The prominence given to the British operations in Arakan during 1942–43 serves to remind us that the India-Buima coastal plain from Chitta-gong to Akyab and south to Ramree and Cheduba Islands was the scene of a difficult campaign during the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1824–25. In the current operations, as in the advance more than 100 years ago, the greatest difficulties are those of transport and supply. These are due to the fact that the entire region is highly malarious, deeply interlaced by a maze of tidal creeks and estuaries, and that it consists of a series of jungle clad parallel ridges and river valleys, which lie directly across the desired line of advance. In fact, except for the ridges, the area bears a striking resemblance to the Pearl River estuary between Canton and the sea.

Studies of Japan and the Japanese have tended to deal in large proportion with phenomena and problems of the nation as a whole rather than with its component parts. In contrast, community studies focus upon some of the smallest social units of a nation. Community studies have been attempted as an approach to understanding Japan and the Japanese only recently and by relatively few foreign scholars. Moreover, even though a recent survey of work done by the Japanese lists 126 localities from which data at the community level have been gathered, no fully rounded community study has yet been finished by Japanese social scientists. Western scholars, following beaten paths, simply have not ventured into communities for small scale studies, whereas in the case of the Japanese the partial intellectual isolation which delayed the arrival of some of the concepts basic to community studies seems largely responsible for the low returns from so much field research.

The study of nationalism, the most powerful political emotion in the modern world, has often become enmeshed in polemic and ideological combat. In Japan during the past century, evaluations of the historical role of nationalism have tended to oscillate between extremes. Some of its first serious students in the late nineteenth century, writers like Kuga Katsunan and Miyake Setsurei, opposing the prevalent Westernism, were convinced that nationalism was a necessary ingredient of Japanese survival; and they would have agreed with Tocqueville's aphorism that “the interests of the human race are better served by giving every man a particular fatherland than by trying to inflame his passions for the whole of humanity.” Since 1945, however, in a mood of national self-alienation, many Japanese writers have shared Veblen's turgid conclusion, “Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to lead human institutions to the service of dissension and distress. In its material effects it is altogether the most sinister as well as the most imbecile of all the institutional incumbrances that have come down out of the old order.” Once seen as necessary and beneficial, nationalism came in the post-war period to be villified or simply ignored amidst the scholars' preoccupation with their anti-establishment liberal heroes. With some notable exceptions, nationalism has been slow to receive in Japan the thoughtful, dispassionate study it needs.

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.

Among the various issues surrounding Japan's economy, three types are prominent in recent literature: issues concerning the magnitude and measurement of Japan's economic growth; issues concerning Japan's economic structure, behavior, and performance; and issues concerning the nature of Japan's relations with the United States. In the second and third categories, many of the issues, directly or indirectly, have to do with the liberalization of the Japanese economy—in either its internal or external sectors. With regard to policy issues, adversary positions are typically adopted. However, they also emerge in discussions of nonpolicy issues, such as those regarding quantification and measurement. The disagreements among the experts provide a useful point of departure for further research and analysis.