The forecast was quite diffused: the Atlantic era would be followed by the Pacific era, and after the American century the Japanese one would arrive. The continuous industrial and financial rise of the Rising Sun would have upset - before 2000 - the old balances and would have thrown to the top of the world a country which - though mimicking the Western model successfully - has remained substantially different, inscrutable and therefore intrinsically dangerous. Besides a very strong and unscrupulous competitor, Japan was considered by many as a potential enemy which, whenever it had decided to abandon its low political profile, would have been able to exert an enormous influence on the whole world scene. Both in USA and in Europe a strong current of thoughtasserted the need to “limit” Japan before it would be able to condition our economy so to blackmail us. Bestellers like Michael Crichton’s “Rising Sun” have contributed to diffuse in the Western world so deep a distrust towards the Japanese  that it looks like racism: we could define it an inverse racism, made not of contempt and sense of superiority, but of fear, envy and aversion for social habits and structures we consider as alien ones. 
But in these last times conflicting signs have been arriving from the Far East, and doubts have crossed some scholars’ minds that the famous “Japanese model” has started to crack, that the future of the Country is not so bright after all and the crisis can awake old demons which were thought exorcized forever. These signs often lack of coordination and are anything but unambiguous, but they light up defects, lacks and contraddictions of “corporate-Japan” which had commonly passed unobserved in the eighties. Possibly the first and most impressive alarm bell was the burst of the so called “financial bubble” whose effects are felt up to now. From 1985 to 1989 Tokio stock exchange had been rising dizzily: the Nikkei index, starting from a base of 8,000 yen almost arrived to 40,000, with a five-fold value corresponding to a GDP growth of a little more than 30%.  The source of this boom which changed deeply the social relations, creating a very crowded class of new rich people, was not only an unlimited and partly unreasonable confidence of the future, but also the decision of the Central Bank to help the firms having difficulties due to a great and too fast re-evaluation of the yen, by bringing the money cost to a level lower than the post-war one. 
An excessive liquidity has brought to speculation which has immediately involved the real estate sector, bringing the prices of houses and lands to dizzy levels and leaving them out of the reach of the common man. As prices were increasing anyone who already had goods could have additional loans by banks, in a whirl of yens which allowed the most incredible eccentricities to the luckiest people. 
It was the time - just to tell you one story - in which Japanese magnates paid 60 billion Liras for a Van Gogh’s picture. But the waking up was awful. 
The Nikkei slump caused failures and chain suicides, and a loss of credibility, from which the Country has not recovered yet. Millions of billions were burnt in a few months’ time, numberless families left empty-handed, found themselves poorer and many credit institutions passed through an extremely difficult period. Still today, the Nikkei has difficulty in rate 20,000. This means that, in spite of the economic advancements and a constant commercial credit balance, the global value of the shares reported in Tokyo is less than a half of the one it was four years ago: a unique case in the industrialized world, a sign of a widespread and persisting discomfort. The situation is made more difficult by the lack of transparence of an economic system which is still closed and verticistic, whose managers have too much space of manoeuvre and can care nothing about the small shareholders’ interests. Neither the productive machine, though being in the van in many sectors, does work with the relentless efficiency as before. Exactly like in the other parts of the world, this year many industrial giants have closed their balances in the debit side, complaining of losses not less enormous than their gains before the crisis began. At the top of the list of heavily damaged companies, there are the great car industries, whose exapansion seemed to be unlimited and which were considered with envy by their European competitors. But in this list there are also iron industries, cement works, and many building industries, with an induced activity  which gave how to live on to millions of workers who are now in serious troubles. For the first time the great “keiretsu” have started to dismiss heavily, breaking with a tradition of “lifetime job” which was one of the boasts of the Japanese model and which was also an important component of the social peace. Failures are increasing, with all the tragedies resulting from this situation in a Country where the sense of responsibility remains very strong: a little time after the crack of a big building industry of Osaka, its chief accountant threw himself under a train, follwed on the following days by three of his co-operators in a kind of chain reaction. In order to react to the crisis of the home market, the Japanese industry has stepped more on the pedal of exports, though the other industrialized countries try to limit its invasion in any way and the strength of yen deprives it partially from its competitiveness. One of the aces of Japan was its almost unquestioned leadership in the Eastern Asia, which during the eighties it had virtually colonized, thanks to its possibility to give economic helps and capitals for investments. As the cost of manpower in Japan was rising, the “keiretsu” had been gradually shifting part of their production to other developing countries of their region, from Korea to Taiwan, from Philippines to Indonesia, from Singapore to Thailand. In a famous allegory of those times, Asia was represented as a V-shaped formation wild geese flight, where Japan was in the lead of the flock choosing the direction and the other birds were following its evolutions with discipline. Today this order is not in force any more: the appearance of Pecking on the scenes, with its two-digit rates of growth and the enormous potential of its market and the force of attraction it exerts on the powerful overseas Chinese communities, has upset Tokyo’s games. The natural resistance to the Japanese leadership, due to the bad war recalls and to the Samurais’ arrogance, has been quite enhanced by the existence of an alternative. Though Japan remains by far the economic power No.1 in the region, now it hasn’t the possibility it had once to use the other Countries as obedient pawns in the great game for the world supremacy. 
