Japan was a physical and psychological wasteland at the end of World War II. With over three million dead, thirty-nine percent of city populations homeless, forty percent of all urban areas flattened, eighty percent of all ships destroyed, and thirty-three percent of all industrial machine tools rendered inoperable, the country was devastated and demoralized.

And yet, just nineteen years later, Japan stood proud-modern, peace-loving, and open-welcoming the world as the host of the 1964 Olympics, the largest global event of its time.

In 1964–The Greatest Year in the History of Japan, Roy Tomizawa chronicles how Japan rose from the rubble to embark on the greatest Asian economic miracle of the twentieth-century. He shares stories from the 1964 Olympics that created a level of alignment and national pride never before seen in Japan, leaving an indelible mark in the psyche of the Japanese for generations.