In 1933 and 1934, the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway Company and the government of the newly formed nation-state, Manchukuo, sponsored a Manchuria pavilion on the Japanese exhibition grounds of Chicago's A Century of Progress World Exposition. Though small, this pavilion bore immense political weight. Opening a year after the Japanese Kwantung Army declared the formation of the new state in Northeast Asia and just three months after the Japanese delegation announced Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Manchuria exhibit demonstrates how Japanese military and corporate interests attempted to sway international public opinion on the cultural world stage. This paper examines the ways in which the Manchuria displays functioned during this crucial diplomatic moment and how the visually dazzling American exhibit, the Golden Temple of Jehol, upset Japanese claims of dominance in the region.

According to standard reference works, the Meiji leader Saigō Takamori committed ritual suicide in 1877. A close reading of primary sources, however, reveals that Saigō could not have killed himself as commonly described; instead, he was crippled by a bullet wound and beheaded by his followers. Saigō's suicide became an established part of Japanese history only in the early 1900s, with the rise of bushidō as a national ideology. By contrast, in the 1870s and 1880s, the story of Saigō's suicide was just one of many fantastic accounts of his demise, which also included legends that he ascended to Mars or escaped to Russia. Remarkably, historians have treated Saigō's suicide as an unproblematic account of his death, rather than as a legend codified some four decades later. This essay links the story of Saigō's suicide to the rise of modern Japanese nationalism, and examines other Saigō legends as counternarratives for modern Japan.

A sense of grievance over a “lost territory” may come to dominate the internal and external politics of a country. France's mourning over Alsace-Lorraine from 1870 to 1918, West German sensitiveness over the Oder-Neisser line in the 1950s and 60s, the Arab obsession with Israel—all are examples of states and peoples who will not forget the lands that have been torn from them. Pakistan is unique as a country with a sense of bitterness and grievance for territories that have never formed part of its polity. The concern with Kashmir needs no discussion here; it is not difficult to understand why Pakistanis believe they have been wronged. But this major, this massive, grievance leads to the perpetuation of a legend of injustice regarding the frontier line in the Punjab. Pakistanis believe that the Indian occupation of Kashmir was made possible by the allocation of Gurdaspur District to India, which afforded access to the state. Inasmuch as Gurdaspur appeared in the Second Schedule of the Indian Independence Act as part of the territories of the new West Punjab (Pakistan), being a district with a majority—even if a small majority—of Muslim inhabitants, there appears to be no good reason why it should have been given to India under the decision of Sir Cyril Radcliffe.

This article traces the development of ethnic relations in West Java during the period of transition from local government to Dutch colonial rule. Changes in relations between Javanese and Chinese-origin elites provide its subject matter, the West Javanese principality of Cirebon its locale, and the half century preceding the massacre of the Chinese in Batavia by the Dutch East India company in 1740 its period.

Of all the political personalities in the era between 1928 and 1949, Tu Yuehsheng was perhaps the most colorful, certainly the most unusual. Born into the lowest ranks of society, he rose to dazzling heights of power and exercised a political influence no gang leader had ever known before. The intimate relationship between Tu and the Kuomintang regime was a most unusual phenomenon in Chinese politics and deserves careful attention. Even though documentary materials are scarce by the very nature of the case, an investigation may shed important light on contemporary political mechanisms.

The growth of the Indian National Congress traditionally has been discussed in terms of the spread of nationalism as a sentiment. The development of the Congress movement in Punjab, however, suggests it may owe less to nationalism than to specific changes within the provincial political systems. Communal politics denied to the Congress much Hindu support in Punjab until the late 1930's. It was not until efforts to organize a Hindu communal party ceased and one faction within the Congress sought Hindu communal support that a large proportion of the Punjabi Hindu community joined the Congress movement.

The problem of Buddhist councils has haunted western Buddhological research through almost all of its last one hundred years. At once, we see that a twopronged approach is necessary if we are to ever have any hope of arriving at a resolution. The first of these involves a consideration of the relationship between the Vinaya council accounts and the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, this latter text preserved in the Sūtra Piṭakas of the various schools and providing a detailed account of [1] the Buddha's travels immediately prior to his death, [2] the actual passing into parinirvāṇa, and [3] the funeral arrangements. Here the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra account concludes, but the details which are associated with the next allegedly historical events, namely, the council narratives, are found in the Skandhakas of the various Vinayas. Scholars began to question why the council proceedings, logically following the Buddha's death and funeral, are preserved in a separate text.

