“Business is war!” - Japanese motto (Rising Sun - Michael Crichton)

Member Name: zOOm

Product:	Rising Sun - Michael Crichton
Date:	09/10/01 (599 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good story

Disadvantages: racism, written in first person

I am sure most of you have seen the movie version of this starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes. In the movie Snipes played Lieutenant Peter James Smith and Connery played Captain John Connor of the Los Angeles police department. The book was written in 1992 and reflects the technology and practices of the time.

For those who do not know, Michael Crichton is the author of Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Congo and the TV’s ER series among many other great novels. Although I have seen the movie adaptations of his work, this is the first novel I have read of his.

The novel is written in first person, which I do not like. This is because I feel that I am missing out on most of the story. For example, if a novel is not in first person then you get to know about the thoughts of the other characters as well as their actions. But, Crichton does an OK job with it.

The Plot (no spoiler)
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Lieutenant Pete Smith is the Special Liason officer of the LAPD. He is actually telling this story to us because he is being investigated by internal affairs on the way he handled the Nakamoto case.

Nakamoto Corporation is another one of those huge corporations that has infiltrated America. It is buying up American businesses everywhere and is just about to celebrate the official opening of its new office building, a huge skyscraper. Everyone is invited, including senators and the press… and there is a murder. Japanese do not want the murder to “bring shame” onto their corporation, after all, the victim is someone unimportant. The LAPD are having trouble handling the Japanese.

Enter John Connor, specialist in Japanese relations. Having lived and worked in Japan for a while he is an expert in Japanese culture and can speak Japanese very well. He immediately believes there is some kind of conspiracy to this whole thing. Afterall, for the Japanese business is war!

Is he right? Who w
as murdered? What was it all about? I’ll let you find that out.

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Overall, the story is good. But you can’t help noticing the “Japan bashing” that is going on! It seems that the author has a very strong feeling against the Japanese buying up most of America. The point he is making is that the Japanese companies are buying up all the American know-how and selling the technology back to America. This is supposedly against the security interests of America. Of course he also makes the point that nothing can be bought unless it is for sale so the Americans should stop selling all of their companies.

There are some intriguing examples of corporate take-overs and reasons behind them that I wasn’t aware of (although the companies are real, I am not sure if the stories are, but I suspect the stories are true or this author would not have got so worked up about all this).

Like I said, there is a lot of “Japan bashing” happening. The author claims that the Japanese are the most racist people in the world and that no foreigner will ever be viewed at the same level as a pure Japanese. All Japanese characters are portrayed badly. (This is worse than Tom Clancy! At least Clancy has one or two good characters of every nation he is portraying as the “baddy”).

Oh, by the way, Japanese have no imagination whatsoever! All ingenious innovation is the work of Americans. The Japanese then acquire the technology and improve on it, make the production process better, make it cheaper and sell it back to the Americans hence forcing American companies to bankruptcy!

There is quite a lot of video technology talk in this book. And although some of it may seem silly (the technologies discussed were experimental at the time), most of it is actually quite good info.
I also found that having watched the movie did help in some ways. I could put fa
ces to characters and hence enjoy the book more. However, having watched the movie also diminished my enjoyment somewhat as I already knew what was going to happen. The movie did stay true to the book, hence there aren’t that many differences between them.

This is a good book to read I if you are into detective novels, corporate workings or video technology. Do not read if you are easily offended by racism as it is quite obvious.

Summary: