God's Dust

Ian Buruma spent a year travelling in eight countries from Burma's rural isolation to the sexual Disneyland of Thailand and the sterile suburbia of Singapore. This book blends history, personal observation, interviews and reportage which portrays an Asia suffering a crisis of cultural identity. Buruma considers how deeply each culture has been influenced by foreign powers (as much be the Chinese and Japanese as by the West), both in the past and present, and their differing responses from the Philippines' psychological dependence on America, to the xenophobia of Korea and Japan's protection by mimicry. He charts the alarming rise of National Socialism and shows how Western ideas are filtered through the Oriental sensibility in individual and often extraordinarily dynamic societies. In his talks with leading thinkers from Malaysia to Taiwan about Asia's struggle to reconcile conflicting values of spirit and science, history and progress, Buruma discovers the modern human predicament in its starkest form. Ian Buruma has also written "A Japanese Mirror".