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Alex Kerr's tough-love analysis Dogs and Demons of how Japanese bureaucrats have worked tirelessly over the past few decades to destroy their own country, is one of those books that qualifies as essential reading for anyone who’s spent time in Japan. Every street corner I turned, every news report about corrupt politicians and shiny new concrete mountains I saw, resonated with what I'd read in the book of Alex Kerr.The Japan I got to know is a rather ugly place, with concrete rivers and beaches, gruesome dilapidated buildings, and mysterious concrete flood control devices in the hills. The point of the book is that Japan has made a mistake in modernizing. The Japanese were very successful up to a point, around the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, at which time little further progress has been made. Alex Kerr puts the blame on these problems squarely on out-of-control bureaucracies that answer to no one and must constantly spend their ever increasing budgets on increasingly pointless public works projects. His favorite example of this is the concreting over of Japan in the name of flood control by erecting pointless dams and encasing rivers in concrete. Only three of the 142 larger rivers in Japan still have their natural banks, the remaining are all enmeshed in concrete. ‘Useless or inevitable?’ always came to my mind because Japan has had severe trouble with many different natural disasters.