Book Review: Sebastian Maslow and Christian Wirth, eds. Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State (NY: SUNY Press, 2021)

Reviewed by:

Simon Avenell 

Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State. Edited by Sebastian Maslow and Christian Wirth. SUNY Press, 2021. xvi, 328 pages. $95.00, cloth; $33.95, paper.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

This book offers a theoretically sophisticated and eye-opening perspective on Japanese politics, economy, and society after the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s—an era which has been labeled by some as Japan's "lost decades" and roughly corresponds to the imperial reign of the Heisei era (1989–2019). The term "lost decades," of course, is problematic on numerous levels. As the editors of the volume put it, "most analyses of the causes and remedies for Japan's lost decades remain hamstrung by their ontological and epistemological assumptions" (pp. 9–10)...