There's beauty in the ugly. You just have to slow down long enough to see it.

After several weeks in Japan I've come home a different man. Not smarter. Certainly not richer. But calmer and, perhaps for the first time, patient. It's as if that country whispers a lesson I and so many others are in too much of a rush to hear: that stillness delivers its own kind of wisdom.

Japan has a way of quietly rearranging you. At first it feels like a nation obsessed with precision and efficiency. Trains arrive on the second. People form queues so neat and orderly they could have been designed by an obsessive-compulsive architect. You can't find a bin anywhere yet the streets are spotless, with no graffiti to be seen.

Yet beneath all this punctuality and polish lies a quieter truth. The Japanese don'

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