ABSTRACT
Because of the Nixon ‘shocks’ and the oil crisis of 1973-4, historians as well as economists see the early 1970s as the end of a period in Japan’s postwar history. Nevertheless, although adjustments to slow growth involved new departures in policies and practices, many developments in politics, society and the economy during the 1970s and 1980s were extensions or dissemination of patterns established during the 1950s and 1960s. And although Prime Minister Satō Eisaku announced the end of the ‘postwar’ period in 1969, this was just the fi rst of such pronouncements, since the ‘postwar’ lingered on in numerous areas, and not only in politics or foreign policy.
