The book that comes to mind is Dave Barry "Does Japan". It was published in 1992, when Japan's economy was looking to outpace America's, and American humor columnist Dave Barry takes a trip to Japan to try and understand why, only to mostly talk about the culture. When I first read it in middle school, I mostly took away "haha Japan weird" (even though, throughout the book, Dave points out that he's the foreigner and all the Japanese probably find things he considers normal weird). As I started learning more history, Japan's devastating financial crisis started to haunt the book more, particularly the descriptions of everyone taking their job very seriously, no matter how menial, and the low crime. When I first started turning left, I gained an appreciation for the one chapter Dave doesn't constantly crack jokes, when he visits Hiroshima, where he actually gets mad at the Japanese for being so apologetic and begs them to feel angry at what was done to them.

In my most recent reading, a bit after I finished Malcolm Harris' Kids These Days, I found myself sympathizing more with the Japanese kids than with Dave Barry. For instance, Dave recalls an anecdote when he was in high school where he and a friend got drunk at a house party, tried to walk home, and ended up puking and passing out on the chief of police's lawn. The police chief drove them home and he got a talking to by his parents, but that's all. The freedom to be this stupid and make mistakes without jeopardizing your future is what makes us Americans, and he hopes the Japanese youth can learn that, as he sees their recreational activities being too choreographed, rigid, and artificial to really allow teenage self-discovery. Meanwhile, as an American, I got grounded for going to a friend's house without telling my parents where he lives, what time l'll be back, who his parents are or what their contact information is, an itemized list of all the activities we're thinking of doing to be approved, etc, etc. We both lived in the same gated community. Re-reading Dave's anecdote, I was shocked at how alien and buckwild what he's talking about seemed.

The book is by no means leftist or intellectual. Ultimately, Mr Barry concludes the reason Japan's economy is doing better than America's is because Americans are too lazy and entitled to do their jobs properly (but if that's the price of American culture, it's a price worth paying). But that's not the focus of the book. Dave is a humorist who scammed his publisher into financing a vacation to Japan on their dime to mostly write self-consciously about being a dumb American tourist. A surprising amount holds up rather well, and I keep being surprised that different jokes and anecdotes keep gaining significance on each re-reading.

Sorry for the essay. Guess I felt like writing. I guess even more than that is a short story collection by HP Lovecraft, which made up an even greater part of my life in high school and college, and led me directly into being a communist, though I've since burnt out on him a bit. There's probably quite a bit more I'm either forgetting or choosing to not remember.