Wolferen, a journalist, attempts to do what many journalists in long foreign placements do, and write some kind of social history.  It's amusing to see him strain at the just-so stories of Japanese history and "temperament", often insisting such reductive stereotypes are insufficient only a few pages before turning around and asserting them once again, or using some long-distant historical example, poorly understood and outside of its context, to make new reductive assertions.  Where it is at its best, it is attempting to be a journalistic account of how Japan got to where it was in the 1980s without any of the American business world's derangement; it has a fully readable and understandable account of decisionmaking in the 1970s which means that, if you wanted, you could work very hard and pull a reasonable amount of good information from the volume. And sure enough, the "decline of Japan" after the publication of this book makes it seem quite prescient.  But boy oh boy does this author not have the understanding or context to truly back up his assertions. 

In this, perhaps Enigma is most generously understood as a bridge between the borderline-racist "to understand the inscrutable Japan-man, the American businessman must read about how things were in the 9th century" books of the sixties and the more modern, context-driven approach of the 1990s and 2000s. I didn't hate reading it, but there were plenty of assertions that simply didn't check out.