R. Taggart Murphy

In the last week of July, two incidents involving disruptive Chinese fans of a genre of Asian media triggered something close to a crisis in international relations. Security personnel had forcibly removed a Chinese woman from an event in Bangkok. Patrons of this type of event, known as a “fan meet,” pay considerable sums to see their favorite entertainers in person, hear them being interviewed, and watch them perform song-and-dance routines.

In Japan’s elections this past weekend, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s “ruling” Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, endured a humiliating drubbing—losing 56 seats in the lower house of the Diet, close to a quarter of its pre-election number. Its coalition partner, the Komeito, suffered an even more severe setback. These two parties can now only form a minority government, leaving them vulnerable at any time to a no-confidence motion.

In the early postwar decades, it was common to encounter notions of “convergence” in commentary on Japan—convergence, that is, between the American and Japanese models of how to run a country. The first iteration of convergence advertised itself as “modernization theory.” Modernization, in this telling, mainly involved adopting the conventions and institutions of American capitalism.