NEW YORK -- There is something mesmerizing about America's fascination with its own people of prominence, especially presidents. There is an endless stream of biographies, and some become immensely popular.

Among those published last year, two are on The New York Times best-seller list: "John Adams," by David McCullough, and "Theodore Rex," by Edmund Morris. "Reaching for Glory," by Michael R. Beschloss, just published, is the second in a series that attempts to portray President Lyndon B. Johnson through secret tapes uncovered not long ago. There is also a new biography of Chief Supreme Court Justice John Marshall.

Coming from Japan, where large, detailed biographies (including autobiographies) are seldom written, I often wonder if this phenomenon is not comparable to "Nihonjinron" -- that amorphous genre of woolgathering on the true nature of the Japanese that foreign observers love to condemn. On the face of it, of course, biography as it is written in the U.S. is unlike Nihonjinron; it is supposed to be based on fact, rather than on speculation. But insofar as biography is "an approximate genre, subject to selective memory (and) the hidden agenda," as Julian Barnes has recently put it, its difference from Nihonjinron may not be that great.