The Second Half of the Twentieth Century in East Asia: The Case of Japan

East Asia astonished the world during the second half of the twentieth century as it grew at a pace that nobody had thought possible during the preceding history. No region of the world had ever grown as fast for such a sustained period of time, and nobody could have imagined that a region that performed so badly in all of the preceding history (with the exception of Japan) would outperform everybody else by so much.