Pacific Rift: Why Americans and Japanese Don't Understand Each Other

By Michael Lewis

Book Overview

In Pacific Rift, the best-selling author of Liar's Poker aims his skewering wit at the so-called cultural clash between Japan and the United States. The result is a very different kind of book on U.S.-Japanese business relations. In search of answers, Michael Lewis hits the road to report on the travails of two businessmen: one a rollicking American insurance agent who works in Tokyo, the other a Harvard-educated Japanese man employed by Mitsui Real Estate in New York City. From the Ginza hostess bars of Tokyo to the "wine-bottle" gangs of Times Square, Lewis dramatizes tragicomic collisions between the two cultures and the basic misconceptions that Americans and Japanese have about each other.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039330986X
• ISBN13: 9780393309867
• Release Date: June 1993
• Publisher: Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

significant

This is significant and not dated. Lewis explores how the Japanese rose from the defeat of World War II to defeat America on most fronts. On a pound for Pound basis Japan is still outperforming America on most fronts. If it looks like they are not it is only because Taiwan and South Korea and Germany and Sweden are also doing so well. The integration between government and industry in Japan is like nothing our own economics professors and statesmen are capable of describing or reacting to.

Worthy Follow Up to Liar's Poker

Michael Lewis, the controversial author of Liar's Poker, and later writer for the New York Time's Magazine, is quite a writer. He proves his talent yet again in this work about Japanese-American business relations and cultural differences in the 1980s.As the saying goes, if you liked Liar's Poker, you'll love Pacific Rift.My only word of caution is that the book may seem dated now that the U.S. isn't scared to death of the Japanese economic "machine". However, the book now gives a nice historical review of what things were like only ten to fifteen years ago.It's a shame the book is out of print.