ABSTRACT
As discussed in the Introduction, modern Japan has contained both Utopian and dystopian aspects, not only in the eyes of its citizens, but in the eyes of the West as well. Exotic, even larger than life, Japan seemed in the twentieth century to be constituted in extremes. From Meiji through the prewar period, its military and technological successes brought its citizens pride at the same time as the price of industrialization proved to be rural poverty and urban ferment in the 1920s. In the 1930s the government ventured abroad on increasingly blatant military adventures under the impressively titled Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, a vision which promised, if not a Utopia, then at the very least a new world order. This vision faded as the war ground down and ended completely with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a defeat which made Japan temporarily an archetype of a devastated Third World nation. This bleak image changed drastically only a few years after the war. In the postwar period Japan’s economic advances in the 1960s once again impressed the rest of the world, although at the same time they brought about legendary pollution problems in land and water. For a time in the 1970s, however, Japan seemed to regain the Utopian high ground after scholars, politicians, and business professionals flocked to learn its secrets of industrial policy and social interaction.
