The Changing Japanese Political System: Why and How? *
From the viewpoint of Comparative Politics, the study of a foreign political system should not be limited to the illustration of its esoteric features but should also aim at finding what the system has in common with all other political systems. Integration of "area" knowledge with the "disciplinary" perspective, however, is more easily said than carefully done. In his 1973 presidential address to the American Political Science Association, Robert E. Ward envisaged two "long term solutions" to this problem. One he called "two skills in one skull," and the other the "internationalization of social science."1 The first refers to the integrated training of a single scholar in both an area speciality and a disciplinary methodology. The second calls for the participation of non-American scholars in the efforts of modem political science. The four volumes on Japan under review here, including one by Ward himself, help to fulfill the expectations Ward had five years earlier.