As the train speeds along, leaving the dense jumble of Tokyo for the cool, green uplands of Nagano, I flick through the pages of The Dignity of a State, the bestseller written by the man I am travelling to meet.

The “notorious” Masahiko Fujiwara – his word not mine – is the talk of Tokyo. His slim volume has sold more than 2 million copies in Japan, trumped only by the latest Harry Potter. That is not bad for a book – written by a mathematician-turned-social commentator – whose themes are rather more heavygoing than Hogwarts: the limits of western logic, why Japan should return to samurai values, and the unique sensitivity of Japanese to nature.

It would be easy to dismiss this as yet another exercise in nihonjinron, theories cranked-out (often crank-filled) to delineate the supposed uniqueness – even superiority – of the Japanese race and culture. Such books reached their zenith in the 1980s when Japan was said to be becoming the dominant economic superpower.

Fujiwara’s work is of a different era. Japan’s economy still has merits, but delusions of its invincibility collapsed along with asset prices 15 years ago. His updated version of Japanese exceptionalism no longer claims Japan can beat America at its own (grubby) game, but says it should be truer to its own values.

I take a cab from the little station at Chino and arrive at a country-style eatery, with rustic tables, clattering plates and burbling chatter. Fujiwara is already there. At 62, still teaching maths at Tokyo’s Ochanomizu university, he is casually dressed in a short-sleeve checked shirt and comfortable white slacks, his greying hair somewhat awry as if he has misplaced his comb. He has a wiry body and an intense face.

After we order the set lunch and chat briefly about his experience living in the US and England, where he was a visiting mathematics professor, I ask him why The Dignity of a State, the most successful of his social polemics, has caught the zeitgeist. Speaking in precise English – a nice touch from a man who advocates semi-abandonment of the subject in schools – he says it has taken half a century of obsession with wealth, followed by a long period of stagnation, to make the Japanese realise what they have lost.

“Japan used to despise money, just like English gentlemen,” he says. “But after the war, under American influence, we concentrated on prosperity.”

Our first course arrives, a prawn, a few delicate slices of salami and some chickpeas. So exactly does my plate’s arrangement mirror that of my guest’s that I wonder if the number of legumes is identical.

Before I can count them, Fujiwara is talking about bushido, the chivalrous samurai code whose essence, he says, is being lost. “When bushido started in the 12th century it was swordsmanship. Since there were no wars in the 260 years of the Edo era, that swordsmanship became a kind of value system: sensitivity to the poor and to the weak, benevolence, sincerity, diligence, patience, courage, justice.”

His nostalgia for more honourable times matches unease in Japan about a growing economic divide, said by some to be bornof the country’s embrace of American-style capitalism. Shinzo Abe, a social conservative, became prime minister in September 2006 with a mission to restore pride in his “beautiful country”, an echo of Fujiwara. Though Abe does not share the author’s contempt for western capitalism, their agendas overlap when it comes to shoring up a supposedly degenerate education system and recovering the national dignity robbed by 60 years of defeated-nation syndrome.

Fujiwara yearns for bushido, the way of the samurai abandoned in 1868 by Meiji revolutionaries who thought Japan must modernise if it were not to be colonised. They dissolved the samurai class, removing swords and hacking off topknots. The trauma of abandoning, almost overnight, one social system and substituting it with another – embracing a foreign culture to resist foreign domination – is keenly felt in a nation even today torn in its attitudes towards the outside world.

The model of liberal democracy that Japan inherited is flawed, Fujiwara says. As well as putting faith in unreliable masses – he prefers a cool-headed elite – it overemphasises rationality. “You really need something more. You might say that Christianity is one such thing. But for us Japanese, we don’t have a religion such as Christianity or Islam, so we need to have something else: deep emotion.”

The waiter brings a large plate of assorted salmon in varied hues of succulent pink, giving us a description of each. When he has gone, Fujiwara continues. “I am against market fundamentalism. It might be a very fair contest. But being fair is just a logical concept. It doesn’t mean much. It means being against weaker people, against less talented people. This gets on my nerves,” he concludes, the final flourish presumably emotional rejection rather than logical refutation.

“Take hostile takeovers. That might be very logical and legal but it’s not a very honourable thing for us Japanese.”

