The Financial Times for Friday, April 1 2005 reports in the article Bank warns of ‘1970s’ oil prices that Goldman Sachs has forecast oil prices reaching $105 a barrel. They believe that the world has entered into a period of “super spikes” because of increased demand for oil and a lack of excess supply.
With […]
Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Modern Japan
By Alex Kerr
Hill and Wang, 2001, 432 pages.
Dogs and Demons more accurately describes the Japan I know and lived in better than any book I’ve read. The Japan I know is a very ugly place, with concrete rivers and beaches, ugly dilapidated buildings, and […]
Many of the problems in Japan that Alex Kerr mentions in Dogs and Demons have come up in the news this week.
Kerr mentions how the Forest Agency engaged in a program to clear-cut natural Japanese forests and replace them with mostly cedar trees, which was thought to be much more profitable to industry. It […]
In Dogs and Demons, Alex Kerr identifies tourism as one of the great failures of modern Japan. He mentions that it was by no accident either, but a “deliberate national policy” that Japan chose to follow. Instead of becoming a service-based economy, national policy was that Japan would shun all industries that didn’t […]