This study traces the rise, fall and rise again of modern Japan and its impact on the modern international system. It tells of a turbulent 150 years of Japanese history: the feudal Tokugawa Shogunate, the restoration of imperial rule, and Japan's embrace and eventual rejection of the West.

In Japan and the Security of Asia Louis Hayes studies modern Japan's frustrated search for national security. The book charts Japan's attempts to fashion its own place in the sun in the face of Great Power interventionism and national demands for regional hegemony: first through nascent internationalism and later disastrous totalitarianism that culminated in war in the Pacific. Hayes expertly tracks Japan's shifting foreign-policy goals up to the present day, moving from the preservation of the nation-state by force to the drive for economic self-aggrandizement as a Cold War client of the United States. The book reveals to the student of modern Asian history a twenty-first century Japan that has rejected unarmed neutrality and is reasserting its security independence in post-Cold War Asia.