Conclusions

Abstract

If there is one thing of which we hope to have convinced the reader in this book so far, it is surely that politics and political decision making in Japan is complex and sophisticated. No quick and easy theory can hope to do justice to the tangled web of interactions and developments which we have sought to analyse. At the same time we are not simply dealing with chaos. Clear patterns are in evidence and politics for the most part does not stray outside reasonably defined parameters. The politics of Japan in these senses is not utterly unlike the politics of most other advanced industrialised states in the world of the late twentieth century.