A STORYBOOK BRIDE 4/20/59
The night before, she was still plain Miss Shoda, but from the moment her mother called her at 5 the next morning, she was already "Your Highness." "Take care of yourself," said a relative who had come to see her off, "when you go over there." A little after 6 a.m., her eyes blinking back the tears, Michiko Shoda, 24, bowed stiffly to her parents, entered the antique maroon Mercedes-Benz sent by the palace, and was off to begin her life "over there" as the first commoner in 2,600 years to wed a future Emperor of Japan.

NO MORE BEER CANS 8/17/59
The go-getting Japanese, who have crashed the U.S. market with everything from cameras to transistors to hibachi charcoal braziers, last week were briskly redesigning their little cars for a full-scale commercial assault. The biggest Japanese automaker, Toyota Motor Co., whose Toyopet was once the tinny target of G.I. gibes ("If you strip off the door lining, you can read the beer-can labels"), streamlined Toyopet to resemble in performance and size a compact U.S. car. Last week, adding its 100th U.S. dealer, Toyota announced that U.S. sales will hit 350 this month.

THEY DON'T LIKE IKE 6/27/60
The battle began at dusk under a driving rain. In four days Dwight Eisenhower was due to arrive in Tokyo, and, simultaneously, the revised U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty would pass its last legal hurdle in Japan. With unflagging fanaticism, Zengakuren, the tightly disciplined, Communist-led student federation, mobilized its forces for a supreme assault on the government of Japan's wispy Premier Nobusuke Kishi.

Against the 4,000 steel-helmeted cops guarding Tokyo's Diet building, Zengakuren threw in more than 14,000 students who charged with cries of "Kill Kishi," "Down with the treaty," "Ike, stay home." Not until after 1 a.m.--while the students were dancing around the flames and singing the Internationale in one of the indelible mob scenes of the cold war--did the cops get the order that no Japanese government has given its police since 1952: use tear gas. By dawn, the city's hospitals had treated 600 police and 270 students.

Next day, as thousands howled their rage outside his residence, weary Nobusuke Kishi met with his Cabinet for the second time in 24 hours. After a brief session, he emerged to announce to newsmen the decision to ask President Eisenhower to cancel his trip.

ON THE FAST TRACK 9/4/64
Across paddyfields, through mountains and over highways last week streaked the world's fastest long-haul train, slithering like an ivory worm along the 320 miles of rail between Tokyo and Osaka. For the first full test run of Japan's $1 billion New Tokaido Line, the super-express Hikari averaged 80 m.p.h. and often went as high as 125 m.p.h. Crowds waved and cheered, highway traffic stopped to watch, and planes of newsmen circled overhead. Japan was greeting not only a new rail service but a symbol of the nation's postwar industrial growth and a new bond between its two largest cities.

TOKYO GETS READY 9/11/64
Japan has spent nearly $2 billion to refurbish Tokyo for the Olympic Games. Last week, as the finishing touches were applied, the dust and din of the past three years began to lift, revealing shiny new buildings, glistening overhead superhighways and a network of fine, wide roads that is already speeding up traffic considerably. Four super expressways slash like sword scars through 62 miles of the once impenetrable capital, while 25 miles of new subway bore beneath the random, rickety scab of slums, pachinko parlors and noodle shops that is home to most of the city's population. The reek of setting cement permeates Tokyo like a geisha's scent.

FRANCHISE ON THE FUTURE 3/2/70
In the gentle Senri Hills just outside Osaka, three weeks hence, Japan's Expo '70 will begin a six-month run. It is the first world's fair ever to be held in Asia, but amid its architectural anarchy the occasional pagoda or the bat-wing sail of a Chinese junk seems oddly out of place--and time. From one end of the 815-acre site to the other, the skyline is a futurescape of spires and saucers, globes and polyhedrons, sweeping carapaces and shimmering towers of aluminum, glass and steel.

The scene strongly suggests the movie 2001, and well it might. No country has a stronger franchise on the future than Japan. No developed nation is growing faster. Its economy quadrupled in the past decade, and will triple again in the next. Says Economist Peter Drucker: "It is the most extraordinary success story in all economic history."

BIRTH OF JAPAN INC. 5/10/71
To many admiring but fretful Westerners, Japan has become a corporate state, and is even referred to as "Japan, Inc." A member of the Nixon Cabinet voices the alarmist view held in some high Government circles: "The Japanese are still fighting the war, only now instead of a shooting war it is an economic war. Their immediate intention is to try to dominate the Pacific and then perhaps the world."

