The latest addition to this expatriate oeuvre is T.R. Reid's "Confucius Lives Next Door." Based on his five and a half years in Tokyo in the early 1990s as bureau chief for the Washington Post, Reid's work is a penetrating mix of anecdote and analysis, designed to illuminate, as the subtitle suggests, "what living in the East teaches us about living in the West."

His goal, Reid told me on a recent swing through San Francisco, was "to write about the Asian social miracle. There have been numerous books and articles about the Asian economic miracle," he said, "but no one has focused on the social miracle. If you look at all the East Asian countries, you find very low crime rates, low divorce rates, no broken homes, 1 percent of babies born to single mothers, even low drug use in most of these countries. By many social measures, these are very successful societies. How? What did they do that we didn't do? Or what are they doing better than we are?

"The answer, I think," he continued, "is that these are fairly harmonious, civil societies because they are based on ethical values or moral values. And many people, including me, think that these values first came from Confucius. Today, even people who don't know Confucius know his rules. Japan, for example, is a very Confucian society, even if the Japanese don't recognize it. There's a woman quoted in my book who was first asked if she was a follower of Confucius. She said, 'No, not anymore. I read Confucius in the third or fourth grade, but Confucianism has no role in my life.' And then the professor questioning her said, 'Well, let's see, Confucius talked about the virtues of a really serious devotion to family, the notion that group loyalties run up and down, a commitment to education, a belief in long-term relationships. And she said, 'Well, that's me. I think I'll go back and reread Confucius because this is what we're all about.'"

Striking a nice balance between edification and entertainment, Reid mixes statistics and historical research with day-to-day tales of neighbors, school life and joining-the-corporation ceremonies to present his thesis of Confucianism as code and context. "Nonfiction books on Asia are pretty off-putting," Reid acknowledged. "Publishers don't like to publish them, and people don't like to buy them. I thought I had something serious to say, but I really felt I needed to be entertaining, to write it in the first person, talk about my family, make it personal. It was really hard to get the right measure and at some point to still say: Well, these are fun stories, but by the way there's an important point here."

Happily enough, this personal touch is precisely what makes Reid's arguments persuasive.

Reading "Confucius Lives Next Door" set me to thinking about all the expatriate books on Japan I've enjoyed since my own American-abroad stint in Tokyo, from 1977-79. I was able to reread many of these in co-editing the recently published anthology "Travelers' Tales: Japan." That anthology is an easy one-stop introduction to Western accounts of Japanese life and culture, but if you're inspired to start your own collection, here are some recommended titles.

Next page | A 2,000-mile walk through Japan and other books