Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
from Vietnam to Afghanistan, the Japanese were investing in business and technology what they could not
spend on tanks and aircraft carriers.
These investments helped fuel Japan's astonishing rise, which had three distinctive phases. First came
the development of heavy industry, which soon surpassed Japan's traditional textile production in export
earnings. By 1956, Japan had surpassed Great Britain as the world's major shipbuilder. The second phase
was the boom in consumer electronics and automobiles. Again, geography played a role. With limited
resources and little space, Japanese manufacturers concentrated on building everything smaller—which
explains their domination in the field of miniaturized transistors. Completely dependent on overseas oil,
Japanese automakers led the way in developing fuel-efficient cars. American automakers kept blithely
turning out the profitable gas guzzlers that had been popular when oil production was not in the hands of
OPEC, a cartel that could turn off the tap at will. By the mid-1970s, Japan had captured 21 percent of the
world's automobile production, second only to America's Big Three. The third, most recent stage is char-
acterized by knowledge-intensive products, with massive research and development going into computers
and biotechnology. The Japanese have coupled high-technology products with the application of computer-
controlled manufacturing techniques to achieve enormous productivity gains and product dependability.
At the same time Japan was building these areas at home, it was channeling its overseas investments
into the low-wage economies of other Asian nations. This strategy not only lowered production
costs—keeping prices low and profits high—but it created overseas markets in which Japan's products
could be sold.
The Japanese have also led the way in proving that economic development is far more significant to
political stability than force of arms. Providing these Southeast Asian nations—many of them pawns in the
superpower confrontations of the sixties and seventies—with jobs and economic security has politically
stabilized the entire region. Even Vietnam, one of the most tragic symbols of the cold war's futility, has
quietly become a consumer society in which the former confrontation between America and the Commun-
ist bloc has given way to more basic desires for a higher standard of living.
Geographic Voices
Marcel Junod visiting Hiroshima, September 9, 1945, from
Warriors Without
Weapons
(1951)
At three-quarters of a mile from the centre of the explosion nothing at all was left. Everything
had disappeared. It was a stony waste littered with debris and twisted girders. The incandescent
breath of the fire had swept away every obstacle and all that remained upright were one or two frag-
ments of stone walls and a few stoves which had remained incongruously on their base.
We got out of the car and made our way slowly through the ruins into the centre of the dead city.
Absolute silence reigned in the whole necropolis.
Geographic Voices
Simon Winchester,
The Man Who Loved China
Chongqing—or Chungking as it was written—is now like few places on earth, growing so fast
and furiously that it is hard to keep up with the speed of the changes. Chongqing is now the most
populous city in China. . . . Thirty-eight million people live crammed within its metropolitan lim-
its. The frantic rhythms of their lives capture the concentrated essence of everything, good and ill,
about the awe-inspiring, terrifying entity that is today's new China. . . . Now eight bridges sweep
over the [Yangzi] river, and eight sparkling new monorail lines on stilts run along beside it. Clusters
of skyscrapers have sprung up in each of the half dozen commercial centers . . . There are teem-
ing masses of people, happy-looking, prosperous, loud, boisterous, well-dressed, well-coiffed, and
well-fed, and all Chinese. . . . All seems happy. All are watched.
