Japan was a physical and psychological wasteland at the end of World War II. With over three million dead, thirty-nine percent of city populations homeless, forty percent of all urban areas flattened, eighty percent of all ships destroyed, and thirty-three percent of all industrial machine tools rendered inoperable, the country was devastated and demoralized.
And yet, just nineteen years later, Japan stood proud-modern, peace-loving, and open-welcoming the world as the host of the 1964 Olympics, the largest global event of its time.
In 1964-The Greatest Year in the History of Japan, Roy Tomizawa chronicles how Japan rose from the rubble to embark on the greatest Asian economic miracle of the twentieth-century. He shares stories from the 1964 Olympics that created a level of alignment and national pride never before seen in Japan, leaving an indelible mark in the psyche of the Japanese for generations.
