As Japan enters the new year, pundits and panjandrums across public, private and academic landscapes are agonizing over what they call the country's "creativity crisis."
Where, they ask, are the new big thinkers — the world-class wizards who will use their prodigious brain power to propel the nation's economy with innovative ideas?
Rising to the challenge, young people scan bookstore shelves groaning under the weight of self-help volumes, hoping to find the one instruction guide that will somehow awaken their slumbering imaginative genius.