Takafusa Shioya has sent me his book published last year, "Keizai Saisei no Joken" (Conditions for Economic Recovery). Nearly three decades ago, during a period of a few years when Jimmy Carter's presidency morphed into Ronald Reagan's, he was stationed in the New York outpost of a Japanese trade office where I work. We have since remained in touch.
Shioya entered the Economic Planning Agency upon graduating from the Law Faculty of Tokyo University in 1966 and was placed with a round of other agencies, as "career bureaucrats" typically are, before attaining the highest rank of administrative vice minister, in 1998.
Throughout, he remained a close analyst and observer of the Japanese economy. Now a professor, he decided to respond, belatedly, to the question Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto once asked, "Tell me how the Japanese economy has ended up in this mess." The result is the book: an exploration of factors that might have led to Japan's "economic failure at the end of the 20th century."