JAPAN'S GOT ROOTS

"The problems have been well publicized: The most rapidly aging society in the world, the highest public debt level in the industrialized world, a decade of falling land and stock prices, declining education standards, rising crime, divorce, suicide, youth delinquency and all-too-frequent scandals involving everyone from elite civil servants to doctors, not to mention politicians and their business associates with their snouts in the trough.

But while it's easy to throw your hands in the air and dismiss Japan as a country drowning in a tsunami of its own making--as many have done--it might be worth paying attention to Kingston's important finding: Something positive is happening here. It's just been happening so quietly, so incrementally, that we all missed it."

From review of Japan's Quiet Transformation: Social Change and Civil Society in the Twenty-First Century
By Jeff Kingston