There is a widely shared belief expressed in political literature that Japan is Russia's “traditional foe.” Japan's policy is very often pictured as a straight line of constant fighting against the “Russian bear” - much more so since that bear has been dyed red. Actually, however, the history of Russo-Japanese relations proves this assumption to be anything but correct.

It is a common statement of writers of Cambodian and Siamese history that the Siamese overran Cambodia and captured Angkor Thom on one or more occasions before the final sack of that capital in 1430–31. The dates on which this event is said to have occurred are variously given as 1350–53, 1372–73, 1384–85, 1388, 1393–94, 1408, 1420–21. As authority, these writers can cite almost any of the common versions of the Cambodian chronicle and some versions of the Annals of Ayuthia (Siam).

Chinese Historiography has a brilliant past. Both in quantity and in quality, only modern European historiography can be compared with it, while that of other old countries, such as India, is far inferior. Other peoples may boast of their philosophy, science, and art, but in the field of historiography no country can claim such a long and glorious tradition as can China.

A SITUATION which cannot be described as other than bizarre reached its climax on October 14, 1944. On that day, Baron Miyagawa Tada-maro, younger brother of Prince Konoye Fumimaro, alighted at Shanghai from a Japanese army transport plane, ostensibly on business for the South Manchuria Railway. Actually, this mild-mannered little man had come to China as the representative of the Itsuyūkai , a secret organization whose aim was the achievement of peace in the “year of the bird” – 1945.

The three maps accompanying this brief text are meant to be the body of the article. They tell a major story in themselves. Railway development in Manchuria is shown graphically to have been rapid and extensive over a period of less than half a century. The rate of railway growth received exceptional impetus after the occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese in 1931, and by 1945 the total trackage of the railways in that country was estimated to be close to 13,000 kilometers as compared with 5,600 kilometers in 1931.

When the marco polo bridge incident occurred near peiping on july 7, 1937, japan was not prepared to launch a long-term war with china. on the contrary, she was hopeful that a little military pressure would result in a local settlement providing for North China autonomy and economic co-operation with Japan, which she had been demanding for several years. When the incident developed into a fullscale war toward the end of July, she declared that her army was only punishing the anti-Japanese 29th Army and particularly its 37th Division. Even after the war spread to Shanghai in August, Japan still insisted that the military operations were undertaken with the limited purpose of urging the Chinese National government to reconsider and to correct its attitude toward Japan. Although these were absurd explanations, they did reflect to a certain extent the true intention of the Japanese government. On the one hand, a war with China would not be favorably received by the Japanese people. Financial, circles stressed that only a general settlement with China would bring economic prosperity to Japan. Even the General Staff, which had Russia in mind, advised against it. On the other hand, however, the young officers in the army, with War Minister Sugiyama as their leader, advocated war, at least a limited one. They felt that the rising nationalism and the growing unification of China must be checked before China would accept Japanese leadership.

Within the past decade a fresh interest has been shown in events within the countries of Burma, Siam, Malaya, French Indochina, the East Indies, and the Philippines – the region of Southeast Asia. Historians, anthropologists, economists, and political scientists as well as businessmen and newspaper columnists have shown a keen desire for more information and factual data regarding the peoples of this little-known portion of the Orient. To meet this demand books have been published in America and Europe which have brought to the consciousness of the people of this hemisphere the long-term significance of Southeast Asia and the intense drive which is in progress in the countries of that area for the attainment of independence and an honorable existence in the comity of nations. However, books, newspapers, and periodicals published in these countries are still coveted and are not easily obtained.

China occupies an important place in the Islamic world, but Islam in China is perhaps one of the most neglected and unexplored subjects in both sinological and Islamic studies. While there is abundant literature on Islam in the Near East, India, the East Indies, and Africa, we know few authorities on the subject of Islam in China, e.g., d'Ollone, Thierssant, Broomhall, Bonin, Hartmann, etc. Even in such comprehensive works as the Encyclopaedia of religion and ethics, the Encyclopaedia of the social sciences, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, and R. Levy's Sociology of Islam, we find merely fragmentary descriptions regarding the subject.

