It’s not just sushi and ramen and anime and Marie Kondo. “‘Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future,’ as the author William Gibson wrote in 2001. ‘The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line.’ … But what Gibson wrote about products was just as true about other, less visible trends in Japanese society: economic stagnation; a plunging fertility rate; a dramatic postponement of the ‘normal’ milestones of adulthood, such as getting married or simply moving out of the family home; a creeping sense of ambivalence about what the future might hold. Seventeen years later, America has finally caught up.”