Southern asia has a long history of contact with countries that were relatively advanced in one or the other aspect of their civilization. Certain elements of these other civilizations were assimilated, others were not, and today the cultural diversity of the area is as great as it has ever been. The processes of intercultural communication are traced here in their broadest outlines to bring out the main patterns of transmittal and of resistance which we can discern.

Confucian reformers found a great deal wrong with China in the seventeenth century. The trouble was this, they felt: men had strayed from the fixed ideals of Chinese civilization. In the early twentieth century, anti Confucian reformers found a great deal wrong in the China of their day; they traced disaster, however, not to the flouting of fixed ideals but to blind and slavish respect for them, to the fixity itself. A seventeenth-century world, a t'ien-hsia, in which traditional values claimed authority, had become a twentieth-century nation, a kuo, in which traditional values were impugned as tyranny.

With the formal abolition of the Tokugawa Shogunate on January 3, 1868, there was created in Japan a governmental void which was not filled finally and satisfactorily until 1889. The search of Japanese leaders for a satisfactory government structure for the new state was thus one of long duration. It did not begin seriously until the successful outcome of the military struggle with the Tokugawa forces in the early months of 1868 seemed assured.

The Preponderance of historical evidence now available provides a sound underpinning for the general thesis that throughout his struggle for power, Mao Tse-tung has always worked within a Marxist-Leninist framework; that he, like other Communist leaders before him, has not hesitated to improvise within that framework; and that the success of his greatest improvisation—the use of Chinese peasants as the main force in the revolutionary struggle—is actually a negation of fundamental Marxist-Leninist tenets. This analysis has been thoroughly and ably developed by Benjamin Schwartz and needs no elaboration.

After her disastrous defeat by Japan in the war 1894–95, China turned tardily to introduce such economic reforms as would facilitate her defense. She was pressed by concession hunters of many nationalities, who desired economic and political advantages which she was nearly helpless to withhold. Obliged to look abroad for capital to finance needed railway construction, Chinese leaders at the same time saw their empire's dominions threatened by their potential creditors: by Russia in Manchuria, by France in the South, by Germany in Shantung, by Japan in Fukien, and by England in the Yangtze Valley. That Americans claimed no political accommodations in return for monetary advances was an inducement to the Chinese to seek money in the United States. Furthermore, in the railway field, Americans had gained valuable experience through the construction of their own great transcontinental lines.

When, in 1926, N. J. Krom published his standard study of the Hindu-Javanese period in Indonesian history, a major gap in the historiography of the Archipelago seemed to have been filled. Krom's later publications enlarged expertly upon the major themes of his great work. He seemed content to catalogue and analyze the many Indonesia inscriptions, statues, and temples, dating from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries A.D. which he regarded as the fruit of the Hinduization of Java and Sumatra. In his earlier study of Hindu-Javanese art, he brilliantly revealed the mingling of indigenous traditions with the technique of Hindu and Hinduized artisans in the Sumatran and Javanese kingdoms. The dominant note in all his writings was the great civilizing influence which he claimed had been exerted by Hindu traders and colonists over the supposedly untutored indigenous population of the Greater Sunda islands. Though willing to admit that the inhabitants of Java and Sumatra before the coming of the Hindus were not “savages” and that they possessed a certain knowledge of political organization, and agricultural and metallurgical technique, Krom emphasized that the high civilization reached by the kingdoms of Java and Sumatra between the ninth and thirteenth centuries was largely due to the infiltration of Hindu culture.

He westernization and reformation of Japan in the nineteenth century were motivated in large measure by a desire to escape the fate of Asian nations that had failed to make a thorough renovation. The example of China in particular seemed to prove the aggressive nature of European imperialism and the necessity for speedy and drastic changes. Japan's modernization, however, was not motivated by a defense mentality alone. There was, rather, a defense-in-depth concept whereby a renovated Japanese nation should, at the very least, join and, if possible, lead other Asian countries in resistance to the West. This awareness of community with Asia was a constant factor in Japanese politics during the Meiji period. The leaders of the liberal-democratic movement emphasized this theme most strongly; they sought from the first to apply their ideas abroad. They condemned their government's apparent indifference to Asian affairs and its anxiety to please the West. The liberals found a more ready response to such charges than they did to their proposals for changes at home, and so they tended to use them more and more. When this nationalist emphasis is considered in conjunction with the lack of a program of domestic and economic reform, the total effect of the liberal-democratic movement can be considered as tending toward militarism and aggression as often as it did toward peace and democracy.

Japanese complicity in the death of Marshal Chang Tso-lin on June 4, 1928, by an explosion under his railway car on the Peiplng-Mukden Railway, has long been taken for granted. In the absence of a full explanation of what happened near Mukden as well as what happened, in consequence, in political circles in Japan, myth and conjecture have obscured the real significance of the episode. An examination of the record makes it possible to show that it was not another manifestation of the positive policy of the Tanaka cabinet but that it was the first successful test of strength between the radical wing centered in young officers in the Kwantung Army, with civilian sympathizers in Japan, and the more responsible elements of the Japanese government, both civilian and military. Strong disciplinary action by the latter group at this point, perhaps, could have checked a chain of events that eventually led to the ascendency to power of the radical faction and the realization of some of its foreign and domestic programs. The failure to punish by established disciplinary procedures may well have been a fateful decision in Japanese history.

