What happens when an entire country retires? Since the 1990s, Japan's economy, once considered invincible, has been trapped in a downward spiral. This is further accelerated by the fact that Japan's population is aging faster than almost any other: in the past five years, the country has lost nearly a million people, and entire rural regions are similarly dying out. Japan's example illustrates what happens when a country reaches the limits of growth and refuses to undergo profound reforms—particularly the consistent opening of the economy to women and immigrants. Wieland Wagner, the Asia correspondent for SPIEGEL, compellingly describes in his book how decades of stagnation have changed the daily lives of people and what lessons we in Germany should learn from the aging of this prosperous nation.