Japanese Like Books on Failure TOKYO (AP) -- Bureaucratic bungling. Chronic lack of imagination. A burned-out economy and mounting social malaise. Forget romance novels with dashing heroes or adventure tales packed with action. When it comes to books, the Japanese these days are curling up with something most folks would rather forget: their own flaws. ``Lessons of Failure,'' is a favorite among recession-weary businessmen. Then there's the bluntly titled ``Japan's Failures.'' For something more elegant, settle down with ``The Essence of This Country's Failure.'' The Japanese certainly have enough to be gloomy about. The economy is stuck in its worst recession in 50 years. Unemployment is at a record high and crime is creeping up. The health, education and financial systems are ripe for overhauls. But the boom in ``crisis literature'' has its roots in something deeper than the business cycle: the Japanese penchant for comparing themselves to the West, especially the United States. In the sky's-the-limit 1980s, that meant a Japan that could match -- and beat -- the world's richest countries. But these days, many here have concluded that Japan is falling behind the rest of the developed world. ``Since the early 1990s ... people have been feeling that something is wrong with Japan,'' said Yasuo Ueda, an expert in publishing at Tokyo's Sophia University. The recent books often trace the country's troubles to supposed flaws in the Japanese character: lack of imagination, failure to set overarching goals and an inability to think logically. And for maximum impact, they make a firm link with the one overwhelming failure that still rankles Japan's tender ego: the crushing, catastrophic defeat of World War II. In ``Lessons of Failure'' -- considered a strong seller with sales of nearly 30,000 copies in a month -- economist Kimindo Kusaka argues that official ineptitude and failure to capitalize on strengths led Tokyo to lose both the war 50 years ago and the economic competition today. Kusaka points to the vaunted Zero fighter plane, which started out as a brilliant technological innovation but was superseded by more advanced American weapons. ``You can say the same thing about banks and insurance -- the Japanese have been defeated in the same way,'' Kusaka said. ``Now we'll adapt and catch up, but by then America will have come up with something else.'' Philosophy professor Kenichi Matsumoto lays out similar ideas in ``Japan's Failures.'' He argues that Japan is doomed to make the same mistakes of the war until it fully comes to terms with the defeat and analyzes the reasons behind it. Matsumoto says the country never had to address its failings after the war because the American occupation forces wrote a new constitution and prosecuted war criminals instead of the Japanese themselves. ``Japan needs to look at the essence of our own failures in the past and look back at what should have been done and what went wrong at the time,'' he said. ``We need to decide our own direction by ourselves.'' Despite the dark soul-searching, Japan can hardly be considered a country that has utterly failed. Compared to many nations in the West, poverty is barely in evidence, the streets are extremely safe and the drug problem is minuscule. And though the ``failure books'' harp on Japan's decline, they are not entirely defeatist. The writers call for a rejection of the old system and the adoption of new ways of doing things and even new ways of thinking. Such a radical shift is not out of the question. Japan swiftly changed from a feudal backwater to a European-style military power in the late 1800s. After World War II, it switched from militarist state to democratic economic juggernaut. For the Japanese publishing world, the fascination with defeat has meant sales. Though none of the three ``failure'' books are in the Top 10 list, publishers say the genre is on the rise. At Eishodo Books in busy Tokyo Station one recent afternoon, men in suits crowded in front of shelves stocked with grim titles like ``Japan's Crisis'' and ``Japan's Zero-Growth Economy.'' ``People are wondering, `Why did we fail, why are we in recession?''' explained a retired banker who declined to give his name. ``We've done some good things, but fundamentally, there's been some mistake.''
