From Jōmon pottery to bullet trains — how an archipelago at the edge of Asia survived Mongols, shoguns, and ruin to become an economic miracle.
No people on earth has reinvented itself more completely — or more often — than the Japanese. An archipelago nation at the edge of Asia took Chinese writing, Buddhist faith, and Western industry, and made each of them unmistakably its own. Then, after the worst defeat of the twentieth century, it rebuilt into an economic miracle in a single generation.
