Inventing Japan From Empire to Economic Miracle

Ian Buruma, who Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has described as having ‘A vivid eye for evidence, a masterful way with voluminous data, a real feel for what makes people tick, an unerring instinct for what one might call the importance of the trivial’ provides a coruscating synthesis of the extraordinary century between Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853 and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.