Garon was born and brought up in Minnesota. 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. At Yale, he was the recipient of the Sumitomo Prize Fellowship.[2]
His first book, The State and Labor in Modern Japan, traced the history of the Japanese labor movement. 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. Beyond Our Means tells for the first time how other nations aggressively encouraged their citizens[3] to save by means of special savings institutions and savings campaigns. The U.S. government, meanwhile, promoted mass consumption and reliance on credit through policies such as tax breaks on borrowing,[4] which culminated in the global credit crunch.
“Transnational History and Japan’s ‘Comparative Advantage,’” Journal of Japanese Studies 43, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 65-92.
"Rethinking Modernization and Modernity in Japanese History: A Focus on State-Society Relations." The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (1994): 346-66. doi:10.2307/2059838.