Japanese Crafts and Customs

Ruth’s Japanese Crafts and Customs: A Seasonal Approach, co-authored with Japanese craft expert Kunio Ekiguchi, was a steady seller for Kodansha for a decade after its publication in 1993.

Japanese Consumer Behavior

Japanese Consumer Behavior is John’s first book, a multilayered work built around translations from the Seikatsu Shimbun (Lifestyle Times), an internal newsletter in which HILL, the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, reports on its research to employees of Hakuhodo, Japan’s second largest advertising agency.

Kellogg School of Management Professor John Sherry (a fellow anthropologist and, do beware, a friend of the author) writes,

This book succeeds as ethnohistory, popular culture, and management treatise. It plays to the most compelling of postmodern social scientific concerns as well: reflexivity, and polyvocality. The content, organisation and style are all engaging. Local nuance is supremely well captured, and interpreted effectively in the author’s ‘wrap-around’ treatment.