The first part of this project was published in the February 1995 issue of this journal, with the title “Early Religious Traditions from the Neolithic through the Han (circa. 4000 b.c.e.-220 c.e.).” It included essays by Constance A. Cook, Donald Harper, David N. Keightley and Edward L. Shaughnessy. The introduction to Part I noted the rapid growth of studies of Chinese religious traditions and discussed some of the continuities between earlier and later practices and beliefs. It emphasized the importance of a knowledge of religious activities for our understanding of Chinese culture. Part II continues the story with surveys of recent studies of traditions that are still active today. As was the case for Part I, the present essays are focussed primarily on Western language studies, though some work by Chinese and Japanese scholars is also discussed. The reason for this focus is that this project is intended to introduce this broad field of study to nonspecialists in the West, taking into account recent materials published through 1994.

The Political Histories of Western Europe and the United States over the past three hundred years illustrate powerfully how the evolution of fully functioning liberal democratic politics has been linked intimately to the presence of vigorous thinkers and activists dedicated to the pursuit of a liberal polity. The social contract theory of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the constitutionalism of Baron Charles de Montesquieu, the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith, and the reflections of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton on the challenges of competitive politics all helped to lay the groundwork for the achievement of liberal democratic politics in France, England, and the United States. Particular strains of political thought found in these and other thinkers help to account for the similarities and differences among the world's historic experiments in bourgeois democracy. French liberalism, which had no Thomas Hobbes seeking eloquently to defend monarchical absolutism, ultimately could not accommodate royal prerogative to democratic politics; and, lacking an Adam Smith to assert the primacy of economic laissez-faire, it showed no fundamental antipathy to the centralized state in its political practice. A more dramatic contrast is afforded by the fragile and short-lived democracy of Weimar Germany, nurtured in soil where G. W. F. Hegel's organic conception of the state and the doctrines of state sovereignty that legitimated the regime of Otto von Bismarck overwhelmed the contributions of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt to liberal theory. In the final analysis, to be sure, the presence or absence of absolutism and its defenders, of laissez-faire economics and its rationalizers is attributable to other factors deep in the history and culture of each society. Yet, in all these cases, the historical relationship between thought and politics is clear and striking.

This article explores the representation of chigo—adolescent males attached to Buddhist temples or aristocratic households who were educated, fed, and housed in exchange for personal, including sexual, services—in medieval Japan. The author discusses how chigo were depicted in historical records, in contemporary short fictional narratives, and in a “Chinese” legend invented by Japanese Tendai monks; the chigo are also compared to the Tang consort Yang Guifei. Fictional and real chigo tend to fall victim to violence, and it is argued that the chigo functions as a surrogate sacrificial victim, a cultural figure whose role is outlined most prominently in the works of René Girard.

Problems concerning the emergence and geographical diffusion of food production in East Asia have long interested archaeologists and historians. However, attempts to reconstruct the chronology and diffusion routes from the so-called nuclear zones of both North and South China through the Korean peninsula and Japan have been less than convincing. In North China, the crops involved were millet (Setaria italica) and kaoliang (Sorghum vulgare); in South China, rice (Oryza sativa japonica and indica).

Two and a half thousand years ago, long before Lakshman Sena ruled Bengal, there was a monster who came out of its cave every night and ate people. The people could not kill him because they feared him so much. They finally put a plan together and made a mirror. When the monster came out that night and saw his reflection, he was so startled to see another creature as big and powerful as himself that he lashed out at the mirror, shattering the glass. But, each broken piece reflected himself back at him. As he turned, these creatures seemed to surround him. He felt they had multiplied. So in his fear and rage, he hit his head and wept himself to death. The people came back the next morning and saw the splintered glass and the dead monster. Now, how to tell all the other villages the news that they could live without fear? So, the same man who had come up with the scheme to kill the monster was asked to devise a second plan. A big leaf was used to paint the picture of the monster. This image was circulated from village to village, and the man was packed off to tell the story. Wherever he told the tale, they gave him rice and, of course, food to eat. Soon it transformed his livelihood. He no longer cultivated land. Then they wanted new stories, so he went to the Ramayana and Mahabharata and added songs to storytelling and pictures on cloth.

