Craig Mark’s The Abe Restoration is a masterful survey of the Japanese economy and politics since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s second coming in 2012. Mark’s focus on the Abe record in the overall context of postwar Japanese development and the changing nature of the system since the momentous changes of the 1990s give the reader a breathtaking view of the seismic shifts in America’s key Asian ally. The notion of a political restoration on par with the Meiji Restoration that opened Japan in the late nineteenth century is apt, and is a useful way to reconceptualize Japan as it shifts to a new security paradigm for the early twenty-first century. Readers will take away a much better sense of direction for a country that may once again truly become the Land of the Rising Sun.

Social anthropologist Takezawa’s account of what occurred in the coastal villages of Iwate Prefecture following the disastrous events of March 11, 2011, is built on personal experience as a disaster relief volunteer, professional expertise as an ethnologist, and extensive involvement in citizen-led redevelopment efforts. The result is a personalized analysis that produces insights of value to anyone interested in the “ethnography of disaster.” The book covers the 18-month period following the earthquake and tsunami. Its three chapters focus on individual accounts of escape from the tsunami, on relief efforts to care for the thousands of displaced survivors, and on the reconstruction planning process at the local village level. Takezawa’s approach combines on-the-ground experiences (both his own and those of other individuals directly affected) with insights derived from the larger historical and anthropological context. Although many of his recommendations for future disaster planning efforts apply specifically to Japan, most are worth consideration by anyone involved in similar work anywhere in the world. In particular, Takezawa (National Museum of Ethnology, Japan) highlights the value of local social cohesion undergirding successful relief and reconstruction efforts and the role of administrative failings at both the national and local level in hampering those efforts. Summing Up: Recommended.

Dr. Nojumi has produced an expansive vision of economic success for Afghanistan embedded in regional cooperation along with the political and policy changes necessary to achieve the vision.

Zack draws on empirical pragmatism to define applicative justice, because ‘Rawlsian ideal theorizing has nothing to offer for correcting real life injustice.’ The approach is based on Arthur Bentley’s claims in The Process of Government (1908) that just law can coexist with unjust practices, and that institutions and rules are nothing more than the actual realizations associated with them. A central example is the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights promotion of a ‘general equality principle,’ which has not been a serious interest to world leaders. Applicative justice is the ‘extension of received functions of ordinary justice under ordinary law, to those who have been denied them in modern democratic societies.’ A barrier to achieving this is facing the delusion of the power of academic speech to change reality, and that social construction of race ‘may require the kind of faith found in activists within the black prophetic tradition.’. . .An excellent supplemental text for any course on justice.

Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.