When I first began travelling in Southeast Asia in the mid-1960s, there was a joke circulating among expatriates that paradise consisted of having an English home, a Japanese wife, a Chinese cook and an American salary.
Hell, on the other had, was to have a Japanese home - 'rabbit hutches', they were called by foreigners - an English cook, an American wife and a Chinese salary. Several stereotypes are contained here, including the 'submissive' Japanese wife - the Madam Butterfly syndrome had endured - and of course the 'coolie' Chinese wages.
The fact that Asia, especially China, was poor was not simply perception, but very much a reality. Japan was the exception, although in the mid- to late-1960s, its growing economic might was not taken seriously, or alternatively was dismissed as fragile and solely based on low labour rates. There were a few who disagreed, however, notably Norman Macrae of The Economist and Robert Guillain of Le Monde.
For the rest of Asia, from the early 19th century until well into the second half of the 20th century, the story was one of precipitate economic decline and demographic increase, leading to rising poverty. The popular imagination was fed with images conjured up by the works of authors such as Pearl Buck, while more erudite minds could ponder Asia's fate in the voluminous work of the Nobel Economics Prize laureate Gunnar Myrdal, whose Asian Drama: an inquiry into the poverty of nations was published in 1959.
In the following two decades, things changed quite remarkably. In 1979, Harvard professor Ezra Vogel published Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, introducing a genre - presenting Japan as either model or menace - that lasted well into the mid-1990s.
Then in the course of the 1990s, the publishing industry witnessed an explosion of books on the Asian model of economic growth. How Asia Got Rich*, the title of a major work by Edith Terry, was the topic pursued by pundits like the Holy Grail.
It begs two questions, and ones that are more than just semantics. While Japan is, and will remain for the foreseeable future, by far the wealthiest Asian nation in terms of gross domestic product per capita, the question nevertheless arises: are the Japanese really rich?
