You would think that in this time of endless information due to the invention that is the internet that inaccuracies would not be made. While I cannot say I haven’t made them myself, I would expect someone who is a professional to not makes those errors, especially with books which are used by schools. Out of the umpteen books which my school has which surround the topic of the history/culture of Japan, one of them stood out to me. Most notably because it was the only book to have information on kaiju eiga and Kurosawa. But I am going to focus on kaiju eiga here. While it is fine and dandy for there to be a paragraph on kaiju, it is not ok if there is an inaccuracy on something which has been - up to the book’s publishing year of 2005 - published many times.
The first offense was the classifying of a still from "Godzilla Raids Again" as a still from the 1954 classic "Gojira". What is even worse, then it comes to the book’s image index in the back of the book, it differs from the image’s subtitle and claims that the picture is from 1955. So if someone who did not know about kaiju eiga was to read this book thoroughly, they would be confused by the different dates which were provided and given the wrong information. The second offense is the calling of "Gorgo" as a Japanese kaiju - instead of the proper classification of a British kaiju film.
Bottom line, you who still go to school and may within the rest of your school years become assigned to do a report on Japan, do not used the book "Japan: A Primary Source Culture Guide" by Meg Greene. With two errors on just one page, I would love to see how many more inaccuracies there would be in the book. This is especially wondrous considering that Meg Greene has written two books on Japan, "Japan: A Primary Source Culture Guide" and "The Technology of Ancient Japan". According to Amazon, she has only published four books.
Fail.
