Japan's acquisition and development of Taiwan did not stem from the efforts of a capitalist class seeking cheaper resources and new market outlets, or engaging in dumping practices to maintain a high rate of domestic profit. Taiwan's economic transformation was brought about by enterprising bureaucrats who formulated a policy of state action in areas unattractive to private capital in order to create conditions that would encourage and sustain private investment. Taiwan's traditional economy was not destroyed completely, but restructured in such a way that land and labor became more productive and resources previously idle were now employed. Japanese colonial policy was successful for the following reasons.

(1) The administration of Kodama and Gotō consisted of able leaders assisted by expert young subordinates who were dedicated to their jobs. Kodama was a first class administrator and apparently had a genius for organizing and extracting the best from his officials. Throughout his governorship he gave Gotō full support, especially in the early years when many military officers and foreign advisers complained to Kodama about Gotō's administrative methods. Aldiough Kodama's career ended in 1906, he stands out as one of the most able and imaginative young officials of the late Meiji period. In Gotō, Kodama had an enterprising, intelligent, and dedicated assistant capable of surrounding himself with able, loyal officials and providing the coordination and leadership necessary to organize their work efficiently. Gotō also had the initiative and ability to make the right strategy move or policy decision when the occasion demanded. He possessed a unique talent for discerning which elements in the traditional society could be used to strengthen modern institutions. His policy of integrating the pao-chia with a modern police system was the political key to the Japanese success in enforcing their control in the colony and obtaining local acceptance of it at the same time.

(2) The Kodama-Gotō administration simultaneously introduced a number of important reforms and investment to establish an extensive infra-structure. This encouraged expansion of the market and enabled the administration to formulate policies of promotion, regulation, and financial support to build an industry of great comparative advantage to the island, sugar.

(3) Kodama and Gotō relied on fiscal reform and deficit financing to finance their programs of reform and economic development. Taiwan's fiscal resources were limited, but the administration managed to secure the home government's underwriting of a large debt issue. The land tax reform, the introduction of new excise taxes, and the creation of the monopoly bureaus resulted in large tax revenues which enabled the administration to repay its debt within the stipulated repayment period and accumulate large budget surpluses at the same time. Taiwan's early economic growth was financed on a pay-as-you-go basis.

On first appearance, the events in Taiwan seemed to duplicate the Meiji modernization achievement. But one important distinction must be kept in mind. The Meiji bureaucracy, unlike the small group of active bureaucrats in Taiwan's administration, applied their policies of reform and state support to sectors other than agriculture. Kodama insisted that Taiwan's agriculture, particularly the export of food and raw materials to Japan, be developed to augment Japan's power for economic warfare. Had Kodama and Gotō remained in Taiwan, they might have introduced different economic and social programs in response to changing demands from Japan's industrialization and Taiwan's population increase. Subsequent colonial administrators only imitated Kodama's economic program, and while it is easy to explain this behavior by reference to the usual pattern of modern colonial rule, this seems overly facile in the light of Japan's early and heavy investment in her colony. An explanation of this puzzle is possible only after further study of Taiwan's economic growth and her economic and political relationships with Japan.

A creative, potent, formless energy is assumed to animate the universe in parts of island Southeast Asia. In Luwu, a former kingdom of South Sulawesi (Celebes), Indonesia, this energy is called sumange'. This paper describes how sumange' is treated within the human body, which it is said to animate, and the logic of ritual substance that it implies. Because it can be lost through shock and routine depletion, humans make efforts to care for it, retain it, and increase it. Because it is potent, concentrations of it in people and places are dangerous. Its differential distribution orders the social and natural universe.

