Economics:For a moment, Japan bestrode the world like some economic colossus. (The Japanese economy, deputy finance minister Eisuke Sakakibara boasted in 1991, had "surpassed capitalism".) But that boom turned out to be a bubble, and burst - resulting in a slump on the Nikkei, a precipitous drop in land values, and massive unemployment.
The sight, in the late 1990s, of beggars lining the corridors of underground stations at night, could not have contrasted more vividly with the heyday a decade earlier, when the country seemed prosperous, progressive and unstoppable.
In attempting to untangle what he calls "the underlying processes of history and national character", Kenneth Pyle's credentials are impressive: a professor of history and Asian studies at the University of Washington, he's also the founding president of the National Bureau of Asian Research, and the founding editor and chairman of the Journal of Japanese Studies. He was even decorated with the Order of the Rising Sun by the Emperor of Japan in 1999 - an extraordinary honour for a westerner.
Yet for much of the book, the title seems something of a misnomer: as befits his status as a historian, Pyle's interest here is less in prediction than in tracing the complex and occasionally contradictory narrative of social developments and political reconfigurations through which Japan has arrived at its present predicament - what he terms, in his introduction, "the Japan puzzle".
Certainly, in an increasingly small and interrelated world, Japan presents a conundrum: few societies, short of totalitarian dictatorships such as North Korea, are so defiantly unforthcoming in their dealings with other nations. Introverted, fiercely ethnocentric - reluctant to accept foreign investment, political refugees, or even foreign workers - the Japanese appear to take considerable pleasure as well as pride in their seclusion. Pyle quotes, with some sympathy, the esteemed translator and literary critic, Edward Seidensticker, who wrote in 1962 that the Japanese "are not like other people. They are infinitely more clannish, insular, parochial, and one owes it to one's self- respect to preserve a feeling of outrage at the insularity". It was ever thus. The world must come to Japan; Japan will not go to the world. But the Japanese character is also pragmatic and opportunistic, as evinced by Pyle's narrative, which begins with the arrival of Commodore Perry's "black ships" into Edo Bay in 1853, just before the Meiji Period, and proceeds, with astonishing thoroughness, through to the present day.
What emerges clearly, along the way, is the seemingly capricious, unpredictable nature of Japanese behaviour. After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour, Winston Churchill remarked that the decision to attack the US, a nation of vastly greater military might, "was difficult to reconcile with . . . prudence, or even sanity". Why, then, do so many of Japan's foreign policy decisions seem to argue against self-interest? The keyword here might be "inscrutable". Just as Japanese culture resists easy analysis by outsiders (what to make of the appeal of Pokémon? Or Noh theatre?), so does the Japanese demeanour, when directed towards gaijin, invite misperception and misinterpretation. Anyone who has tried to do business with Japanese companies has been forced to acknowledge, very quickly, the ritualised network of hierarchies and status in operation. The evasions of etiquette (how, for example, no one will ever tell you "No"; the "Yes" is just never forthcoming), the nuances of deferrals and deference. It is like an elaborate dance, or piece of theatre, perhaps, in which honour must be seen to be satisfied, and respect accorded. It is oblique and often agonisingly slow.
Though forgiving of the country's recent paralysis - believing that Japan, watchful as ever, spent much of the 1990s contemplating its place in the new, post-Cold War world - Pyle also notes that "for the first time in their modern history, the Japanese lack a sense of national purpose". He sees hope, though, in the arrival of the new Heisei generation, less burdened by nostalgia for the nation's imperial past than their predecessors (or, for that matter, the comfortable polarities of the Cold War), and quietly determined that Japan should become an international player.
At present, the choice facing Japan is a simple one: either forge closer ties with the US, or build strategic and economic bridges with its neighbours in Asia. If, as currently seems likely, this century will be dominated by China - a scenario at once facilitated and complicated by the possibility of a unified Korea - then the resulting shift in the balance of power will require what Pyle calls "a full-scale rethinking of the role of the United States in Asia", and must inevitably alter (and perhaps even revoke) the present US-Japanese Alliance. He does, however, advance a third possibility, no more unlikely in view of the Japanese temperament than any other: that the nation will choose to remain independent, a "wild card" in the Asian balance of power. A very "Japanese" solution - and hardly a profitable one.
While Pyle's breadth of knowledge is formidable, his prose is also admirably clear and concise, sketching a number of flawed, intriguing characters - from the brittle, aristocratic Prince Konoe Fumimaro, so implacable in his opposition to Woodrow Wilson's "Washington Plan", to Elvis-loving, pro- western prime minister Koizumi Junichiro. Reading this excellent study, one emerges substantively wiser about both Japan and the Japanese, a considerable achievement.
Shane Danielsen is a former artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and a one-time resident of Tokyo
Japan Rising By Kenneth B Pyle Public Affairs, 434pp. £17.99