Why should one study elite recruitment and political leadership in Japan? Because, our answer would go, we live in a world of ever deepening interdependence among nations where the peace, security, and prosperity of each is greatly influenced by policies and actions of another. This is particularly true when the latter is an economic superpower like Japan, the largest creditor nation and aid donor in the world of the early 1990s with a gross national product equal to about fifteen per cent of the world's total. Who makes Japanese domestic and foreign policies and how they are made has important implications for the welfare of other nations, including the United States, which maintains what a former American ambassador to Japan, Mike Mansfield, called the “most important bilateral relationship” in the world.

“Elite” and “leadership” are two concepts that help us identify and analyze those who play central roles in a nation's policymaking process. Commonplace as they are in the vocabulary of both modern political science and the mass media, these words are often used ambiguously and interchangeably. They are, however, etymologically distinctive words that can serve us as useful analytical tools only if they are clearly and distinctively defined. In the discussion that follows, we use “elite” to refer to a group of individuals who hold privileged positions in society or organizations and “leadership” to refer to the exercise of power, broadly defined, to lead others in collective action. As William Welsh has suggested, elites are thus “set apart from the rest of society by their preeminence in political and governmental hierarchies,” while leadership means “ability to mobilize human resources in pursuit of specific goals.”