For both worker and executive, the company is the center of life. Workers often cheer each other when changing shifts, like baseball players applauding a teammate who has just hit a home run. It is rare for a major executive to leave on a business trip without getting a rousing sendoff from the entire office staff at the airport. At Matsushita Electric, Nissan Motors and other firms, the day begins with everybody assembling to sing the company song. At Toyota the day opens with five minutes of supervised calisthenics. In a recent survey, 68% of the Japanese managers polled said that business was more important to them than their families.

REWRITING HISTORY 8/23/82
When word leaked in the press last June about proposed changes in modern history texts that would gloss over instances of Japanese aggression in the period before and during World War II, Japan's neighbors, who remember wartime atrocities all too well, reacted with outrage. Said a South Korean Cabinet Minister, giving vent to the prevailing sentiment outside Japan: "Perhaps the Japanese are not capable of thinking like normal human beings."

In Seoul crowds of South Koreans, mostly senior citizens, massed in downtown Pagoda Park, chanting anti-Japanese slogans. In Taipei university students gathered 50,000 signatures for a protest petition to Tokyo. In Pyongyang the North Korean Communist Party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, labeled the Japanese act "an intolerable insult to the Korean people," and in Peking the People's Daily ominously observed that "some people in Japan are indulging once again in their dreams of aggression."

KARAOKE CRAZE 2/28/83
Music lovers who cannot stand the sound of silence carry their tunes with them on portable cassette players. Now frustrated singers in Japan are turning to a far more elaborate audio apparatus. Known as karaoke, or empty orchestra, sets, they give users the feeling of being accompanied in song by their very own back-up band. First popular in small bars, karaoke sets quickly spread to the home. In 1982 sales of home units zoomed to $625 million, more than was spent in the U.S. on, for example, gas ranges.

BUSTED FOR BRIBERY 10/24/83
The trial had plodded along for so long that when the day for the verdict finally arrived last week, the Japanese paid almost as much attention to it as they would to the real Judgment Day. But then, the seven-year court battle did star Kakuei Tanaka, the former Prime Minister who still reigns as the country's shrewdest powerbroker.

When [Presiding Judge Mitsunori] Okada finally issued the verdict, Tanaka listened with his eyes closed. The three-judge panel found him guilty of having accepted $2 million in bribes from the Lockheed Corp. during the early 1970s in return for persuading Japan's largest domestic airline, All Nippon Airways, to buy the company's TriStar jets. He was sentenced to four years in prison and fined $2 million, the amount of the bribe. At one particularly somber moment, Judge Okada looked directly at the former Prime Minister and sadly noted that his actions had brought "irreparable damage to the public trust in politics."

NAKASONE'S TRIUMPH 7/21/86
Surrounded by reporters and anxious party leaders, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone stared intently at a large television set placed in a corner of the cramped fourth-floor lounge. The walls were lined with long rosters listing L.D.P. candidates for both houses of the Diet, or parliament. As the hours wore on, and returns flooded in from the country's 3,450 counting centers, the excitement grew. The dimensions of the L.D.P. juggernaut expanded, and expanded again. "Jimin, Jimin, Jimin," repeated the television announcer, using the diminutive of Jiyu-Minshu-To (Liberal Democratic Party) as yet another L.D.P. candidate was declared elected.

Soon it was clear that Japan's voters had handed Nakasone's party its most complete victory in 31 years of continuous rule.

BUYING AMERICA 3/9/87
Exxon, ABC and Tiffany have more in common than famous names and slick midtown-Manhattan addresses. All have Japanese landlords. Within the past six months, investors from Japan have bought the headquarters buildings of the three firms. In a new twist on the protectionist slogan "Buy American," Japanese firms are literally buying America, or at least choice pieces of it, from New York City high-rises to beachfront hotels in Hawaii. Eager as customers at a close-out sale, these investors from the Far East snapped up as much as $6 billion worth of U.S. real estate last year, more than four times the 1985 level, and they have only begun to shop.

NAKASONE'S NIGHTMARE 4/27/87
For Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, the week was a nightmare. Just nine months after he led his Liberal Democratic Party to the most sweeping victory in its 32-year-history, the L.D.P. suffered major setbacks in local elections as voters lashed out against Nakasone's proposed 5% national sales tax.

The man who helped propel Japan into a major role on the world political stage was, to put it gently, no longer a hero in his own land. Many Japanese politicians doubted that the Prime Minister would fill out his term, which ends in October. Declared Independent Commentator Masaya Ito: "The Nakasone administration is in its last days."

