Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival
David Pilling
Allen Lane, 432pp, £20
Until December 2012, Japan was proverbial in the City as the graveyard of global investors. It seemed impossible to get right. How many false dawns on its stock market had the optimists endured over the two “lost decades”, since the collapse of its great bubble in 1990? Then again, how often had the pessimists – warning of imminent default, as Japan’s pile of government debt grew bigger and bigger – turned out to be crying wolf? A frustrated fund manager of my acquaintance summed up the way in which many financial types had come to think of Japan: “I don’t understand what is happening there and I never will: sometimes, I wish it just didn’t exist.”
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