In ōta yōko's (1903?–63) novel Han-ningen (Half-Human, 1954) the heroine, named Oda Atsuko, is like author Ōta herself a famous A-bomb writer suffering from severe depression. She enters the hospital in an attempt to cure an addiction to tranquilizers whose intemperate use derives from very real, but to the medical profession opaque, neuroses ultimately due to the trauma of Hiroshima. No treatment proves totally effective. Medicine can only hope to counter illness, not history, and Oda's deepest torments remain chronic. She continues to be plagued by a frustration linked in the novel's fifth chapter with the choices she has faced in the seven years since the end of the Second World War: suicide, flight, or the writing of a “good work of literature.” Throughout the novel Oda dismisses suicide as not in her nature; Ota, in her essay “Ikinokori no shinri” (The psychology of survival, 1952), concludes that no Japanese writer can abandon Japan, and her heroine here concurs. Of Oda's three alternatives all that is left is the writing of a good work, but that too seems elusive. What constitutes “good” is unclear. Just how she might recognize such a work (ii sakuhin to wa nanimono ka) is a literary problem inextricably bound with Oda's physical and psychological problems, and all have arisen from her presence at Hiroshima's destruction on August 6, 1945.

A major issue in modernization theory, and in the study of the relationship between the expanding West and the “Third World,” has been the dynamism or lack of dynamism present in the indigenously idiosyncratic patterns of non-Western cultures. The concept of modernization was born and bred in the West, and seems to have reached full maturity in the late 1950s under the tender care of American social scientists. The bulk of the literature it generated assumed that modernizing cultures, following the West in their patterns of development, would become increasingly alike and eventually “converge.” Although Marxist theories of imperialism do not see Western influence as an unmitigated good, they too view the Third World nations as essentially passive.

Various interpretations have been offered to explain the nature of Taiping society. The earliest ones were given by those who witnessed the progress of the movement and who either took part in suppressing and ultimately destroying it or suffered as victims of its wanton destruction. The attitude of this group is exemplified by Tseng Kuo-fan's “Proclamation, ” Chang Te-chien's Tse-ch'ing hui-tsuan (Prepared by order of Tseng)a, Ku Shen's Hu-hsüeh shenghuan chi (Narrow escape from the tiger's den), b Ming Hsin Tao Jen's Fa-i ch'uchi (The first account of the hair rebels), Ch'en Hsi-ch'i's Yüeh-i hsien-ning shih-mo chi (A complete account of the occupation of Hai-ning by the Yüeh rebels), c and a host of others. These accounts, as Teng Chih-ch'eng remarked in his “Preface to Wang Shih-to's I-ping jih-chi (Wang's diary), because of the fact that the authors were the actual victims, “only give tragic scences of burning and massacre and condemn the unorthodox and vulgar nature of the institutions and writings [of the rebels].

The Korean Communists face a troublesome problem in recording their hiswtory. The first years of the Korean Communist movement are now regarded as a gigantic skeleton in the closet. Official party publications brush over them in a few paragraphs. Individual Communist leaders are almost all identified as petty bourgeois intellectuals, sectarians, deviationists, or factional wreckers. The Communist movement itself is recorded as a “failure” and a “disgrace” by contemporary Kim Il-sŏngists. When praise is meted out, it generally goes to the broader nationalist movement, and the only truly “good guys” turn out to be “the people.” Only when the omniscient Kim arrives on the scene in 1931, do Korean Communist historians begin to panegyrize their past.

The outbreak of hostilities between Chinese and Japanese troops at Liutiaohu in the vicinity of Mukden on the night of September 18, 1931, unleashed a chain of events leading to a disasterous war for Japan and the collapse of the Kuomintang government in China. The causes and course of the Manchurian incident which began on that date are well known and have been abundantly published in recent years. Although the significance of the Nakamura incident as a prelude to the Manchurian affair has also been generally recognized, the details of the Nakamura case and the manner in which the conflicting organs of Japanese policy-making handled it have remained obscure. The attempt here is to supply these details and analyze the affair with particular reference to the role of the Japanese Foreign Office and the growing civil-military conflict over the control of foreign policy.