Harriet Sergeant lived several years in Japan and gives in this book an account of her experiences in that country. It is an appalling picture: endemic corruption (even for the purchase of a house), racketeering, religion as business, the excessive importance of the group to which one belongs to. A merciless, brutal, egoistic and aggressive social environment: already at school children are badgered, resulting in several deaths per year.
But the biggest victims in this overcrowded country are a Japanese minority group (the burakumin) and women.
The burakumin should be compared to the pariahs in India. Because of their discrimination, many of them joined the yakuza (the powerful, also politically, Japanese gangsters) and are now feared.
Women are totally subordinate to men. The comment of Amélie Nothomb in her book 'Fear and Trembling', where she says that she admires Japanese women because they don't commit suicide, are here completely confirmed.
An eye-opening book.

While living in Shanghai I made a point of buying memoirs or oral histories of the old China-Coast communities. This book was the least informative, most fatueous one of the lot. Ms. Sergeant obviously had impeccable connections through her husbands business contacts into the upper reachs of the old Hong families and managed to say nothing interesting. Not even gossip.

Through her skillful narration interspersed with rich vignettes, Sergeant delved into the fate, suffering and individual triumphs of 4 representative strata of the pre-World War II Shanghai society ¨C the English (the snobbish old colonial master), the Japanese (nouveau rich old-colonial-slaves-turned-new-colonial-master), the White Russians (the royalist Russians abandoned by fate and humiliated by self-degradation), and the Chinese (downtrodden colonial slaves seemingly condemned to unending cycles of oppression from within and outside its own community) ¨C in so doing Sergeant succeeded in vividly recreating the eerily exciting pulse and ambience an extraordinary city unique to the social, economic and political climate of its time.

As a modernized China re-engages the world confident of its destiny on one hand and betraying insecurity about its traumatic past on the other, Sargeant's work is an essential background reading for any foreigner with a serious interest in engaging China at a deeper level.

The most memorable part of this fine, absorbing account of pre-war Shanghai is the description of the horrific factory conditions in the Chinese- and Western- owned businesses there. Here are tales right out of Dickens! I realized, unfortunately, that the unsavoury reputation of modern China's horrible factories has a long and sad history. The description of girls from the chrome plating factories with "chromium holes eating into their arms" was particularly awful.

The book is also full of interesting stories and anecdotes of all aspects of old Shanghai - the parties, social gatherings, etc, and carries on right up to the communist takeover (when newer and even more devestating things happened). Many interesting photographs. For anyone who's been to the city recently and seen how much of the pre-war architecture survives, this book will be a treat. The author gets a little lost at the end - perplexed (sarcastic?) at Europe's seeming abandonment of the place to the Japanese without a fight, though it seems obvious that London was more worth saving than a ruthless mercantile city like Shanghai - kind of a pre-war Hong Kong is what it was, and clearly from these pages not so much glamorous as crass. Well-worth the read, this book will give the reader much food for thought as to China's current direction and unhealthy work conditions. Must Peking try so hard to follow in the ways of its more ruthless ancestors?

Another good description of Shanghai's interesting and horrible sides is W. H. Auden's and Christopher Isherwood's 1930's account, "Journey to a War."