ABSTRACT
New conditions and new attitudes are calling into question the role that the Japanese see as appropriate for their nation to play in the international system. Throughout the postwar decades, Japan's role in the world was a product of the political order imposed upon it by the United States and its allies and the pragmatic policies of the postwar generation of Japanese leaders. Japan has become noteworthy for the striking incongruity between its vast economic power and its political weakness. The key figure in shaping the postwar conception of Japan's national purpose was Yoshida Shigeru—a man whose style can scarcely be characterized as "understated" and "anonymous" in the manner that many Japanese leaders with whom Kissinger was familiar during the Nixon years. By the late 1970s, as the pressures and constraints within which the Yoshida doctrine had operated began to undergo substantial change, a national debate on Japan's future role in the world was in full swing.
