The main text upon which these notes are based (Muen, kugai, raku) was first published as a chapter in a book of essentially the same name in 1978. When the revised edition of the work was published in 1996, voluminous notes were added as an appendix, as a way for Amino to reply to his critics. The present article consists of three notes, one on raku, one on kugai and one comparing the three raku, kugai and muen with the idea of “liberty” (Amino's preferred translation for the Japanese term jiyū). To recapitulate the main text (whose translation appeared in IJAS 4:1), all three terms, originally Buddhist, were used as secular concepts in medieval times to denote people and places outside the control of the political authority. All were characterized by certain “freedoms” or “liberties”, but such connotations disappeared in the course of the seventeenth century with the unification of the country.

This study examines the manner in which the significance of housework affected the job choices of young Japanese women over three decades spanning the beginning of the twentieth century, by focusing on domestic servants hired by the Hiroumi family, a merchant family living in the Sennan District, Osaka Prefecture. The family recruited unmarried young women from within Sennan as domestic servants. These women benefited from domestic service because it enabled them to become skilled in housework. Around the late 1890s, however, they preferred to work in the textile industry, the mainstay of Sennan's economy at the time, not recognizing the value of domestic work. Consequently, the Hiroumi family experienced a labour shortage. After this period, though, young women attached increasing importance to housework, and by the 1920s, they were as willing to be employed in domestic service as in the textile industry. This made it less difficult for the Hiroumi family to recruit domestic servants.

This article attempts to demonstrate that the notion of “Islamic world” was a creation of the modern age, emanating from north-western Europe in the nineteenth century. The term incorporates two opposing ideological meanings: on the one hand, Europe representing modern, positive values is set against the Islamic world, representing pre-modern, minus values, while on the other hand, the Islamic world was the common bond among all Muslims for their solidarity and unification against European colonialism. The article goes on to investigate why, how and when precisely the two concepts of “Islamic world” were created under the influence of modern European thought. It is stressed that in much of today's discourse too we can still perceive the two different meanings of the term, and this has often led to confusion and misunderstanding in discussion. Modern historians have played a role in substantiating the ideology of the “Islamic world”, because modern historiography has often described political objectives as actual reality.

History tells us that neither government decree nor intrinsic content can determine the value of currencies. However true this statement is, though, it is not at all clear who actually made that determination. It is easy to say theoretically that the market decides the price of currencies, but it is not so easy actually to mark the boundaries of the market and identify those who were influential in valuing the currency. Thus, the question remains unanswered. Nevertheless, certain historical facts concerning medieval Japan discovered by Hiroyuki Honda in the following paper furnish us with two important implications regarding it.

This article studies the role copper coinage, mainly of Chinese origin, played as the currency of preference in medieval Japan and the process by which it replaced commodities as the main medium of exchange. By the late fifteenth century a major watershed in the development of a money economy had been reached, when distinctions began to be made between good-quality coins and others. The practice of shroffing then became widespread. Though both the Bakufu and local magnates attempted to forbid the practice, local needs dictated which coins were circulated. A contrast in usage grew up between “pure coins” (seisen), that is authentic or standard coins, and “inferior coins,” such as those privately minted in Japan and certain Ming coins. Attention is drawn to the need to distinguish between the monetary policy and their financial policy in the anti-shroffing decrees issued by the authorities.

The International Journal of Asian Studies has published four seminal articles by Japanese scholars of the history of Chinese law (2004–2007). In this issue and the next, an eminent French scholar will analyse and review the articles, adding his perspective to the questions already raised. Part One looks mainly at Shigeo Nakamura's article “Was Traditional Chinese Law a Mere ‘Model’?” and at Osamu Takamizawa's article “Legal Troubles and their Resolution in China: The Interaction of shuolizhe and Xinfuzhe.” The remaining articles, by Hiroaki Terada and Susumu Fuma, will be treated in the next issue.

Huang Yi-long. Liangtoushe: mingmo qingchu de diyidai tianzhu jiaotu (Two-headed Snakes: The First Generation of Catholic Converts in Late Ming and Early Qing China). Xinzhu: Guoli qinghua daxue chubanshe, 2005. The simplified Chinese version, Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006.