Japan was literally reduced to ashes at the end of the Second World War. Japanese people scavenged for anything to sustain themselves in those dark days following surrender. A piece of bark from a rotten tree or a limpid carrot root must have passed as a great meal.

Each exhausting day must have been just as bleak as the previous one. The infrastructure, what remained of it, was in total disarray. The country was in chaos. Panic was ensuing after news spread of the devastation that the atomic bomb had wrought on the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The losers (Japan) could not decide whether to embrace their conquerors or fight to the bloody death. It was only a painfully humiliating radio broadcast (at the urging of General McCarthur) by the Emperor Hirohito in which he admitted he was not divine that allowed the Allies to bring a horrific world event to a definable end.

One constant explains the miraculous economic recovery that Japan