Go to a bookstore in London and you’ll see endless rows of books on the history of British royalty or the Victorian garden or the Great Age of Elizabeth. In a Japanese bookstore, those books are about the future of transportation, the future of health, the future of urban development, and so forth. We Americans, on the other hand, tend to have no past and no future. We are what the advertisers in the ’60s called, on behalf of Pepsi, the Now Generation. We tend to be focused on the immediate.