Robert C. Neff, who was at the center of American discussions about Japan's rapid rise in prominence in the late 1980s, died on July 31, 2024, at his home in Hayama, southern Tokyo, after a long illness. He was 77 years old. Survivors include his wife of more than 40 years, Sekizawa Fumiko;
Neff was born in St. Louis, Missouri on July 22, 1947. His parents were missionaries stationed in Asia. Neff spent most of his childhood in Japan, where he attended the American School in Japan and developed a native-like fluency in Japanese, a rarity among foreigners.
Mr. Neff rose to fame with his August 1989 cover story for Business Week, “Rethinking Japan,” at a time of fierce debate in the United States, and within the magazine, about whether Japan should open up its markets and adopt a more Western economic and political model.
This debate was important because Americans were wondering whether Japan would use its political and economic model to overwhelm American industry, or whether it would abandon its post-World War II model and adopt a broader open-door policy.
Naef's words on the magazine's cover seemed incredibly bold at the time: “After years of negotiations, the United States still has an annual trade deficit with Japan of $52 billion, and Japanese society remains closed in important respects. As a result, American thinking about Japan is undergoing a fundamental shift. This revisionist view is that Japan is truly different, and that traditional free trade policies don't work. Whereas once such a view would have been dismissed as 'Japan bashing,' it now has intellectual basis.”
Neff is known as the first to use the term “revisionist” to refer to the intellectual leaders of the school, which he identified as Clyde Prestowitz, Chalmers Johnson, James Fallows, and Karel van Wolferen.
“I truly appreciate Neff's clear recognition of the realities of U.S.-Japan trade relations in the 1980s,” Prestowitz said in an email. “He was the only major journalist with a clear and complete understanding of what was going on, and I will truly miss him.”
Japan's financial bubble burst in the early 1990s, leading some critics to say the revisionists had been wrong, and the rise of China in some ways posed a challenge to Japan, but Japan did not abandon its business and political models.
Neff was a figure in the golden age of magazine journalism. He traveled the world with posts in Honolulu, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London and New York. American news organizations maintained extensive networks of foreign correspondents, and Neff was one of the most respected and personable of them all.
Stephen Shepherd, who served as editor-in-chief of Business Week from 1984 to 2005, was a glowing admirer of Neff. “A great journalist and a wonderful person,” Shepherd wrote. “I have many fond memories of visiting Tokyo and absorbing some of his deep understanding of Japan. I treasure our friendship.”
Mr. Neff was also known for nurturing the careers of junior reporters, some of whom had worked for him, and others who had not: He mentored many of the new reporters who came to Japan in the 1980s to cover the country's economic growth, the value of the yen, its technological prowess and, inevitably, its trade frictions.
Neff attended the University of Michigan from 1965 to 1969, where he met his lifelong friend and journalistic rival Urban Lehner, who became Tokyo bureau chief for Business Week magazine and Wall Street Journal Tokyo bureau chief and editor of the Asian edition of the Journal.
Neff was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and served two years in hospitals as part of his national service before enrolling in the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He began his career at Pacific Business News in Honolulu and was hired by Businessweek's Los Angeles bureau in 1977. The McGraw-Hill Companies owned Businessweek as well as the trade magazine and wire service McGraw-Hill News.
Taking advantage of Neff's Japanese language skills, McGraw-Hill transferred him to their Tokyo news agency in 1979. Neff rose to the position of bureau chief.
After editing International Management magazine in London, Neff moved to New York in 1987 as international editor of BusinesssWeek magazine. He returned to Tokyo in 1989 as the magazine's bureau chief, a position he held until the mid-1990s. He then wrote and edited for other magazines, including Forbes and Fortune, and left journalism for a time to serve as executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan.
Neff's greatest achievement was writing the famous guide “Secret Hot Springs of Japan,” which listed the best of Japan's hundreds of hot springs. His friend Lehner and his family went on a hot spring tour with Neff and his wife Fumiko. Lehner wrote an article about the trip for the Asian version of the Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Lehner said Mr. Neff was a master of finding quaint, affordable hot springs, often with mountain views from the steaming hot baths. The Japan Times, a leading Japanese-run English-language newspaper, described Mr. Neff as a “discerning hot spring visitor.”
Neff was also known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Tokyo's vibrant nightlife, and he particularly loved karaoke, the Japanese custom of singing while drinking at night. “A lot of Japanese people I knew told me what a great singer Bob was and how much fun it was to go out drinking with him,” recalled Leslie Helm, who worked for Neff at the Business Week bureau.
Neff was active in the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, serving as secretary from 1981-82 and as president from 1998-99. He also served as co-chairman of the club's food and beverage committee, which meant that he and the other co-chair, the late Bob Kirschenbaum (they were known as “the two Bobs”), tasted every food and drink before it went on the menu.
Mr. Neff served on other committees, and his friend and fellow journalist Toshio Aritake recalled that he was “always at the correspondents' table and at the center of some of the most heated discussions.”
His funeral was held in Hayama Town on August 2nd as a family funeral. The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan plans to host a memorial evening in September.
