Japan Since 1945: The Rise of an Economic Superpower.

• Author: Khactu, Dominique N.

By the late 1980s, Japan has emerged on the word scene as a great power, not perhaps in military and political terms but certainly in economic sense. As the homology of the Soviet empire fell apart and the prima donna imprint of the American know-how and productivity began losing its luster, the economy of Japan became indisputably the second largest in the world with a capita income that, by 1987, has overtaken over the U.S.A. and any country of the OECD. Despite the international oil shocks of 1973 and 1979-80 and some other political and financial flickering convulsions, Japan continues to enjoy a very high economic growth rate to the present day: the five largest banks in the world belong to Japan; the Tokyo Stock Exchange had grown into one of the major world's financial markets; the three largest security houses in the world are Japanese; iron, steel and automobile productions surpassing that of the U.S.A. is something unheard of in the postwar era; and no nation is ever owed so much from abroad.

Although Japan today is not a military and political power in the circle of great nations, it certainly becomes a major player in the current world's strategic equation, especially with regard to the Pacific arena. Japan since 1945 is an historical overview of the various processes by which postwar Japan was transformed into an economic power which impinges upon almost all of us. This is the work of an historian from the University of Ulster, who directs his focus toward the political, economic, and financial developments in Japan, although not to the exclusion of the other social and cultural dimensions of the enormous change which has taken place since the Japan's surrender of August 15, 1945.

Structurally all the six chapters of this small volume can be grouped into three basic parts. The author uses the first part, (chapters 1-2), to retrace the present spectacular economic rise of Japan to its vital past some centuries ago. In other words, Japan's today economic success and power is merely a natural extension of a long, continuous trend of Japan's history from its feudal times to present days. Thus an analysis of Japan's history would reveal the vital lines of continuity running across three principal historical fissures: (a) the victory of the Tokugawa family in 1600 ending a prolonged period of civil war and setting up an unprecedented era of peace and openness to the outside world; (b) the Meiji Restoration in 1868 bringing down the...