By now the pattern should be clear: in the half-century since the United States defeated the Japanese in World War II, we have consistently underestimated Japan's economic prowess. As this startling book shows, Americans are doing so yet again, and in our blindness to the consequences we are jeopardizing our economic independence and security.

Ever since the Tokyo stock market entered a period of decline in 1990, the Western press has portrayed Japan as mired in an economic slump. Yet in the first four years of this decade, Japanese exports soared by 32 percent, the yen rose 27 percent, and Japanese employers created a net 3.2 million new jobs. As a result, Japan has now surpassed the U.S. to become the world's largest manufacturing economy and is thus poised to claim the lion's share of the world's growth.

Eamonn Fingleton, an award-winning financial journalist, has reported from Tokyo for nearly a decade, and Blindside is the brilliant summation of his long study of Japan's economy, culture, and political system. He explains why the country's leaders have recently cultivated the image of financial distress and why it is naive to take that false modesty at face value. He locates for the first time the true command center of Japanese economic expansionism, the little-known Ministry of Finance.

Working behind the scenes for almost fifty years, the Ministry of Finance has rewritten the rules of global finance and created a powerful new economic system that is as sharp and portentous a break from capitalism as capitalism was from feudalism.

As the worldwide recession ebbs, the U.S. remains blind to Japan's real strengths and ambitions. This groundbreaking book provides an authoritative and deeply disturbing portrait of the economic juggernaut that is on course to overtake America by the century's close.