The basis of Thailand's political security has been altered from time to time to meet the changing stresses and strains created by great powers in the Far East. In the process of political evolution the Thai people and their politicians have shown a great deal of flexibility.

For thirty-five years a major scholarly dialogue, (which often spilled over into abrasive debate) has enlivened the study of comparative Indo-European religions and mythology. At the center of this academic storm is Georges Dumézil, whose brilliant insights into the nature of early Indo-European cosmology, myths, rites, deities and social structure, have sent dozens of historians of religion, philologists and linguists to the texts in efforts to either corroborate or disprove his theories. The extent of Dumézil's influence may be seen in the number of scholars who have developed and amplified his ideas in their own research. Another, equally significant measure of his influence may be found in the number of well-informed critics which the French scholar has attracted. Dumézil's central theory, concerning the tripartite ideology of the Indo-Europeans, has proven to be suggestive and stimulating for scholars in Germanic, Roman, Celtic, Scandinavian and Indie studies. Certainly, Dumézil ranks alongside other great contemporary French scholars such as Braudel and Lévi-Strauss. Like them, his work has had an incalculable effect upon his discipline and upon the world of scholarship.

The poetry of every nation and age is a complex expression of the history, spirit, and individual genius of a people; and, as each successive generation evaluates a native or an alien poetic tradition from its own historical and cultural vantage-point, it discovers meanings and values as well as limitations and weaknesses in the poetry it reads. Each generation must reassess for itself the glory that was Greece or the grandeur of Japan—so that the attempt to describe the formative elements which underlie Japanese poetic expression is more than a single essay, individual, or generation can accomplish. But the undertaking nevertheless seems necessary today, when we can no longer be satisfied with the older extremes of Victorian condescension towards “Japanese epigrams”; the exclusively historical or biographical treatment which evades direct analysis of the poetry; or that simple-minded exoticism which prefers ignorant rapture to the disciplined effort of literary criticism. For the Westerner as well as for the Japanese, poetry lives only as it is understood and felt, and our experience of Japanese poetry today must reflect contemporary critical standards and techniques of analysis—the means of understanding given us by our own age and culture.

Our coverage of wartime broadcasts emitted by Radio Tokyo and its satellite stations, while unavoidably incomplete, nevertheless offers clear clues to the Japanese blueprint for Indonesia. The essence of propaganda is to hammer away at a few points, and we may infer from these what the Japanese intended to do, regardless of what they actually accomplished. Despite certain conflicts in regard to timing, priorities and, above all, overall direction, this program seems to have represented the combined goals of Japan's military and big business elements. Although most of the desiderata were the same as those set for the rest of what Japan termed the Southern Regions, Japanese propaganda to and about Indonesia exhibited certain variations from the norm. As the richest, most populous, most distant from Japan, and most thoroughly Muslim area in Southeastern Asia, Indonesia necessarily called for special handling. Its political division by the Japanese into three administrative areas under separate army and navy commanders was a further complicating factor.

Whether china has changed or remained the same is a question of remarkable longevity in the field of Chinese studies. It is sustained in part by the continuity of certain terms of reference within Chinese culture, from late imperial to contemporary times, together with the maintenance of certain institutions. W. F. J. Jenner has recently identified some of these: the bureaucracy, walls, “dad, mum and the kids,” “severe punishment,” among others (Jenner 1992). In Jenner's analysis, the fact of China being ineluctably Chinese is readily translated into the fact that it has failed the challenge of modernization. The same equation has been made by others: Peyrefitte's “l'empire immobile,” Mabbett's “mirage of modernity,” and Pye's nationalism without modernization all bespeak an understanding of China as not only imprisoned by its past but also, to draw on older views again, as stagnant, mummified, or decaying (Peyrefitte 1993; Mabbett 1985; Pye 1993).