From the (e)Bookshelf: Bending Adversity

That I doubt I was even aware of them at the time may just add that much odd interest to finding relics of the 1980s warning how Japan had figured out an altogether different approach to the great game of international relations and would buy up the world in the end. Things changed there, but after a while I suppose the new seeming assumption the country was now just this strange place off to the side, irrelevant to everything else, began to seem sort of overdone in its own way. When I saw a review in my newspaper's Sunday supplement of a book arguing that perhaps Japan wasn't quite so sunk in "decline" as everyone thinks, that got my attention enough for me to buy "Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival" as an e-book.
( The art of survival )