Although placed on canvasses of very different magnitude, the authors of the two preceding articles have posed similar questions. Both ask essentially, “What were the processes of adaptation during periods of culture contact in South Asia?” Neither author is particularly preoccupied with chronology and itemizing but rather with formulating the larger regularities within which events have occurred. The question they ask is the kind that social scientists rather than historians are likely to phrase. It is, however, a question of such a high level of generalization that few social scientists have had the courage to investigate it—even though its implications would be of inestimable theoretical importance to contemporary programs of international assistance.

The period of Japan's greatest promise, the hopeful 1920's when dim flashes of political liberalism were sometimes discernible, was also the “golden era” of the Kenseikai. The picture of those eventful years would be incomplete if the image of this political party, both in and out of office, did not appear on at least one corner of the canvas. Occasionally displaying promise of strength but generally exhibiting its actual impotence, the Kenseikai nevertheless played a role of some significance to developments in Japan. It is the purpose of this essay to examine briefly some of the forces at work within the party which had their effect upon that role. This task calls for an investigation of the political inheritance of the Kenseikai, the circumstances surrounding its birth, the elements that went into its composition, the techniques used by some factions to consolidate their strength, and the devices utilized by competing groups to dislodge from power those in control of the organization.

The Grand Council, Chün-chi-ch'u, which functioned mainly as a secretarial and consultative agency to the Emperor, was the most important institution of the Ch'ing Dynasty. The Grand Councilors, Chün-chi Ta-chen, had daily audience with the Emperor to assist him in making decisions on important government policies and administrative matters and in drafting and despatching edicts. From time to time the Grand Councilors were sent by the Emperor to the provinces as trouble shooters to deal with urgent matters such as war operations, flood control or investigation of provincial officials.

Collaboration, that is, the full cooperation of a subjected people with an enemy occupying power, may easily be misjudged. On the one hand the judge, holding in advance that the people under consideration are non-collaborators, may dismiss evidence which seems to confirm collaboration. On the other hand the judge may interpret the people's non-resistance to the invader's rule as endorsement and hence collaboration. In both cases analysis of collaboration rests upon value judgments and substitutes inference from abstraction for empirical investigation.

The preceding articles deal with disparate topics; yet they have in common an underlying theme. They are all concerned, either implicitly or explicitly, with some aspect of political power, the central problem of political science.

Germany's role in the events leading up to Pearl Harbor needs to be re-examined in the light of documents published since the end of the war. These sources help correct certain misconceptions about German policy which were held during the conflict. The Allied powers believed at that time that Hitler had long-range plans for conquest and that as a part of these plans had, in one way or another, pushed Japan into war with the United States.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, when internal disorder and the impact of Western influences began to work striking changes in the structure of Chinese governmental finance, the revenue of the Ch'ing dynasty may be divided into five main categories. The first and most important was the land tax, which was imposed on most agricultural land throughout the empire and provided the major portion of the funds with which the routine administrative operations of both the central and provincial governments were financed. The second, far smaller in amount than the first, was the grain tribute, which was imposed like the land tax on agricultural land but was levied only in certain areas and was devoted normally to the feeding of the official population of Peking, including the metropolitan garrison, the court, and the metropolitan bureaucracy. The third was the governmental monopoly of the production and distribution of salt. The fourth and fifth categories were respectively the regular (or “native”) customs and certain miscellaneous indirect taxes.

In an earlier publication I reported briefly on the irreparable damage caused to the Hōryūji Kondō by the fire of January, 1949. After the almost total destruction of the great series of mural paintings that had been preserved there since the eighth century, there is a melancholy timeliness in collecting the last studies made by Japanese on their once priceless National Treasure. I continue, therefore, with a summary of several publications on the Hōryūji frescoes that have appeared in Japan since the beginning of the war: three articles by Tanaka, Kobayashi, and Sawa, and a book by Haruyama. Since the last, published in 1947, has not been long in my possession, I have not attempted so far to read more than the author's final chapter of “conclusions,” and to check his identifications of the controversial subjects of the Kondō panels. The book has been praised by Sawa as epoch-making because of the exceptionally fine illumination under which the author's study of the paintings was made. It seems a work as comprehensive in purpose as the fine monograph published in 1932 by Naitō, for acquaintance with which Western readers owe so much to the expert translation by Acker and Rowland.

In vol. 9, no. 3 of The Far Eastern Quarterly, Alphonse Riesenfeld called attention to “Some Probable Bronze-Age Influences in Melanesian Culture.” His point of departure was a stone ax from Bougainville in the Solomon Islands showing traces of derivation from bronze axes of types known from Indonesia, and suggesting analogies with trunnion axes of the bronze and iron ages from regions as remote as the Near East and Europe. It seems appropriate, therefore, to introduce in this place another comparison, of a slightly different order, between certain artifacts of modern or recent times in Melanesia and artifacts from the ancient bronze-age art of the Far East.