One could argue that at the dawn of the 1980s Japan had reached a higher level of civilization than any mass society on earth. Most Japanese could aspire to higher education and a well-paying job, obtain medical, welfare, and pension benefits, live in comfort and safety, and still expect the freedom to write and talk more or less as they pleased. Inbred social constraints, the perpetual search for a near-mythical “consensus,” not to mention the legendary “homogeneity” of Japanese society— all no doubt placed inhibitions on the Japanese. But these were hardly comparable to the political terror, abject poverty, and economic and social inequities prevalent in one form or another* jn many other industrial nations.

The Japanese themselves, though bitterly critical of their own shortcomings and failures wherever they perceive them, continue to believe they can do no better than retain the system and set of rulers under which they have lived for the past generation. The voters on June 22 gave the deeply conservative Liberal-Democratic party (LDP) its greatest leverage in a decade. In elections for all members of the powerful lower house and half the upper house, the LDP increased its slim majorities so that it now controls every key committee and can all but ignore the pro forma objections raised by the distant second-ranking Japanese Socialist party, which barely managed to hold its own.