Mishima Yukio killed himself on 25 November 1970 at the age of forty-five in the traditional Japanese warrior manner of seppuku after a vain attempt to incite a unit of the Self-Defence Forces to a coup d'état. The event shocked and alarmed not only the Japanese but also people abroad. Many were reminded of the 1936 coup by young army officers, and some, especially abroad, became worried about a possible revival of Japanese militarism. But the jeering by the rank and file troops whom Mishima tried to rouse to action proves that such a possibility is very slight. The Japanese Government, including Mr Nakasone, the Minister of Defence, positively disapproved of Mishima's action. The Prime Minister, Mr Sato, was anxious lest such scandalous behaviour on the part of an eminent writer might tarnish the reputation of the country founded on economic prosperity. Nevertheless, nothing seems farther from the truth than the Prime Minister's statement that Mishima had ‘gone mad’. In every detail Mishima's suicide was an act calculated well in advance. In its political implications it was a challenge to the kind of stability and prosperity of present-day Japan of which the Prime Minister himself is the representative. Mishima detested the progressive or left-wing Japanese intellectuals, but he did not align himself with the Liberal Democratic Party either. Nor was he prepared at all to link with the right-wing organizations, in spite of the ultra-nationalism of his own Shield Society. Ironically enough, Mishima could have agreed with the dissident students of the New Left who played the leading role in the 1968–69 university upheavals.

Looking back at the path of modernization Japan has taken in the last hundred years, one finds the most serious failure to be the lack of development of democratic political theories. In our evaluations of the ‘modernization achievements’ of Japan, this is usually the focal point of disagreement between Western and Japanese scholars. Often in the name of ‘value-free’ political science, Western scholars try their best not to mix the issue of modernization with that of democratization. The failure of democracy in pre-War Japan is usually considered insignificant, though relevant, in the discussion of the success of her modernization. More often the failure is obscured by the presence of some democratic theories and movements during the Meiji and Taisho period. In contrast, Japanese scholars tend to consider modernization and democratization as inseparable. They refuse to accept the so-called ‘objective’ approach of Western scholars, not on the basis of the old Comintern formula of ‘modernization means development toward bourgeois democracy’, but because of their emphasis on the qualitative output of a political system.

Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 changed the balance of power in the Far East, and there was a shift from opposition between Japan and Russia to one between Japan and the United States. One result of the new tension between the United States and Japan was the conclusion of a Russo-Japanese Agreement on 30 July 1907. Financial and political difficulties within Russia and Japan also helped to bring about this Agreement.

Since the South Korean–Japanese normalization pacts of 1965, the long-sought economic and political cooperation between the two countries is on its way. The pacts planted the seeds of mutual cooperation between the two countries which had been hostile toward each other for more than a half-century, and the South Korean and Japanese leaders have expressed their determination that the future relationship between the two countries would be to each other's advantage.

The increasing use of the new high-yielding varieties of cereal seeds during the past decade has undoubtedly brought about immense agricultural and social progress in the developed world. Contrary to all expectations, however, the application of these technological innovations, commonly known today as the ‘green revolution’, has not resulted in similarly favourable developments in the underdeveloped countries, particularly of South Asia, but rather seems to have shaken the economic foundation of their agricultural populations and given rise to unexpected developments. Some observers still maintain that the very momentum of the green revolution will eventually be strong enough to bring about the gradual transformation of agriculture which is an essential precondition for development. Considering the structure of the prevailing agrarian systems, however, it seems more likely that rather than improving rural conditions such a transformation will primarily benefit the already privileged farmers while bypassing the bulk of the rural people and even reducing their chances of gaining a livelihood in agriculture.

Whilst reading agricultural economics for the postgraduate Diploma in Agricultural Science at Cambridge University, the author's attention was caught by two reports on recent developments in Indian agriculture. These were the ‘I.A.D.P. Third Report 1965–7’, and the ‘First Evaluation Study of the High Yielding Varieties Programme for 1967–8’. Although the information was generalized and the samples involved biased towards most successful areas, certain trends and conclusions emerged relating to the progress of innovation adoption in simple agricultural communities and the influences at work on the mechanism. Subsequent field work in north-west India provided firstly some of the detail lacked by the All-India statistics and, secondly, some insight into the problems faced by economically progressive districts of relevance to less developed ones.