ABSTRACT
As the end of the century approaches, Japan faces a series of commem orations and choices, occasions to reflect on the past, take stock of the present, and anticipate the future. The end of the Cold War was fol lowed by the first overseas dispatch of Japanese military forces (1992), the fiftieth anniversary of the defeat in World War Two (1995), the promulgation of the 1946 Constitution (1996), and the increasing pos sibility of elevation to “Great Power” status on the U.N. Security Council. In the wake of the Cold War, suddenly freed of its role as a frontline state between two worlds, Japan might have been expected to articulate a distinctive vision of the sort of world order its people aspired to create. Instead, denying any such intent, Japan suffered a failure of will and imagination, leaving the construction of a new world order in the hands of the Western powers. Ironically, the long crusade to revise the Constitution, pursued during the Cold War by the conservative Liberal-Democratic Party, but blocked by the socialist opposition, advanced much closer to fruition with the collapse of LDP rule and under a socialist prime minister.
