Here's another great book...

...from T. R. Reid, Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us about Living in the West. A typical paragraph:

Perhaps you've seen the photographs of those shocked, weeping masses of Japanese people listening to their emperor's radio broadcast of August 15, 1945. War-weary, starving, sick, and sad, people dressed in makeshift smocks made from old newspapers sank to their knees and bowed their heads when they heard -- virtually all of them for the first time -- the imperial voice croaking through the static. Hirohito didn't tell his subjects all that had happened: that the Japanese empire had been completely lost, that the Imperial Army and Navy were totally destroyed, that five million Japanese had died, that thirty million had no homes, that every Japanese city was a wreck, that there was virtually nothing left to eat and no intact roads or railroads to deliver food even if there had been some, that once-proud Japan was the most despised nation on earth, that millions around the world had cheered when atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities, and that an occupation force of enemy soldiers would soon arrive to run the country. Rather, the emperor set forth the state of things in a classic piece of Japanese understatement: "The situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage."