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One of the most painful intricacies of the Japanese undertaking is this: Japan, by becoming such an economic phenomenon, has incurred new responsibilities. Yet those responsibilities cannot be fulfilled if the Japanese remain true to some of the characteristics that made them so successful in the first place. The Japanese are both distinguished and confined by their own culture. Their culture is their charm, their force, their secret and their gravest limitation. It gives them both method and identity and an enveloping inhibition. The Japanese attach such total meaning to themselves that for them, few intellectual excursions outside that circle can be significant.
Japan has become an economic superpower, but not yet a cultural or a political or a moral superpower. The deepest questions of the Japanese future revolve around Japan's capacity to transcend the limitations of its identity. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union attempt to export ideals: for better and for worse, they stand for something in the world. What does Japan represent? Does Japan have a universal meaning? Or is its meaning, unlike its products, destined to remain confined to the home islands? Do superior products embody ideals?
The Japanese have set a breathless commercial pace for themselves and for the world. Can they maintain it? The old values are eroding now. In the next decades, the Japanese will be thrown back more upon their cultural reflexes and improvisational gifts. Those talents will determine whether Japan will be remembered as a great civilization, or merely a minutely distinctive one, full of brilliant energy. —By Lance Morrow.
Reported by Edwin M. Reingold/Tokyo