This edited volume represents the homecoming of a scholarly odyssey lasting more than a decade and spanning 10,000 miles from one side of the Pacific to the other. We now find that our intellectual debts are so heavy and our creditors so numerous that we could not possibly repay or even mention them all. In terms of intellectual origins the book represents a confluence of at least two currents: In the study of Japanese politics, it can be traced to Haruhiro Fukui's pioneering interest in the gaps between formal rules and actual political behavior, resulting for example in his attempt to explain the “consistent inconsistencies” between the theoretically expected and the actual results of every change in Japanese electoral laws since the late nineteenth century. In the study of Chinese politics, although seasoned China-watchers have had an intuitive grasp of informal politics for some time, its methodologically self-conscious analysis dates from a debate between Andrew Nathan and Tang Tsou in the pages of the American Political Science Review and the subsequent intellectual fermentation of Tsou's teachings among his students (including Lowell Dittmer, Joseph Fewsmith, Peter Lee, and Ben Ostrov). These two currents converged in the Santa Barbara–based research project, “Informal Politics in East Asia,” codirected by Fukui and Dittmer and generously endowed with two-year funding (1991–1993) by the Pacific Rim Research Program of the University of California. This enabled us to put together a research team consisting initially of recruits from the UC campuses and later cross-fertilized by other interested scholars.