Halfway to Hegemony: Japan's Tortured Trajectory (Predicting THE PRESENT‪)‬

As the Japanese economic juggernaut lumbered inexorably onward through two oil shocks and beyond, there was a deepening angst at the geopolitical implications of Japan's persistent rise in the late 1980s. On the more academic side, political scientist Ezra Vogel asked seriously, if rhetorically, about the possibility of a Pax Nipponica in a landmark 1986 Foreign Affairs article, following on the arguments posed by his classic volume, Japan as Number One. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]