When students of Japanese literary history view the latter part of the Tokugawa period, two developments stand out. First, Edo replaced Kyoto and Osaka as the center of cultural activity. Second, a baffling variety of forms of prose fiction arose. The former stemmed largely from the policies of Yoshimune, the eighth Tokugawa shogun. Although his suppression of “pernicious literature” had a baneful effect on publishing in Kyoto and Osaka, it indirectly improved the competitive position of Edo booksellers. During Yoshimune's reign, also, the city of Edo underwent enormous population growth. Many hatamoto and samurai were forced to resettle in Edo, where they lived on rice stipends rather than on the direct produce of their land. Bureaucracy expanded. Samurai turned from the rigors of rural life to polite urban pursuits. Need for additional services led to a growth in the number of merchants. Likewise, Yoshimune's personal interest in mathematics, science, and even Western learning resulted in the import of books and ideas from the outside world, particularly China. Proscriptions against foreign learning became less rigid.

Even as recently as a dozen years ago, one learned basic Sinological methods rather much the way one learned about sex: by osmosis and “from the gutter.” One puzzled over the remarks of his professors, looked up the strange words in the dictionary, and listened to the older boys in the hall. “I got it from the Kanshi taikan,” some graduate student would say, and you made a mental note to ask a friend about the Kanshi taikan the next time you could be alone together. For all the limitations, it was a pleasant and reasonably effective way to learn Sinology. The atmosphere was clubby, the pace was slow, and there was usually time for patient professional attention.

The author reconstructs the religious idea and ritual that lie behind the “Songs of the Dead.” The three songs attributed to Empress Saimei in the Nihonshoki (nos. 119–121) are interpreted as sung by a dead person's spirit sailing to the nether world. They must have been handed down by the Asobi-be—shamans who appeased dead emperors' spirits—because these and other funeral songs in the Kojiki use similar verse forms. The Ryō no Shūge says that the Asobi-be's services involved two persons called Negi and Yoshi. Negi appeased the spirit who possessed Yoshi; the empress's songs must originally have been sung by Yoshi. The ritual behind the “Songs of the Dead” also helps us to understand the origins of Nō, especially of mugen nō, and to perceive the connection between Nō and the development of Kabuki in the early seventeenth century.

The Iwakura embassy's encounter with Hamilton Fish at the State Department in 1872 is far more than a quaint but insignificant episode in the relations between Japan and the United States and deserves resurrection from the footnotes of history. The two sides, much to the surprise of both, met in a long, drawn-out series of trying and painful interviews, stretching from mid-March to the end of July, to argue and then attempt to revise the terms of Japan's 1858 treaty of friendship and commerce with the United States. This confrontation marks the proper, though halting, beginning of the treaty revision movement in Meiji diplomatic history and also illustrates the Grant administration's policy, or more accurately, cluster of attitudes toward East Asia during the early period of post-Civil War expansionism.

A Civilization, as distinct from a primitive society, is expressed and recorded in the written works of its reflective and highly creative minds. It develops what simpler forms of living have not: a “great tradition” of the literate and critical few. Beneath and within this high culture live the common people, whose “little tradition” is creator and then creature of the philosophy, science and fine art of the great tradition.

If the several articles assembled here dramatize a long-standing suspicion that our understanding of nationalism has not progressed very far beyond its original conceptualization, they also reveal the limitations of this tradition of discourse which we have had to work in. Yet in disclosing the limitations of this tradition they have in fact gone beyond it. In viewing the subject as a condition of a more basic problematik they have raised new questions demanding serious accountability and, perhaps, cleared the way for a total reassessment of nationalism as history and hermeneutic. In the following pages I would like to rehearse a few of the ideas found in these papers and pursue some of the implications of their suggestiveness.