SLATE.com goes to the Davos Meeting's "Japan Dinner"....
Dispatches From Davos -- Japan's Gross National Cool... Japan Dinner, an annual event hosted by some of the country's most powerful industrialists....It started as a pretty formal-looking affair with a soporific agenda of greater understanding and friendship. But by night's end the event had turned into an anarchic generation war...
[Japan's] Reform plans read like "Zen riddles," and nothing ever comes of them. The bureaucracy is defined by its resistance to change; a system that "rewards people for their obedience" and leaves critics fearing retaliation. ("In fact," he half-joked, "fear of retaliation is what I'm feeling right now.") Japan had, if anything, fallen further since last year; Joi Ito called again for revolution...