James Howard Kunstler

There was Japan, standing quietly offstage all these years, minding its own business, more or less - though unwinding financially and socially at some very deep level for two decades, debt rising around everybody's ankles like a silent, insidious tsunami, population dying back, young people demoralized by the "salary-man" culture with its meager consolation of nightly drinking sprees ending in micro-hotels with rooms like funerary vaults - Japan, who had been horrifically chastened after its mad military-industrial outburst of the last century, who shook all that off to become the world's most dependably, civilized nation. 

     And now, the sorrows of Job.

 
Rock Me on the Water