"[3] He is the recipient of a number of prestigious of awards for academics, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation grant, and the Abe Fellowship from the government of Japan.
He graduated from the University of Minnesota, summa cum laude, in 1973.
He then received a master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard in 1975, followed by a doctorate in history from Yale in 1981.
In 1997, he published Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life, an account of the Japanese state’s success at mobilizing its people to act in the perceived interest of the nation in.
In Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends and the World Saves (2011), he argues that the current savings imbalances between the United States and other developed nations are not the result merely of different individual choices.