Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West [Hardcover]

In "Confucius Lives Next Door" T.R. Reid attempts to expose and explain East Asia's 'second miracle'. The first miracle being the enormous economic gains of the last half-century that started in Japan and now encompass most of the Pacific side of that continent. The second miracle, in Reid's view, is the social stability, low crime rate, and overall quality of life that can be found throughout East Asia. Boiling a complex issue that spans billions of people, thousands of years, dozens of languages and scores of cultures, he concludes that Confucius is to blame.

If that sounds overly simplistic, it is because it is; and inherently that is the problem with the book. Once again here we have a person trying to explain another culture(s) in simplistic historical solutions that fit many and divergent facets of a large swath of people.

Yet, in certain ways Reid is on to something. Just as Western thinking finds its philosophical underpinnings in the influence of Plato, with a liberal sprinkling of hundreds of thinkers along the way, Asia -- particularly countries historically influenced by China -- owe the core of their philosophical and social thinking to good old Confucius, with a liberal sprinkling of hundreds along the way. That much is good. Reid had me at the Plato-Confucius comparison, and his chapter about the life of Confucius was educational. Most of his ideas appear to have been instigated by conversations with his next-door neighbor, Mr. Matsuda, who seems to be the wizened neighbor we all wish we had. But in this book I fear Reid has ordered more lemon chicken than he can eat in one sitting. His examples mostly draw upon his experiences from living in Japan for five years, and from examples gleaned from second-hand sources about other Asian countries. If these are meant to be end-all examples, then they do not work. Though I also feel that Reid was using the trips to an elementary school and to the Toyota plant and elsewhere to illustrate points and to tell stories. This is fine and dandy, but it does not serve such a high-powered thesis completely; so it must be read with a pinch of forgiveness. Anybody who bothers with these studies will know that it is not all sugar drops and robotic dogs in Asia and that there are actual social problems as divergent as the cultures of each country highlighted. To gloss over these problems and to smudge the lines between cultures (I know of few people who would argue that Japan and Singapore use similar methods to keep their streets safe) is acceptable only in a work that admits its simplicity. The final chapter of "Confucius Lives Next Door" attempts this in certain degrees to limited satisfaction.

That being said, I have been a fan of T.R. Reid for a while now. His articles in National Geographic are always very lucid, and his sense of humor is a trait more people need to have who write on topics like these. For a while though he seems to abandon the humor and go pseudo-academic for good stretches of this book, which I think works only part of the time. Read this book as a collection of stories and it is worthwhile. But anybody who has spent more than a few months living in East Asia will feel they could have written half of this book.