Despite a campaign of denigration and misinformation by left-leaning, largely mediocre, so-called mainstream media in Japan and the U.S., it may be Asia’s most important contemporary phenomenon. Remember: Japan was the only non-European society in the 19th and 20th century successfully to modernize — if ending in the tragedy of the Great Pacific War.

The vapor trail of the soaring China Boom rocket of the past two decades, fraught with its essentially rickety launchpad, obscures events. But as the Chinese, themselves, increasingly try to find answers to entering the world power constellation; many Asians look to Japan as the model. Generations of Chinese did so until intoxication with Sovietism led to three decades of bloody repression and stagnation. The Chinese Communists unfruitfully have devoted considerable resources to asking why that model failed.

And, indeed, without great publicity, Chinese intellectuals have returned to puzzle through how the Japanese made it and they, with their vaunted mother culture, did not. The Chinese have turned off their failed campaign of intimidation directed at Koizumi, and now even a joint government-sponsored binational commission will examine interpretations of modern history between the two countries with a view to reexamining textbooks. Beijing has even consented, at least initially, to include the Communist massacre at Tien Mien An in 1989 along with reviewing, again, the Rape of Nanking in 1937!

It’s all the more fascinating for, like Japan, present Chinese economic success is the same kind of bubble which exploded into a decade of Japanese stagnation and self-examination. That the Japanese now appear not only climbing slowly out of their catatonia is not only important to its economic partners — particularly the U.S. — but also to economic and political development strategies in East and South Asia.

This reorganization of Japanese society, not just economic restructuring, is as unpredictable as fundamental developments in our fast moving world always are. Not all signs are optimistic. The demographic catastrophe with falling fertility, birth rates, and population is a basic concern, not only in economic terms but because of social and political fallout. Japan, unlike the U.S., has no tradition, nor is it likely to develop, of a solution to its aging population based on in-migration. Japan’s Korean ethnic minority, so close and yet so far from assimilation, is evidence no change there is likely.

But overall the scene is pregnant. When Koizumi chose to leave office — itself an anomaly in politics the world over with Tony Blair hanging on for dear life, Jacques Chirac maneuvering to at least name his successor, and even George Bush fighting off attempts to write the history of his administration two years before it ends — the question was whether he was, to use that old American cliché, a flash in the pan. It was no secret his sometimes bizarre [certainly by Japanese standards] behavior — the hairdo, the guitar playing, the divorce, the skateboarding, the offhand [and as often offcolor] quips — masked what fashionable Japanese interi [the chattering classes] considered his conservative, even [by their standards] reactionary, concepts and strategies.

Could his successor — after all a scion of an ultra-conservative political family dynasty whose origins were as clerks to the discredited military — with anything but his flair carry on?

It’s much too early to make the call about Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Media pollsters — with more than the usual axe to grind to bolster nattering of their own and colleagues in New York, Washington, and Paris — say he is losing out.

But after his first parliamentary session, the evidence is to the contrary.

Abe has led the Liberal-Democratic Party [and its recalcitrant coalition ally, the neo-Buddhist New Komeito Party] in a series of successful legislative victories. These are largely aimed at Koizumi’s goals: liberalizing the Japanese economy and meeting growing military challenges from an obstreperous North Korea, and a potentially runaway Chinese military.

The biggest hurdles are still ahead.

It would take a two-thirds majority in both Diet houses for the referendum Abe favors to bring the reality of Japan’s military prowess and challenges into line with the MacArthur Constitution which set the unattainable goal of otherworld pacifism. The decoupling of Japanese savings from a century and a half system of industrial policy — expanding capital plant on the backs of the consumer — goes ahead, even if Kozimui had to accept a longer time frame. For example, the dismantling of Tokyo’s virtual monopoly hold on the tax base has started, transferring responsibility to cities and prefectures for budgeting and sharing taxing authority. It will help clean up the cesspool of Japanese political corruption.

These are not just economic readjustments. They are democratizing the Japanese system, meeting the 21st century headon, but also going back, if you will, to some of the early Meiji Era savants who hoped — and failed — to import Ralph Waldo Emerson’s individual responsibility [as my friend Yoshio Terasawa has pointed out] along with industrialization.

There is no guarantee these measures would solve all Japan’s social and political issues, any more than they do in the U.S. with all the anomalies of American society.. But given Japan’s role in the modern world, its continuing position as Washington’s most important ally in a volatile part of the world of growing importance, they may provide a new model for other Asians striving to deal with modernization, and its concomitant, globalization.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.