Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

As of January 8, 2001, many ministries and agenciesof the Japanese government are being merged and retitled. The names I give are those in use at the time of writing.



Prologue

What I am about to communicate to you is the most astonishing thing, the most surprising, the most marvellous, the most miraculous, most triumphant, most baffling, most unheard of, most singular, most extraordinary, most unbelievable, most unforeseen, biggest, tiniest, rarest, commonest, the most talked about, and the most secret up to this day.

– Mme de Sevigne (1670)



The idea for this book came one day in Bangkok in 1996, as I sat on the terrace of the Oriental Hotel having coffee with my old friend Merit Janow. It was a colorful scene: teak rice boats plied the great river, along with every other type of craft from pleasure yachts to coal barges. At the next table, a group of German businessmen were discussing a new satellite system for Asia, next to them was a man reading an Italian paper, and across the way a group of young Thais and Americans were planning a trip to Vietnam. Merit and I had grown up together in Tokyo and Yokohama, and it struck us that the scene we were witnessing had no counterpart in the Japan we know today: very few foreigners visit, and even fewer live there; of those, only a handful are planning new businesses – their effect on Japan is close to zero. It is hard to find a newspaper in English in many hotels, much less one in Italian.

The river, too, presented a sharp contrast to the drab sameness of Japanese cities, where we could think of no waterways with such vibrant life along their shores, but instead only visions of endless concrete embankments. Japan suddenly seemed very far away from the modern world-and the title for a book came to me: Irrelevant Japan. Japan kept the world out for so long, and so successfully, that in the end the world passed her by.

However, as I researched this book, it became clear that Japan's problems are much more severe than even I had guessed. Far from being irrelevant, Japan's troubles have serious relevance for both developing countries and advanced economies, for the simple reason that Japan fell into the pitfalls of both. So the title changed.