Japan’s slide into militarism can be traced to its abandonment of an honour code. “We became very arrogant. We wanted to become president of Asia, so we invaded one country after another. We lost our senses.

“I always say Japan should be extraordinary; it should not be an ordinary country. We became a normal country, just like other big nations. That’s all right for them. But we have to be isolated, especially mentally.”

Indeed, the social stability of Edo Japan, so admired by Fujiwara, came at the price of almost total isolation from the outside world. The downside was that, rather than adapting to the threat of the west, it imploded, ditching feudalism overnight and embracing an approximation of western parliamentary democracy. Besides, is his version of the samurai system credible? Wasn’t the reality a stratified society, with downtrodden peasants and a sword-wielding aristocracy exerting arbitrary power?

“There were very poor peasants and feudalism, but there were many good points too. We should look at both sides. In some senses it was horrible, but in many senses it was much nicer than now,” he says, taking a middle path rarely trodden in his inflammatory book.

Another plate comes – they are piling up on his side of the table – this one featuring scallop arranged as if by angels. “Chinese dishes, of course, are very delicious. But so far as beauty is concerned,” he says, as he examines the display before us, “we pay great attention to aesthetics. In writing we have shodo [calligraphy] and for flowers we have ikebana [flower arrangement].”

In England, he had been shocked to see esteemed Cambridge professors slurping their tea from mugs. “We have tea ceremony. Everything we make into art.”

The Japanese do indeed have a genius for making things beautiful, though they have done less well with nature, which they ransacked in the second half of the 20th century. His section on Japan’s unique sensitivity to nature provoked particularly heavy scribbling in the margins of my copy of his book.

He recounts, for example, how a visiting American professor, on hearing the sound of crickets, asks Fujiwara: “What’s that noise?” Fujiwara is appalled. Doesn’t the professor realise he is listening to music, something obvious to any Japanese? How, he wonders, can we have lost a war to these imbeciles?

“When we listen to that music we hear the sorrow of autumn because winter is coming,” he tells me. “The summer is gone. Every Japanese feels that. And, at the same time, we feel the sorrow of our life, our very temporary short life.”

The “music” Japanese people hear is surely a cultural construct, I counter. It has come to represent mononoaware, the pathos of a fleeting life epitomised by the short-lived cherry blossom, which Fujiwara contrasts with westerners’ preference for the thick-petalled rose. But don’t Japanese people make these connections because their poets and philosophers have told them to, just as the English hear summer and the village green in what to the average Japanese might sound like the mere knocking of a ball against a cricket bat?

Fujiwara cedes some ground, but is ultimately unrepentant. “One professor of a Tokyo university, using some electronic apparatus, concluded that all Japanese listen to insects as music because we listen with the right hemisphere of our brain and westerners listen with the left hemisphere.”

We are deep in nihonjinron territory here. Yet in spite of his pride in things Japanese, some of his warmest words are reserved for Britain. Does he have a sneaking regard for the place, despite its penchant for roses, logic and outsize tea cups?

He likes it very much, he says, in spite of its cruel history. “In the 20th century, Germany and America caught up and surpassed England. And as their economy went down, the British people came to know that money and fame had never brought happiness. That is why you have been in recession almost permanently,” he says, a remark unlikely to curry favour with Gordon Brown. “But nobody panicked. That is why England is great. Japan should learn from England; how to decline with elegance, how to decay with elegance.”

The waiter is bringing cappuccino, ice cream and fresh melon. I have bombarded Fujiwara with so many questions the table looks like a traffic pile-up. Over dessert, our discussion wanders to Japan’s alliance with the US, which he reluctantly supports (better than depending on China), to Indian mathematics and to a theory, which he contests, that the samurai honour code is preserved among yakuza gangsters.

Our conversation has been robust, but entirely friendly, and after lunch he shows me his mountain home before driving me back to the station.

As I run for the train, I pass an ikebana display arranged with seasonal flowers by the station staff. The stationmaster bows deeply as I pass through the turnstiles. The train, naturally, arrives to the minute. Where Fujiwara laments the disappearance of what is good about Japan, I can’t help noticing its remarkable ability to endure.

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Gamlastan
Chino, Japan

2 x assorted starters

1 x assorted salmon plate

2 x white bean cream soup

2 x scallop au gratin

2 x grilled white fish

2 x ice cream and melon

2 x cappuccino

Total: Y5,250