ABSTRACT
The travails of the 1990s have sparked a revolution in thinking not only in Japan. They have also prompted some welcome rethinking in America as well. In the effort to discover why Japan's miracle soured, analysts are finding that they have to go beyond the "revisionist" versus "traditionalist" debate that has polarized, and paralyzed, U.S. analysis for the past two decades. Neither of these two dominant paradigms either predicted, or can explain in hindsight, why the Japanese miracle soured. Neither has proven an effective guide to policymaking.
