Volume 20, Number 10 · June 14, 1973
Watch Out for Japan
By Geoffrey Barraclough
Black Star Over Japan
by Albert Axelbank
Hill and Wang, 230 pp., $7.95
Japanese Imperialism Today
by Jon Halliday, by Gavan McCormack
Monthly Review Press, 272 pp., $7.95 (to be published in September)
The Fragile Blossom: Crisis and Change in Japan
by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Harper & Row, 153 pp., $5.95
The Weary and the Wary: US and Japanese Security Policies in Transition
by Robert E. Osgood
Johns Hopkins, 95 pp., $5.00
One of the clearest and least equivocal signs of the changing pattern—to say nothing of the confusion and disarray—of current international politics is the way everyone is suddenly becoming preoccupied with Japan. For twenty years Tokyo remained in the background, apparently happy with the role the United States assigned it in the postwar world, while attention concentrated on the actions and reactions of Moscow and Peking. Today the roles are reversed. I am not the first, and I shall certainly not be the last, to discern some disconcerting analogies between the position of Japan in the world today and the situation it found itself in when it launched its drive into Manchuria in 1931. As I pointed out in my previous article, [1] there is a large and growing body of commentators anxiously scanning the Far East and trying to predict which way Japan will jump. The purpose of the present article is to put their views into some sort of historical perspective and assess them accordingly.
Review, 5299 words
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