ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the structure of a world system in which modern Japan has been an important, but almost always subordinate part. It distinguishes three aspects of this transformation, a model of industrializing political economy that began under Japanese auspices in Northeast Asia, the contribution of that regional formation to hastening British manufacturing decline and assisting American manufacturing advance, which was one important aspect of the shift from British to American hegemony, the civil war in Korea which provided in the fulcrum for building the military sinews of the American global position. Radical intellectuals had their thoughts examined and reformed through the intense measures we have come to associate with Chinese Communism, they were then marched before the Korean people as exemplars of right thinking. It was the Korean War and its manifold procurements, not the great crescent', that pushed Japan forward along its march toward world-beating industrial prowess.