In the meanwhile, as Vittorio Volpi writes in his beatiful book “Japan: an enemy or a competitor?”, a series of little and less little cracks is appearing in the Japan Inc. building, the great corporate Japan. Though on the paper we have one of the highest income in the world, markedly higher than the European ones, the Japanese people are living worse than the German, the French or even the Italians. Apart the penalty of working almost one third of the hours a year (a sacrifice which is not very suffered by a people having a remarkable sense of duty and, however, with scarce facilities for their time-out), the lack of modern houses, social infrastructures, and a proper social care starts to be felt, inducing the young more than anybody else to put questions about their future. The school system, which was once very competitive, has started to crackle too. The massive entrance of women - having a subordinate role till the last generation and now claiming the sex equality almost fiercly - into the world of work, is creating significant unbalances and frictions. While the average lifetime is getting longer, producing a crowd of pensioners which is in no way lower than the Italian one, the birth rate is decreasing in a great rush, especially in the large towns where young couples lack the means to buy their own house. This demographic crisis and the young’s reluptance  to accept the most thankless tasks, in turn has caused  a great immigration - either clandestine or legal - of manpower from the Third World, which the Japanese society, culturally and ethnically homogeneous, refuses to accept. In the meanwhile greater and greater power and influence are taken by the “Yazuka”, organized crime, which - in its infinite branches - has many points of contact with our mafia and has even greater protections in the fields of justice and  policy and in the political world. 
The last one has been struck in the last years by a storm as it had never seen in the industrialized world, which has virtually left the Country without a leader, except the high burocracy.  Four Prime Ministers and an indefinite number of Ministers, under-secretaries and common deputies have been swept away by scandals, revealing corruption and complicity mechanisms even more comprehensive than the ones brought to light in Italy by “Mani pulite” (Clean hands). Accrdingly, this year the liberal-democratic party which had been keeping the power monopoly for more than forty years, has split firstly int two parts and then has suffered a rankling defeat at the elections. A heterogeneous coalition of seven parties has come in its place, led by Morihiro Hosokawa, where nationalists and socialists, Buddhists and conservatives  sharing no program are living all together. To make things more complicated, also the strong man of the regime, Ichirio Ozawa, who had played a key role in the “replacement operation”  has been caught red-handed. In the void of power and ideas which has been created, the movements of extreme right have re-appeared, heirs of the imperial tradition of the first half of the century, which had lost any influence after the 1945 defeat. 
The role of Japan in the world is therefore being discussed once again at any level. For a long time the Country had been living protected by the American nuclear umbrella, satisfied with a defense aimed only to the protection of the home territory, to which only 1% of GDP was destined. The constitution (imposed by the USA after the war) prevented these units from operating outside their country; in fact, on occasion of the Gulf War, Tokyo had to compensate for its military lack with a contribution of 13 billion dollars! Militarism was considered a bad word, even singing the national anthem in public was considered suspicious, and pacifists had always the last word in the debates. Even recruting officers and non-commissioned officers had become a problem: now the Japanese were said to have lost their “otokogi”, their male spirit, and to be possibly unable to react against an aggression. 
Now things are changing. The discussed participation inthe UNOmission in Cambodia, which for the first time after fifty years has allowed the defensive forces to go over the border and show their muscles, has waked up again old prides asleep and has made the Japanese more aware of their role in the “new world order”.  The request for a permanent seat in the Security Council and the need to have back from Russia the Curili Islands taken from Japan by Stalin in the last part of the war, have turned into full stops in the foreign policy of the new government. At the same time, Tokyo understands that, with the progressive withdrawal of the United States from Asia, it should be in a condition to face alone North Korea, China and any other regional countries, should they get on their high horse. And since today someone has dared think the unthinkable, which is that Japan, forgetting  Hiroshima and Nagasaki holocausts, one of these days shall have to be equipped with its own nuclear deterrent. 
All these things create a mix which is not yet explosive, but it is surely alarming. One thing is sure: the “pacifist”  and “producing” stage of Japan is going to be exhausted, though it is not yet clear who and when shall have to turn over the page.