Just when Japan and the United States are both caught up in a major debate over the effectiveness of their governments, this volume offers new explanations of their comparative strengths and weaknesses. Why can Japan keep building nuclear power plants while it has a hard time building an information superhighway? Why is the opposite the case in the United States? Will political reform change public policy in Japan? Would it make a difference in the United States? This volume explains why and how. This is one of the few volumes on the two countries that offers detailed studies of value to policy makers as well as scholars and students of comparative policy and foreign policy.