ABSTRACT
First published in Social Analysis, No. 5/6, December 1980 IN AN ARTICLE written more than a decade ago I suggested that there were
five sorts of preoccupation that had tended to influence Western writing on Japanese politics from the end of World War II up to the mid-1960s. 1 They were (1) the influence of the Occupation, especially upon those writers who were directly involved, (2) subsequent problems in American policy towards Japan, (3) pessimism or optimism over the functioning of the economy, (4) preoccupation with democracy as a unique, definable and universally desirable political system, (5) preoccupation with the modernization of developing countries and the application of modernization theory to Japan.