END OF AN ERA 1/16/89
By the hundreds of thousands, they had kept a vigil outside the palace gates throughout the autumn and early winter. When finally they learned that Emperor Hirohito, 87, the longest reigning monarch on earth, had died of cancer of the duodenum, Japan's 122 million citizens were profoundly moved. All realized that a period spanning 63 years, the Showa era, was at an end. Before 1945, most Japanese had never heard the sound of his voice, but those who listened to Hirohito's radio broadcast to the stricken nation on the topic of surrender would never forget it. The time had come, the Emperor told his people, for "enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable." As it happened, the unendurable led to an unprecedented period of international influence for Japan.

ASCENDING THE THRONE 11/26/90
The courtyard of the palace was filled with the uniforms, heraldry and weapons of the Heian Era (the years 794 to 1185). Twenty-six brightly colored banners fluttered in a light breeze; below them 20 courtiers, some carrying bows and quivers, stood at attention. Slowly, majestically, 14 members of the royal family walked into the Matsu-no-ma, a state room opening onto the courtyard. The Emperor, dressed in a robe the color of the rising sun and wearing a cloth coronet topped with a tail of black silk gauze, took his place behind the drawn curtains of the octagonal takamikura, a three-stage, canopied throne. At the sound of a bell, the purple curtains parted on three sides to reveal the Emperor, who read a two-sentence statement announcing his accession. Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu responded with a brief address and, stepping back three paces, shouted, "Banzai!"--the traditional cheer wishing 10,000 years of life. At that, Japan's 125th Emperor and his family silently left the scene.

KOBE DISASTER 1/30/95
It was the country's worst earthquake in more than 70 years. The jolt that hit Kobe (pop. 1.5 million) just before dawn on Tuesday measured 7.2 on the Richter scale. The numbers alone told the chilling story: some 5,000 confirmed dead, 200 still missing, 25,000 injured, 300,000 homeless. As exhausted relief workers sifted through the rubble of what had once been the country's second busiest port, survivors waited stoically in line for hours for a small bottle of water and a fist-size ball of rice. Offers of help came from all over the world, and as each day revealed new horrors, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama admitted that even in a country with a long history of earthquakes, the Kobe tragedy was "a disaster nobody could even imagine." But at week's end, criticism was mounting against government relief efforts that were deemed too little and too late.

CULT OF CATASTROPHE 4/3/95
Last Monday Japan was assailed by the most synthetic of catastrophes: a man-made poison and a madness that was strictly human. A form of nerve gas called sarin, a weapon of mass killing, was placed simultaneously in five subway cars at morning rush hour, killing 10 people and sickening thousands more. Within days police raided 25 branches of an obscure sect called Aum Shinrikyo, which preaches the apocalypse to come. It is led by Shoko Asahara, a charismatic misfit who preaches that efforts to stop his movement will coincide with the end of the world.

TROUBLE FOR JAPAN INC. 7/10/95
When Japan's trade warriors came home last week, there was hardly a banzai to be heard in Tokyo. Trade Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto had saved Toyota's car sales in the U.S. and said no to some fearsome American demands, but so what? The trade talks are small potatoes compared to the crisis on the home front. Japan Inc.--the export-driven, cheap-credit-fueled juggernaut that has carried the country to the pinnacle of postwar prosperity--is falling apart. Its collapse could be a major catastrophe for Japan--or a rare opportunity to restructure, depending on how the government responds. In either case, the demise of Japan's reliance on industrial investment and exports is the most important shift in recent Japanese history, and the implications for the rest of the world economy are immense. If Tokyo makes the wrong moves in the months ahead, Japan will drag down the rest of the world too.

OKINAWA OUTRAGE 10/2/95
The scheme took shape, according to Japanese police, early in the evening of Monday, Sept. 4, the Labor Day holiday for Americans. Four U.S. servicemen stationed on Okinawa, home base to 29,000 American troops, met at a disco in Naha, the island's main city, and talked about grabbing an Okinawan girl and having some "fun."

At about 8 p.m. they spotted a girl walking alone on a well-lighted stretch of road, lined with storefronts and homes. Before she knew what was happening, they had thrown her into the backseat of the car, where they bound her eyes, mouth, arms and legs with tape. A kilometer farther up the road, they parked, pulled their victim from the car and carried her to a deserted stretch of beach. They tore off the tape, and for 15 minutes at least two of the men raped her, before driving away.

The crime was far from the first or even the worst committed by American troops in the half-century they have been stationed in Japan. Nonetheless, the Okinawa rape is the biggest shock to the U.S.-Japan security alliance in years.