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.

The key question is: Why should Japan have fallen into any pitfall, when the nation had everything? It reveled in one of the world's most beautiful natural environments, with lush mountains and clear-running streams pouring over emerald rocks; it preserved one of the richest cultural heritages on earth, receiving artistic treasure from all across East Asia, which the Japanese have refined over the centuries; it boasted one of the world's best educational systems and was famed for its high technology; its industrial expansion after World War II drew admiration everywhere, and the profits accumulated in the process made it perhaps the wealthiest nation in the world.

And yet, instead of building the glorious new civilization that was its birthright, Japan went into an inexplicable tailspin in the 1990s. At the start of the decade the stock market collapsed, and by the end of it the Tokyo exchange, the largest in the world in 1989, was capitalized at little more than a fourth of New York's; meanwhile, GNP growth in Japan fell to a minus, while the United States, Europe, and China boomed.

That Japan's economy stumbled is old news. But the media have reported very little about the distress that afflicts other aspects of the nation's life. Few have questioned why Japan's supposed «cities of the future» are unable to do something as basic as burying telephone wires; why gigantic construction boondoggles scar the countryside (roads leading nowhere in the mountains, rivers encased in U-shaped chutes); why wetlands are cemented over for no reason; why the movie industry has collapsed; or why Kyoto and Nara were turned into concrete jungles. These things point to something much deeper than a mere period of economic downturn; they represent a profound cultural crisis, trouble eating away at the nation's very soul.

In the process of researching this book, it became clear to me that Japan's problems have their roots in the 1860s, when the country first opened to the world. At that time, the nation set out to resist the Western colonial powers, and later to vie with them for dominance – and even though Japan succeeded in becoming one of the world's most powerful nations, the basic policy of sacrificing everything for industrial growth never changed. Over time, a wide gap opened up between the goals of this policy, instituted over a century ago, and the real needs of Japan's modern society. Distortions and hidden debts have accumulated, like water dripping into the bamboo poles that can often be seen in Japanese gardens, until finally one last droplet causes the bamboo to tip over, the water spills out, and the other end of the bamboo drops onto a stone with a loud bonk. How Japan went bonk-falling so quickly from being the economic and cultural darling of the 1980s into a profoundly troubled state in the 1990s – is one of the strange and terrible tales of the late twentieth century.

The external view of Japan differs vividly from its internal reality. «A man seeing an X-ray photograph of his own skeleton,» wrote Marcel Proust, «would have the same suspicion of error at the sight of this rosary of bones labeled as being a picture of himself as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: 'Dromedary resting.' » The Japan that I have described in this book will be equally unfamiliar to many readers. The «land of high technology,» lacking the know-how to test for or clean up toxic wastes. The society that «loves nature» concreting over its rivers and seashores to feed a voracious construction industry. An «elite bureaucracy» that has so mismanaged the public wealth that the health system and pension funds are failing, while the national debt has soared to become the highest in the world.

It is an incongruous picture, shockingly alien if one is familiar only with the seductive outer skin of Japan's manufacturing success. How could the winsome Portrait of a Girl, presented to the world for forty years by Japan experts, have turned out to be Dromedary Resting – ravaged mountains and rivers, endemic pollution, tenement cities, and skyrocketing debt? Why have writers and academics never told us about this?

Since the 1950s, Western observers have come to Japan as worshippers to a shrine. When I majored in Japanese Studies in college in the 1960s and early 1970s, I learned, as did most of my colleagues, that it was our mission to explain Japan to an uncomprehending and unsympathetic world. Japan did everything differently from the West, and this was terribly exciting – for many Japanologists, it seemed to be an ideal society, a Utopia. Even the revisionist writers of the 1980s, who warned of a Japanese economic juggernaut, spoke largely in terms of awe.

Many of my colleagues remain convinced that their job is to present Japan attractively to others, and a high proportion of them depend, in one way or another, on Japan for their livelihood. Let the Japanophile say the wrong thing, however, and he may not be invited back to address a prestigious council; his friends in industry or government back in Tokyo will cease to funnel information to him. So self-censorship rules.

Even stronger than censorship is the power of nostalgia. Japan experts long for the beautiful, artistic, efficient Japan that they continue to believe in, and the unhappy reality makes them cling even more to a vision of Utopia. Incurable nostalgia rules this field, and this is why Zen and tea ceremony experts recite to us many an exquisite haiku demonstrating Japan's love of nature but do not speak of the concreting of rivers and seashore. Similarly, economics professors lavish praise on Japan's industrial efficiency without mentioning that factories are free to dump carcinogenic chemicals into neighboring rice paddies. A few writers have raised these issues in recent years, but they were mainly journalists. American academics and cultural experts have uttered not a peep.

This brings me to a personal confession. This is a passionate book, and the reason is that I find what is taking place in Japan nothing less than tragic. Of course, there is much that is wonderful in Japan-I would never say that foreigners conversant with Japan must attack and criticize it. Nevertheless, we must certainly take off the emerald glasses and see modern Japan for what it is. To do otherwise is to condone and even become complicit in the disaster.

People writing about Japan make a big mistake if they believe that to gloss over its troubles is to «support Japan» and to point out difficulties is to «attack» or «bash» Japan. Japan is not a monolithic entity. Tens of millions of Japanese are as disturbed and frightened by what they see as I am. American friends have asked me, «What drove you to write a book that portrays Japan in such a disturbing light?» The answer is an almost embarrassingly old-fashioned Japanese answer: duty.

I came to Japan as a young boy, and spent most of the next thirty-five years in Tokyo, Shikoku, and Kyoto. As someone who loves this country, it is impossible for me to remain unmoved by Japan's modern troubles, especially the doom that has befallen the natural environment. During the past decade, I have spent untold hours with unhappy Japanese colleagues, who deeply deplore what they see happening to their nation's culture and environment but feel powerless to stop it. Halfway through the writing of this book, I took a trip to Ise Shrine, Japan's most sacred site, with two old friends, both of whom are prominent cultural figures. As we walked through Ise's primeval groves, I asked them, «Please tell me honestly whether I should press forward with this book. It's hard work. I could easily let this subject go.» They answered, «No, you have to write it. In our position, with our every move scrutinized by the media, we aren't free to speak out publicly. Please write it, for us.»

So this book is for my two friends, and millions of others like them. There is a great irony here, for while many foreign experts remain emotionally attached to present-day Japan's way of doing things, a growing and increasingly vocal number of Japanese emphatically are not. They, too, feel nostalgia, but it's for an older, nobler Japan, one that today's Japan denies at every step. As we shall see, much that parades as hallowed tradition is actually new contrivances that would be completely unrecognizable in Edo days or even as recently as the 1960s. People in Japan grieve because they know in their hearts, even if they cannot always express it in words, that their country is no longer true to its own ideals.

A strong streak of dissatisfaction runs through every part of Japanese society, with even a few highly placed bureaucrats questioning the status quo. Commentators in daily newspapers, magazines, and television talk shows here are obsessed with the idea that something is wrong. The title of an article in the influential opinion journal Shincho 45 sums up the mood: «In the 1990s, Japan Has Lost the War Again!» Another opinion journal, Gendai, devoted an entire issue to a series of essays by prominent economists and journalists headlined «As Japan Sinks – How to Protect Your Life and Possessions.» The subtitle was «This Country Is Rotting on Its Feet.» Unhappy and distressed people number in the millions – and they are Japan's hope for change.