Women were demanding and getting new roles. Japan’s youth were seen as not merely rebels but shin jin rui, an entirely “new breed of people.” The local Utsukushigaoka elementary school enrolled our two sons, the first foreigners it had ever accepted; this was just one sign of the coming internationalization of Japan, known as kokusaika. The big debates about Japan’s role and future involved the pace and probability of all these changes—in politics, in business structure, in social relations, in Japan’s sense of its place among nations.

I have been back to Japan many times since then, but not to Pleasantville. This summer my wife and I returned to the old neighborhood we had not seen in 20 years. We found ourselves again thinking about “change,” but mainly because of its absence. There’s no place we’ve lived that was easier to recognize after 20 years away. Of course, I’m talking about more than this one town.

The most striking changes were of the burnishing variety, consistent with Japan’s steady rise in personal wealth and also manufacturing strength, even through these years of financial-market paralysis. If you know China mainly through stories of its economic successes, you’re surprised on a visit that it’s still so poor. If you know Japan mainly through stories of its failures, which are real, you’re surprised that it’s become so rich. The houses looked the same, but with bigger, nicer cars in the driveways. We saw Land Rovers, BMWs, even a Cadillac on the narrow streets that once were full of bikes and little Nissan Sunnys. The drab, reinforced-concrete train station has been rebuilt in stainless steel and glass; its plaza is now lined with luxury fashion shops, all jammed with shoppers on a warm Sunday. In the 1980s, the Tokyu store had run an “American Food Festival,” featuring Big Red soda and bins full of Butterfinger candy bars. Now there are latte shops everywhere, bistros, tapas bars.

But this was the kind of “change” the ambitious Japanese of the 1980s had assumed, rather than aspired to. What about the more-sweeping changes in Japanese life, for which such prosperity was meant to be the prelude? They were not apparent, at least not in politics. Anyone familiar with the Japanese rule-by-bureaucrats of the 1980s—or the 1960s, or the 1910s—would feel depressingly at home seeing today’s political logjam. A year ago, Japanese voters seemed to have worked a major political miracle, throwing out the near-permanently ruling postwar party and putting the new Democratic Party of Japan in control. This was comparable to a third-party win of the White House in America. By this summer, the prime minister who led that drive, Yukio Hatoyama, had grown unpopular and had resigned, because of minor financial improprieties and a large impression of fecklessness. For now, the reform movement seems to have sputtered, like its predecessors in the ’80s and ’90s. A generation ago, Japan’s unique military relationship with America—Japan theoretically forswearing military action on its own, relying on America—was ripe for basic reconsideration. It is overripe now.