In today’s accelerating world, we are exposed to changes that might have taken two or three hundred years to unfold during the Middle Ages. Time and space have contracted, and nothing now happens in isolation. Japan is having difficulty adjusting to this new world. It clings to a hopelessly idealistic and historically illegitimate constitution handed down by U.S. occupation forces nearly 60 years ago to block Japan’s reemergence as a military power. Japan now entrusts its survival to the United States, has forsaken independent thinking, and has become spineless.

Some people have contended that Japan can prosper as a nation of peaceful merchants. That might have been possible as long as the United States was a reliable guardian. Today, with the limited capability of the United States as a superpower apparent, this dependence is extremely risky for Japan. It is ironic that the Japanese economy—especially in the financial sector—is susceptible to plunder by the very Americans who were originally supposed to be our patrons.
The Japanese used to have the spirit and backbone of the samurai, the same warriors who were applauded by Walt Whitman when they visited the United States in the 1860s. When will we recover our national virtue, described so well by Ruth Benedict in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword?

Much will depend on how East Asia evolves, especially militarily, in the next decade. One critical factor will be where China—with its growing military and stubborn Communist Party—casts its gaze and whether its ambitions will be pursued with the same kind of hegemonic intentions employed in Tibet. It will also depend on whether China, which has repeatedly asserted claims on Japanese territory, persists in its provocations. I wonder how the United States will...