Bob Neff focused reporting on Japan ‘revisionists’

Robert C Neff, who was at the center of America’s debate about a rapidly rising Japan in the late 1980s, died on July 31, 2024, at his home in Hayama, Japan, south of Tokyo, after a long illness. He was 77 years old. He is survived by his wife of more than 40 years, Fumiko Sekizawa.

Neff was born on July 22, 1947, in St. Louis, Missouri. His missionary parents were posted to Asia. Spending much of his youth in Japan, where he attended the American School in Japan, Neff developed native fluency in the Japanese language, which is rare amonggaijin – foreigners.

Neff was best known for his BusinessWeek cover story entitled “Rethinking Japan,” which appeared in August 1989 at a time of sharp debate in the United States and inside the magazine about whether Japan would open its markets and adopt a more Western-style economic and political model.

The debate was important because Americans wondered whether Japan would use its political and economic model to overwhelm American industries or, instead, would abandon its post-World War II model in favor of a broad opening.

Neff’s words on the cover of the magazine seemed remarkably bold at the time: “After years of haggling, the US still runs a $52 billion annual trade deficit with Japan, and Japanese society remains closed in crucial ways. As a result, a radical shift in US thinking about Japan is underway. This revisionist view holds that Japan really is different and that conventional free trade policies won’t work. Once, such views would have been dismissed as ‘Japan-bashing,’ but now they have an intellectual base.”

Neff was credited with first applying the term “revisionists” to refer to the intellectual leaders of this school of thought, whom he identified as Clyde