The world's greatest repository of historical information is to be found in the twenty-five officially approved Chinese standard histories. This collection begins with legendary ages and continues to the beginning of the Tsing or Manchu period. Because only parts of a very few histories have been translated, this collection remains almost completely unavailable, except to expert sinologists. Altogether the histories have well over twenty million characters, the equivalent of at least forty-five million English words. If this series were translated with appropriate notes and printed in the same format as the parts of the first two that have appeared, there would be about 225,000 pages, making about 450 volumes of 500 pages each. This translation is the greatest single task awaiting sinologfcal scholarship today.

It is a commonplace that the great majority of the world's inhabitants are concentrated within a few demographic areas covering only a small portion of the surface of the earth. Of these, perhaps only three are of a first order of magnitude, while easily the greatest of these, the agglomeration in Monsoon Asia, may contain as much as 50 per cent and certainly more than 40 per cent of the world's population. Within this crescent of favored littorals and archipelagoes, certain areas – Japan, China, Java, India, and Tonkin in particular – demonstrate the most delicate and potentially disastrous balance between the physical endowment of an area and the ability of men to win a livelihood and to increase their numbers.

The initial reaction of the foreigner upon his first contact with Chinese law and legal system is one of frustration and noncomprehension. Those given to facile generalization are apt to declare either that China is devoid of any serious juridical tradition or that it is still in a primitive state of legal development. But both of these conclusions are clearly false since the Middle Kingdom has a long and complex legal history, and, while certain jural notions of responsibility which characterize Western law have not come into being in the East, their absence is not proof of arrested growth but merely that jural problems are envisaged in another fashion in the Sinitic body politic. The basic fact which the foreigner slowly comes to recognize is that, while the need for justice is constant in any culture, in Chinese society it is attained in a unique fashion.

Editor's Note: The essay that follows is based on a conference paper by Dilip K. Basu that has long circulated informally, in the process exercising an unusually high degree of influence for an unpublished commentary. Most notably, some ideas embedded in it have been spread via literary scholar Lydia Liu's engagement with and quoting of the paper in The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Liu 2006), a provocative and much-cited book that calls for a radical rethinking of some of the standard terms and concepts used in the past to refer to the Qing Empire's ties to and conflicts with other political and territorial units. Those familiar with Liu's work will find here an essay that complements some arguments in her book; those who have not read it will be introduced to those ideas for the first time. Beyond this, though, all readers will find a discussion of various ideas and events—visions of China's place in the world, how the story of the Opium War is thought about in different settings, the history of Sinology—shaped by personal as well as scholarly concerns.

The essay's ties to the author's life and associations, which come into play more as the essay proceeds, make it a good fit with the goals of our recently introduced and still evolving “Reflections” genre. In addition, since it revisits critically ideas about China associated with the work of John K. Fairbank, it can be placed well beside some of the essays published in the “Legacies” series launched by Kenneth George, in his time as editor of the journal. And regular attendees of the Association for Asian Studies annual meetings may notice that much that follows resonates with the keynote address by Amitav Ghosh, one of those familiar with Basu's essay in draft form, when that conference was held in Toronto in 2012. The pages that follow are tightly focused on China, but Basu's discussion of “xenology” (a term for the ways that cultures think about those deemed “others,” which has, of course, the same root as the more familiar term “xenophobia”) clearly has implications for widely varied times and places, just as the handling of Fairbank's distinctive role in Chinese studies may bring to mind parallels to the influence that other prominent Western academics from the last century once shaped and via their legacies can continue to shape academic work on other parts of Asia. While focused tightly on China, in other words, it has much to offer readers whose primary interest is not in that country.

This study presents an overview of attempts by Chinese literati during the twentieth century to articulate a coherent Chinese mythology, primarily based on ancient texts but eventually to some extent drawing from ethnographic materials and folklore as well, and all much beholden to Western examples such as Greek and Norse mythology. This examination of text-based activities sets the stage for an inquiry into a wave of monument building during the Reform Era, much of which has celebrated China's ancient myth, history, and legend. A recent park in Wuhan dedicated to the legendary sage ruler and conqueror of floods, Yu the Great, serves as a case study of how, over the last three decades, old Chinese myths have been inscribed on the new Chinese landscape, and allows exploration of this phenomenon in relation to deeper issues concerning the role of myth in Chinese society, particularly its unexpected marriage with modernity.