ABSTRACT
The world is slowly awakening to a sense of gathering material crisis of population, resources, and environment. As the end of the Cold War signaled the revision of the basic structures by which Japan had for long related with the world on political and strategic terms, so its global economic linkages were simultaneously shaken by fundamental revisions of the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) system and the introduction in 1995 of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Neither the political nor the economic was one-dimensional, for what, at one level, was a matter of market and monetary value was at another one of fundamental social and moral value, impinging not only on the material “whatness” or “howness,” but also the moral “whyness” of life. Beneath the manifold forms of global material crisis impinging on Japan lay a crisis of values.
