Like Botswana, Japan has been able to engage with modernity and modernization on its own terms, to select from it what it needed and to avoid being overwhelmed by its unintended consequences. The art of achieving this relation to modernity is extremely rare: twentieth century Germany pursued modernity in German terms in a way that led to the dead-end of national socialism, American modernity came upon that country through nineteenth century mass migration and the sudden concentration of capital in a few influential hands, throughout the twentieth century the artistic and experiential meaning of American modernity struggled to catch up to where the economy and the society had already gone.