYSTA adding “corrupt.” Other culture mavens stigmatized crooners as gender and sexual deviants. The loyal assistant of Wilder, Sandy, sourly observes of Grant “When all the dames are gaga about a guy, there's usually something wrong with him." 

* Still in existence, NYSTA is the oldest continuing singing teachers organization in the world.

Today is Vernal Equinox Day

春分の日 Shunbun no Hi. This national holiday was established in 1948 as a day for enjoying nature and cultivating love for all living things. Prior to 1948, the vernal equinox was an imperial ancestor worship festival called Shunki kōrei-sai (春季皇霊祭) - in other words, it had lots of ultranationalistic overtones that the post-war Japanese felt uneasy about. Let's celebrate spring by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Modern Japan – Alex Kerr

The author’s Japanese is so proficient that he writes and publishes in it, a rare ability in a foreigner. His second book Dogs and Demons was released in 2001 and has been recommended as a must-read ever since. The title is from an old Chinese story. The emperor asked his court painter what's easy and what's difficult to paint. The artist answered that demons are easy but dogs are difficult. The artist meant that the quiet low-key things in the environment are hard to get right but flamboyant eye-catching things are easy. It was Kerr’s ambition to explain dogs - what's in front of everybody's nose but hard to see.

Kerr’s basic thesis is that Japan has been mired in economic woes since 1990 because politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders have been unwilling and unable to change their old ways and meet today's challenges.

For more than two decades, Japan's national debt has floated above 100% of its GDP. In fact, as of the second quarter of 2022, Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio was 226%. Debt is out of control because of government spending on public works projects that feed the largest employer in the country and raise demons, i.e., flashy projects that are easy to point to. For instance, the construction industry piles unsightly tetrapods one upon another along about half of the Japanese coastline. Studies done on US coasts have shown that instead of protecting beaches, the 50-ton concrete thingies in reality promote erosion.

To spend down budgets lest they be cut the next fiscal year, the Japanese equivalent of the Department of the Interior pays millions and millions to the construction industry to mold the tetrapods and plop them on the beaches. Kerr paints an unsettling picture of a bureaucracy turned spending machine for which nobody can find the off switch. As often happens among federal bureaucrats in the US, Japanese officials retire from government at the mandatory age of 55, and then they find jobs in the very industries they used to regulate.

Kerr builds a strong case because the book is solidly researched. Figures and examples support his assertion that bureaucrats in Japan collude with industry to construct boondoggles and white elephants (demons) instead of making the small particular changes (dogs) necessary to solve problems.

Using his ability to read Japanese, Kerr provides an insider’s view of the environmental degradation of Japan, the disappearance of the Japanese movie industry and the failure of internationalization. The one qualm I have with this treatment is that although he argues that plenty of Japanese are becoming concerned about the ecology, he doesn't say much about the complacent voters who are happy to receive government pork for schools, community centers, paved roads, train lines and communication towers.

The chapter on the Japanese attitude toward information is fascinating mainly because I have first-hand experience with the Japanese tendency to equivocate, prevaricate, cover, and generally mishandle information. One tiny story. When I taught in Okinawa I noted a couple of times on campus an English professor toting around a camera. I asked him on two different occasions what he was taking pictures of and both times he clowned to avoid telling me. I found out from a third party a simple explanation. For a committee the English prof was taking shots of illegally parked cars to collect evidence that the campus lacked adequate parking space. I heard the explanation only after I angrily stopped being curious, figuring “F**k it I'm not gonna give a s**t if he's got such a f*****g problem giving me the a f*****g answer to a non-sensitive f*****g question,” so incensed was I over nothing (my last two years of six in Japan I often needed more self-control than I could muster for a high-context culture). Kerr says the slow pace of Internet adoption and the waste of time that is the Japanese Internet is the result of this aversion to openness.

Anyway, Japanophile Kerr ends on a cautious but pessimistic note. This is a powerful book and well worth reading for those interested in what happened to Japan in the 1990s. Kerr not only quotes modern scholars and journalists but quotes great opinion leaders in the past to get the long view. This book is still worth reading.