| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Laura Hein. Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth-Century Japan. (Twentieth-Century Japan, The emergence of a World Power, number 16.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 328. $45.00.
This book is a most unusual and refreshing contribution to the study of modern Japanese history, and provokes the reader to contemplate philosophical issues that relate to every scholar of history in the modern world. Laura Hein has crafted her history by artfully combining several approaches, in place of conventional historical perspectives.	1
First, she offers us an intellectual history of not one but several economists who were self-consciously united under the umbrella of the great modern economist ëuchi Hyëe (1888–1980). By analyzing the sociopolitical contributions of an intellectual cohort instead of an isolated individual thinker, Hein reveals to us what usually remains invisible: the mechanisms of intellectual influence, both within the cohort itself, and between thinkers and the wider society, including the state.	2
Hein is more successful in an empirical sense, in pinpointing the postwar influence of the ëuchi group on public opinion and policy making, than she is in showing the same in the prewar and war periods. For example, in postwar pensions policy, energy policy, and labor productivity, Hein demonstrates convincingly the ëuchi group's collective impact on the shape of policy and its reception in society (see chapters six and seven). The power of ideas in shaping public opinion is conveyed through Hein's treatment of ëuchi and his followers' role in postwar pacifist activism (through the Peace Problems Discussion Group, Beheiren, and the Constitutional Problems Research Group; see chapter five), and she credits them with shaping and building Japan's postwar pacifist culture (pp. 135–137). But we are left wondering why their influence in the 1930s and early 1940s was so peripheral and ineffectual.	. . .

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