Ranpitsu

In America, there are a limited number of people who can be called readers. […] In Japan, the ordinary citizen likes to read — reading is seen as entertainment and has been since the 16th and 17th centuries. In America, there seems to be a psychological barrier for people to go to a bookstore. Here, it isn’t uncommon, even in the smallest of towns, for people to set a date to meet at a bookstore.

— Tetsu Shirai, deputy executive director of Kodansha International who headed Kodansha America in the 1980’s, in a Jan. 1999 NY Times article about Sawako Noma, who was and still is the president and CEO of Japanese publisher Kodansha Ltd.

6 months ago

May 8, 2009

Comments (View)

The post-American world is naturally an unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should not be. This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else. It is the result of a series of positive trends that have been progressing over the last 20 years, trends that have created an international climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

— an excerpt from Fareed Zakaria’s “The Post-American World” [Newsweek Int’l]