Japan arouses strong feelings. You love it or you hate it — sometimes both at once; rarely neither.
Critics come well armed. Japan often seems narrow and parochial. Trading partners find it overprotected and overregulated. Refugees and their advocates deplore Japan's cold shoulder. Foreigners sometimes complain of being made to feel like a different species.
Is Japan even a democracy? To some observers it seems more of a bureaucracy, the elected politicians a mere front for the unelected bureaucrats who really govern. Is it pacifist? It has a pacifist Constitution and hasn't waged war since 1945, but its closest neighbors claim to see an unregenerate militarist core beneath its benign exterior.