This bibliography is designed to guide the reading of instructors, students, and general readers interested in gaining an understanding of the backgrounds of the present war in the Pacific and the Far East and the problems of peace which will confront the post-war world in that area. It lists 169 of the better and more general introductory books relating to the area. There are 7 5 starred items, 25 of which are double-starred, for the guidance of librarians of institutions with more limited means seeking to build up basic collections of books on the Pacific area. No periodical articles have been included in the list, but a list of the leading periodicals in the field has been given at the end. The Far Eastern Quarterly carries in each issue a classified list of currently appearing articles and books in the field.

Few contemporary poets writing in Bengali are more widely read than is Jivanananda Das. He is considered in many respects the most modern of Bengali poets, as well as the one most independent of the influence of Rabindranath Tagore. His orginality has even been considered eccentric, but another leading Bengali poet, Buddhadeva Bose, says this of him: “He is important because he has brought a new note to our poetry, a new tone of feeling, and has tuned our ears to a subtle melody drawn from apparently conventional patterns of verse, for, despite the metrical seductions of modern Bengali, he has confined himself throughout to a single metrical norm, and that the oldest. It is rather remarkable that, though metrically a hermit, he has yielded to the prose poem and made it as haunting as his verse.”

Chu Hsib (1130–1200), one of the greatest Chinese thinkers since Confucius and Mencius, and the most important in the last eight hundred years, synthesized Neo- Confucianism and built his own philosophy on a new basis. This philosophy—which dominated Chinese thought from the fourteenth century on, Korean thought since the fifteenth century, and Japanese thought since the sixteenth century—began to attract European attention in the seventeenth century. At that time, Catholic missionaries in China quarreled over the translation of “God” as Shang-tic (Lord-on-High), and over the interpretations of the Chinese term t'iend (Heaven). Consequently, they began to study Neo-Confucian thought. The publication, in 1715, of the Hsing-li ching-ie (Essentials of Neo-Confucianism) had a strong impact on them; Chu Hsi and other Neo-Confucian thinkers gradually occupied the minds of Catholic missionaries.

The Nationalist unification of China was nominally completed on December 29, 1928. On that day Manchuria, under the leadership of Chang Hsüeh-liang, accepted and hoisted the Revolutionary flag. Historians have tended to emphasize the role of nationalism in the union of the Three Eastern Provinces with the Kuomintang domain after the death of Chang Tso-lin on June 4, 1928. According to the general view, Chang Hsüeh-liang, having grown up in the period of the May Fourth Movement, shared many of the national aspirations of the younger generation, and desired to stop civil warfare in China and assist the Kuomintang in the policy of unification. Moreover, he is represented as being violently hostile to Japan, suspicious of the Japanese in the killing of his father, and determined to put forth every effort to bring Manchuria and Nationalist China together, so that the unified nation could resist the ambitions of its imperialistic neighbor. Japan, under the “positive policy” of the Tanaka ministry, is pictured as attempting to keep the Three Eastern Provinces separate from the Nationalist South; to delay, if not halt, an eventual union.

Timor, or Timur, is the eighth, numbering from Sumatra, in that long line of islands called the Sunda, which contains the more familiar islands of Java and Bali. Timor is connected by many smaller islands with the Sunda chain and with the islands of Flores and New Guinea, but such connections are lacking with the Australian continent to the south. The island is long and narrow, approximately 350 miles in length and 60 miles in average width.

Universal suffrage was enacted into law in Japan in 1925 under a coalition government formed the previous year by the two major parties, Kenseikai and Seiyūkai. The law abolished an existing tax qualification for voting, expanding the electorate from three million to twelve and one-half million adult males. The Kenseikai had endorsed universal suffrage in late 1919, after an internal debate which began about a year earlier. The Seiyūkai by contrast accepted universal suffrage only in 1924, after several years of expressly rejecting it. This article traces the stages whereby these parties became committed to the legislation, and also examines the reaction to the issue on the part of other elements which had at least a potential voice in this legislation: the nonparty cabinets which governed from 1922 to 1924, the privy council, the House of Peers, and the genro, or elder statesmen.

Our understanding of Cambodia/Kampuchea's immediate past is gradually being enlarged by recent works dealing with pre-1975 Cambodian society, the development and policies of the Communist Khmer Rouge, and local life during the beginning of the Vietnamese occupation. Research using a broad range of primary source material, including a growing number of interviews with refugees, provides a more detailed picture than previously available of the two successive Kampuchean regimes. There remains, however, a persistent problem in many writings: political/ideological biases that can lead to different perspectives on the Khmer Rouge and on Kampuchea under the Vietnamese.

World War II brought a degree of complexity and intensity to Thai-American relations that contrasted sharply with their quiet uneventfulness in the era preceding it. Before the war, Thai relations with the United States had been friendly, but not close since Thailand was within the British financial and commercial sphere of influence. The factors chiefly responsible for altering diese former relations were the emergence of Thai nationalism in association with Japanese imperialism and the eclipse of Western power in eastern Asia during World War II.