SOURCE: Ford, Glyn. “Unfinished Business.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 316 (19 August 1994): 39-40.

In the following excerpt, Ford compliments Buruma's central argument in The Wages of Guilt.

After all but half a century of hegemonic rule, Japan is in a state of rapid flux. The old Liberal Democratic Party, Jiminto—in power since the war apart from a Socialist interlude in 1947-48—is no more. A conjuncture of corruption, the end of the cold war and the passage of time has seen an edifice crumble. After two brief opposition administrations of Socialists, LDP dissidents and the rest, we currently have a Tony Benn-style prime minister kept in power by the Jiminto equivalents of Margaret Thatcher and Michael Portillo. No one expects this to last longer than a few months, before it in its turn is replaced.

The past decade has seen the slow emergence of a more outward-looking, self-confident...