Mount Atago lies northwest of the ancient capital of Kyoto. Because of its long history and the cult that has been associated with it from early times, the mountain provides a typical example of Japanese religion. Like all sacred mountains in Japan, a cult of ancestors was originally attached to Mount Atago. During successive centuries this cult served as a base for other cults: of fire, the tengu, the Bodhisattva Jizō, and Shōgun Jizō. It also served as the base for a large popular cult with branches all over the country, which still exists. The complex structure of the popular cult contains a harmonious blend of elements of archaic religion, Shinto, and Buddhism. From early times until the Meiji period, its organization was directed by a group of the mountain ascetics known as yamabushi, who lived on the mountain itself. A sad consequence of the Meiji Restoration was the dispersion and disappearance of this group as well as most of the documents concerning Mount Atago. In an effort to reconstruct the history of the cult, the writer has consulted the few documents that still remain, which are found among local chronicles and classical texts. The study also discusses the religious and social characteristics of the Atago confraternities (kō), which are found in towns and villages even today, and their position in relation to the general phenomenon of confraternities in Japan.

Everyone with interests in Chinese studies who has had occasion to become aware of it will agree that within the past two or three years there has been a marked upswing in the quantity and in the quality of publication in Taiwan. The present writer observed some of this new development on the scene in 1954–55, and others both better informed and better qualified to judge report that the trend continues. Although the Journal has on several occasions during the last five or six years reported briefly on publication there, now there is perhaps some value in reporting more comprehensively on recent developments, both because the phenomenon itself is of interest, and because many recently published items will be desired by scholars and by research libraries.

Just a century ago, in 1843, Ralph Waldo Emerson read for the first time a complete translation of “The Four Books” of the Chinese classics, copying many sentences from them in his “Journals.” Many of these quota-tions reappear in his later “Works”—and almost every volume contained one or two illustrative sayings taken from the Chinese classics. The greater part of these entries in his journals are in an appreciative tone, and his quotations from them in the “Essays” are mostly used to confirm his own beliefs.

Gertrude Stein once remarked that history must be understood not as the passage of time, but as the killing of centuries. This killing of centuries takes a very long time, she added, and she discerned the final death throes of the nineteenth century—a period in thrall to science and the idea of civilizational progress—in the middle of World War II. Being an American Jew in France, that denouement was realized, for her, by Hitler's Germany, in the moment that it fell to American industrial war making. But Stein's insight might as easily and as correctly be applied to the analysis of anticolonialism and the collapse of European rule in South and Southeast Asia. It was there, after all, that the ideology of a civilizational mission was revealed in all its hypocrisy. Such, at least, is the impression one gathers from reading the works of Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Leela Gandhi, and Benedict Anderson, each of whom offers a perspective on the history of empire's end, and the rise of revolutionary and nationalist independence movements in Asia. As counterpoint to their insistently particularizing narration of these movements, James C. Scott sketches a deep history of recurrent antistatism as the context in which European empires made their ill-fated claims to civilizational exceptionalism, and in which anarchism could emerge as a technics of ungovernability.