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Like other dramatic and discontinuous historical processes, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 possesses the inherent fascination to sustain yet another rehearsal of its basic course of events. The present one differs from others in several ways. It does not center on samurai heroes and villains contesting foreign incursion. Instead it identifies fully four groups that acted during the late Tokugawa era, the years 1850–68, known by the generic periodizing word bakumatsu—"the end of the bakufu," that is, of the shogun's government situated at Edo. It presents each group according to the experiences and motives of its members. It points to the interactions between the four narrative structures, the plots ormythoi, but without homogenizing them into a unitary historiographical line. It also recognizes the necessary prefiguration of the historian's field but tries nevertheless to convey the perceived intentions of the four groups of historical actors.

In the decade and a half from 1931 to 1945 Japan confronted a series of domestic and international crises culminating in the national disaster of World War II. Many authors - both Japanese and Western - have portrayed this period in terms of the labeling generalization "fascism", suggesting that Japan's experience ran parallel to that of such European countries as Italy under Mussolini and Germany during the Third Reich. My object here, after first attempting to explain how and why this interpretation arose, is to take issue with it, but in criticizing the use of the label fascism I do not mean to fall back to the position that what happened was simplysui generis, a somehow "unique" Japanese response to the troublesome developments of the interwar world. Fascism has the virtue of being a comparative concept, and if we throw it out we need to seek other comparative concepts to test as possible replacements.