As the British historian, the late A.J.P. Taylor, remarked: "History gets thicker as it approaches recent times." The broad outlines, the major themes, have a way of disappearing under the dross of uncharted daily events and the historian is confronted with a remarkably dense tangle, a mass of time, packed full and indecipherable.
This is particularly true of contemporary Japan since prior historical paradigms (Topsy-turvy Nippon; Japan, Land of Contrasts; Japan as Number One) have become irrelevant and the country has developed in a most unexpected manner. In fact, the transformation of Japan over the past five decades has been headlong, recasting all the earlier social, political, economic and cultural landscapes into scenery strange and seemingly unaccountable.
Yet it is the historian's duty to account. Often, one of the ways this is done is to create a necessary paradigm and then fill it, as in: Japan, its Rise and Fall, or Mature Japan Joins the Family of Nations. Common though such a procedure is, however, it remains historiographically suspicious. And, in any event, the modern historian knows perfectly well that history is choice -- it is whatever remains of the past we have decided to see.