Japan's Business Renaissance: How the World's Greatest Economy Revived, Renewed, and Reinvented Itself, by John C. Beck and Mark B. Fuller. McGraw-Hill, 2006, 226 pp., $27.95 (cloth)

There was a time when you couldn't walk past a bookstore without seeing scores of books preaching Japanese business knowhow. Ezra Vogel's "Japan as No. 1" may have been the most famous of the boom years, but a multitude of others were rolled out as authors and publishers tried to cash in on what was the hottest market on the planet.

So much for the 1980s.

Come the lost decade of the 1990s and the only growth industry was in dreary academic tomes looking at what went wrong; books on Japan's business success were as popular as Kim Jong Il jumpsuits.