Modern middle-class life, you could reasonably argue, generates more happiness among more people than any other ever conceived. It has been extravagantly derided — as bourgeois, soulless, spiritless, narrow, boring, mindlessly acquisitive and so on. But back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when 90 percent of Japanese proudly identified themselves as middle class, the prevailing feeling was of past sorrows overcome en route to an ever-brightening, ever-expanding future.