In contrast to the general tendency of resurgence of academic life in Germany, which has been reported from all the former academic centers and even from an additional one at Mainz, the pace of the recovery of German Sinology has been rather slow. Some of the main former seats of Far Eastern studies still remain unoccupied. The reason for this special development is, in the first place, lack of personnel. Of the old generation Alfred Forke, who held the chair of Sinology at Hamburg University for many years, and Erich Hauer2 died during the war. Otto Franke, the Nestor of German Sinology, died practically from hunger and exhaustion soon after the war. Several of the most promising German Sinologues have left Germany during the past fifteen years, mostly for political reasons. G. Haloun, Walter Simon, and Bruno Schindler are working in England; Balazs resumed his Sinological studies in France; Karl A. Wittfogel heads the Chinese History Project sponsored by the University of Washington at Columbia University; Ferdinand Lessing has been for more than ten years at the University of California, Berkeley, and Wolfram Eberhard, who taught at Ankara, Turkey, is now a member of the faculty at Berkeley too. Franz Michael joined the Far Eastern Institute at the University of Washington years ago, as recently did Erwin Reifler.

This list of publications was extracted by the translator from a typescript bibliography on all the Oriental countries, compiled in the U.S.S.R. The translator has been unable to verify or to annotate the titles listed here, because, unfortunately, comparatively few of them are available in this country. He gladly acknowledges his indebtedness to Professor Owen Lattimore, who elucidated some doubtful points. The main contributions of Russian research on the Far East and on Central Asia have again been made in the fields of Sinology and Mongol studies. Among the senior authors of international repute, the academicians V. V. Struve and V. M. Alexeev must be mentioned, who have carried on the tradition of Russian scholarship.

The six conditions for good painting set by Hsieh Ho in the fifth century a.d. were apparently the first Chinese attempt at a systematic approach to the theory of the art. Their primacy ensured them the respect of later centuries; and since they satisfied the general requirements of classical lore by being at once ancient, terse, and superficially simple about a core of mystery, they came as early as T'ang to acquire a unique weight of authority. The emphasis given them, by quotation and long discussion, in the theoretical sections of the first two grand histories of Chinese painting–Chang Yen-yüan's in the ninth century and Kuo Jo-hsü's in the eleventh–is an obvious sign of high esteem. To these instances might be added countless others, throughout the later literature of the art, in which the Six Laws or the name of their author appear in a place of honor.

The United States government in the closing days of the European war initiated what seems a unique venture in war history: to dissect the war anatomies of major enemy countries and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses on the basis of enemy data and interviews. The diagnoses, while primarily to trace the effects of strategic bombing upon enemy war potentials, were also to serve as a means of checking United States techniques of estimating enemy war potentials. Accordingly, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey was formed and, hard on the heels of occupying troops, corps of economists, engineers, and military technicians descended upon the remains of the German and Japanese economies for their autopsies. The results of their work have been incorporated in a series of technical papers and two major reports of particular interest to economists, published by the Over-all Economic Effects Division of the Survey.

Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, when the native movement in the East Indies got its start, the more extreme elements among Indonesian nationalist groups have looked to the figure of Prince Diponegoro, the early nineteenth-century mystic and leader of the native rebellion against the Dutch known as the Java War (1825–30), as a source of inspiration in their struggle for independence. Members of the nationalist movement still commemorate his death and are hailing him today as “the hero of liberty of the Indonesian people.” Many are also sympathetic to Diponegoro's old program of national purification with its emphasis upon the distinctive Hindu-Mohammedan antecedents of the Indonesian, as opposed to the “contamination” of Western civilization brought in the wake of more than three centuries of Dutch rule over the East Indian Archipelago.