Synopses & Reviews
What is Japan's political role in the world? Over the past decade, Japan has been increasingly pressured to assume more financial and political burdens globally. Its foreign policy has thus evolved in a piecemeal manner, around the question of managing foreign pressures. To date, policy has been largely developed by bureaucrats, who are traditionally responsible for public policy in Japan. The lack of a clear set of foreign policy objectives, however, has made it impossible for the bureaucracy to play its previous role as the arbiter of public interests.
Today, there is increased recognition that in a more pluralistic society, nongovernmental public policy specialists are needed to provide a more integrated and longer-term vision of foreign policy goals. This book represents the first private and non- governmental indigenous effort to stimulate public debate of Japanese foreign policy.
Japan's International Agenda makes a distinctive contribution to the foreign policy debate. Its contributors are younger Japanese non-governmental foreign affairs specialists, each with considerable international experience and committed to the belief that significant policy reforms are essential. As a statement of Japan's ability to contribute substantially to international policy debates on such broad questions of security and trade and development, Japan's International Agenda will enable scholars and experts in North America, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and elsewhere to engage in substantive dialogue on critical public policy issues with their Japanese counterparts. This book represents the first private, indigenous effort to stimulate public debate of Japanese foreign policy. Its contributors are young Japanese foreign affairs specialists, each with considerable international experience and a commitment to the belief that significant policy reforms are essential.
Review
"The young Japanese academics who produced Japan's International Agenda ... believe Japan is an introverted society that has to change its habits and its self-image now that it has great economic power. ...Unfortunately ... the politicians ... are probably far too busy to read mind- stretching books like Japan's International Agenda." -Far Eastern Economic Review,
Review
"A powerful story, one that raises themes that still reverberate."
The New York Times
"Wolff tells us a great deal that is disturbing and fascinating both about turn-of-the-century Vienna and about the strange combination of love and loathing out of which child-abuse and even child-murder all too often spring."-The Spectator,
Review
"Describes one of the great lost opportunities in European social thought. In the end, humankind could not bear very much reality. The waltz began once more, and it drowned the cries of the abused. Two generations elapsed before anyone heeded them again."-New Statesman,
Synopsis
On the cusp of the twentieth century, in the most cosmopolitan city in the world, there a sensation that entranced the city's populace as nothing had beforea sensation that cast a great and disturbing shadow over the city, and then vanished, leaving no more trace than a shadow would.
Child Abuse in Freud's Vienna is the story of that forgotten sensation in this fabled city.
In the autumn of 1899, Vienna's attention was focused not on its extraordinary cultural life, but on child abusespecifically, two cases of child murder and two of abuse. While Sigmund Freud was anxiously awaiting the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he first theorized about the Oedipal hostilities between parents and children, every day's headlines proclaimed the ugly reality of child abuse. Focusing on the four cases that dominated the pages of the newspapers, Larry Wolff's riveting narrative paints a picture of a great city enthralled by a spectacle it desperately wished to ignore.
About the Author
Yoichi Funabashi is currently the Washington Bureau Chief of the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese daily at which he has served as a correspondent in Washington, D.C., and Beijing and as diplomatic correspondent and columnist. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Ushiba Fellow at the Institute for International Economics.