How Japan Can Reinvent Itself and Why This Is Important for America and the World. In 1979, the book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America by Harvard University professor Ezra Vogel caused a sensation in the United States by pointing out that Japan was surpassing America as world economic leader; the book remains to this day the all-time bestseller in Japan of non-fiction by a Western author. The book was timely: Japan's subsequent «bubble era» of the 1980s saw the country booming....
