Japan, inadvertently, has become the outstanding forerunner in a new set of global developments that can be described under the three headings of <italic>deflation</italic>, <italic>downsizing</italic>, and <italic>demography</italic>. New ‘lessons from Japan’ are to be discovered here, and these are not only admonitory ones. Far from it,...

This essay describes the evolution of Japan's modern currency standard, from its premodern origins, to the age of the classical gold standard, to the establishment of the classical dollar standard after World War II. Relatively little has been written in English describing this long-run...