ABSTRACT
The rise of Japan to the position of a great Power ranks along with the reconstruction of Germany as the most significant of the political changes of the fifty years before 1914. To many Westerners the Japanese achievement, in the economic as well as in the political sphere, seemed so astounding as to defy rational explanation. Consequently, some of them were at times inclined to acquiesce in the views of those Japanese who sought the clue to their new-found glory in the realms of mysticism, while others attributed Japan's advance to a series of lucky accidents and prophesied that time would presently reveal an essential mediocrity. In the economic sphere especially, forecasts of imminent disaster and decay have “been numerous and impressive at every stage of her modern history, and it was not until she plunged into war with the United States and the British Empire that a shrewder estimate of her strength became common in the West.
