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513 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1991)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0513 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE When The Annals devoted a special issue to Japan in 1956, the perspectives on the Japanese economy offered in the present volume were unthinkable. The past thirty-five years have witnessed a remarkable, many say miracu- lous, transformation of Japan. By the mid-1950s, Japan had barely recovered from the enormous devastation of World War II and, following the Allied occupation (1945-52), had only recently regained national sovereignty. In those days, chief preoccupations with Japan included whether, even despite the boom from the Korean conflict, the Japanese economy would remain viable or drop back to a mere subsistence level, and whether the new and fragile democratic institutions would succumb to traditional autocracy or to Marxist revolution. A generation later these questions, although undoubtedly of great historical importance, have been superseded by widespread vexation over the predominant role Japan may come to play in a world that is now undergoing massive economic and political shifts. As an economic entity, Japan's impact today is of global proportions. In the mid-1950s, few analysts would have predicted that this would come about. The twenty years that followed saw Japan's real gross national product growth rate exceed all known national records, rising steeply from a level close to abject poverty to reach the second-highest of the free-world countries. Even with the slowdown forced upon the entire globe by the first oil crisis (1973-74), the Japanese economy could still manage to surge ahead and surpass the Soviet Union by the early 1980s. Continuingto gain on the United States and demonstrating technological superiority in a number of major industries, in the 1990s Japan more and more is being viewed as a potential leader for the entire world economy. Three comparative statistics cogently summarize how great an economic power Japan has become: (1) per capita income higher than that of the United States and still growing steadily, (2) the world's largest holder of net foreign assets in contrast to the United States as the world's largest net-debtor country, and (3) a large, well-educated, well-integrated population, the world's sixth-largest and half as much as that of the United States. One may quibble over what these numbers really mean, but they are taken seriously by world public opinion and are indicative of Japan's leverage over world affairs. Japan's growth into a great economic power has generated special patterns of relationships with the rest of the world, new perspectives on the part of the Japanese, and diverse reactions from the world's Japan watchers. Throughout the world, an anxious question is being asked: what is Japan going to do with its economic power and its clout over the world? This special issue of The Annals offers a partial answer to this question. 8

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