ABSTRACT
September 11, 2001, and actions in Iraq and North Korea have more profoundly affected Japan than any other U.S. ally. Combined with the challenges of the last decade—at the end of which nationalism had become respectably mainstream, "checkbook diplomacy" had been discredited, and constitutional reform was regarded as both desirable and inevitable—these events have produced historic and far-reaching changes in Japanese policy and attitudes. Japan is reemerging as an independent power in the Pacific, but many Western observers, missing the forest for the trees, persist in regarding Japan simply as a tangle of contradictions.
