I recently gave a talk on Japanese culture to a group of foreign students at Tokyo Institute of Technology. They hailed from a variety of places, including Scandinavia, the United States and Asian countries. I began by asking them to give me a keyword or two that they thought characterized Japanese life today.
In a few minutes we had more than 20 answers on the blackboard, all of which were very appropriate to describe this highly modernized country and the people who live in it.
On the day after the talk I began to read a book that, had I known about it, I would certainly have shown them. Published by Iwanami Shoten in September 2007, "Sengo Harapeko Jidai no Shatta-on (The Sound of the Shutter in the Postwar Era of Hunger)," brings together a host of photographs that were published in the Iwanami Photographic Paperback series from 1950-58, with highly insightful commentary by author Genpei Akasegawa.