Japanophiles, look away now. A country renowned for inspiring fascination, warm feelings and not a little envy in its rapidly rising numbers of visitors – from crime-free streets to clean and plentiful public toilets – is in the grip of problems deeper and darker than you might imagine.

The classic Japan itinerary reveals little of those problems. You’ll enjoy hyper-modern Tokyo with its fabulous restaurants, flawless transport and non-stop shopping and entertainment. You’ll jostle tourists and schoolchildren for the perfect view of the Golden Temple in Kyoto without losing your enthusiasm for Japan’s ‘eternal city’. Then you’ll fly home with pretty much only good things to say about Japan and the Japanese.

Companies making nappies for babies are pivoting to nappies for the elderly

Companies making nappies for babies are pivoting to nappies for the elderly

Yet a short train ride out from these places would deliver you into the world that Tom Feiling describes, with heartfelt sadness, in this beautiful, measured meditation on the country’s predicament. The author lived there in the early 1990s, the last years of its postwar heyday. Returning 30 years later, he finds that cities such as Tokyo continue to thrive – but largely thanks to what he sees as a Dorian Gray effect. They look young because they draw in young Japanese from across the country and because, thanks to a hyperactive construction industry, the average age of a building in Tokyo is just 28 years. Suburban and rural Japan are the portrait in the attic: deprived of their young, shops and schools are shutting down and properties are lying........

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