Japan basks in easy times. It’s a lucky place — an oasis in a desert of suffering.

It doesn’t always seem that way. Hardship there is, in abundance — for everyone sometimes, for some always; for many more this generation than last. Still, never before, in the broad sweep of history, have people in general been better housed, better fed, better educated, more prosperous, more comfortable, more leisured, more empowered, more equal to one another — in a word, happier, if all this makes for happiness — than people in general living modern lives in modern times in a modern country.

Premodern poverty is scarcely imaginable today. “There was a great famine throughout the land,” reads a 15th-century Kyoto chronicle of the year 1461. “An epidemic of many diseases was also prevalent. Two-thirds of the people died of starvation, and skeletons filled the street.”