Historically, tokugawa Samurai were a legal creation that grew out of the landed warriors of the medieval age; they came to be defined by the Tokugawa shogunate in terms of hereditary status, a right to hold public office, a right to bear arms, and a “cultural superiority” upheld through educational preferment (Smith 1988, 134). With the prominent exception of Eiko Ikegami's recent The Taming of the Samurai (1995), little has been written in English in the past two decades regarding the sociopolitical history of the samurai in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. E. H. Norman's seminal work, Japan's Emergence as a Modern State, established the parameters of debate among American historians of Japan from the 1950s through the 1970s. Drawing on the Marxist historiography of prewar Japan, Norman interpreted the Meiji Restoration in terms of class conflict: a modified bourgeois revolution directed against a feudal Tokugawa regime, led by a coalition of lower samurai and merchants, and supported by a peasant militia (Norman [1940] 1975).

Revolutionary mass upheaval generally weakens the people's respect for authority, law, and discipline; and it brings in its wake social, economic, and political disorders, facilitating the establishment of an authoritarian regime. The French Revolution was based on the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity; but the destruction of the old social and political fabric, and the failure to institutionalize the new ideas, led Frenchmen to search for “the man of genius destined at once to carry on and to abolish the revolution.” The Russian Revolution of 1917 was also followed by several years of civil war, which led to the establishment of the ruthless totalitarian regime of Stalin, itself reminiscent of the Thermidorian Reaction. In Algeria, Cuba, China, and North Vietnam, successful mass armed revolutions have been consolidated only because of their one-party dictatorships.

In his autobiography Loren Eiseley wrote: “One exists in a universe convincingly real, where the lines are sharply drawn in black and white. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes the lines were never there in the first place. But they are necessary in every human culture, like a drill sergeant's commands, something not to be questioned.” We who are non-Japanese students of Japan form a culture of our own, and Edward Said's Orientalism helps us to see, perhaps for the first time, the “drill sergeant's commands” to which we respons.

A number of Korean legal historians have argued that Chosŏn Korea had a tradition of customary law and that it was suppressed and distorted by the Japanese during the colonial period. But a comparison of Korean “custom” with that in late medieval France, where the legal concept of customary law developed, reveals that custom as a judicial norm was absent in premodern Korea. The Korean “customary law” that has been postulated as a true source of private law in Korean historiography was the invention of the Japanese colonial jurists. The Japanese collected Korea's popular usages that were supposed to serve as an antecedent for a modern civil law, and colonial judges employed the legal instrument of custom in reordering Korean practices into a modern civil legal framework. In colonial Korea, custom played the role of an intermediary regime between tradition and the demands of modern civil law.

For nearly two decades, study of the Chinese economy involved constructing pictures of broad macro trends from extremely limited data painstakingly obtained. Given the quantity and quality of data available, a majority of analysts came surprisingly close to the mark in explaining what happened. A few economists attempted to deny that any economic progress had occurred, while there were others who painted a picture approaching Utopia, but these were always in the minority. When China began to open up in the late 1970s and data were once again systematically published, there were some surprises, but much of that written before the opening remained valid. If economists did a reasonably good job of explaining what happened, however, they did much less well explaining why.

In this paper I am concerned with an examination of symbolic and social dual organization. Does “dual organization” refer to those rare social systems in which the total community is in one way or another bisected into two definable “groups” which have certain formal relations with each other? Or, alternatively, can we speak of “dual organization” when the society is not so divided, or when the social divisions are obscure, but where there is a symbolic system in which binary categories are prominent? And furthermore, just what is the relationship between dualism as a symbolic order, which appears quite widespread, and dualism as bisected social structure, which has rarely been satisfactorily analyzed ?

Although political and cultural developments in India have strongly influenced those in Ceylon for many centuries, the effects were often contradictory and ironic. The land that sent the Buddhist religion to Ceylon also sent invaders to plunder its Buddhist monuments; and the Indian mercenaries recruited by the kings of Ceylon to strengthen the royal army were such a turbulent element that they themselves frequently posed the greatest threat to the stability of the realm. India's cultural contributions to Ceylon are well known, and have been examined in detail by Indian, Ceylonese, and Western scholars. The purpose of this paper is to examine the more abrasive side of the Indian–Ceylonese relationship during the eleventh century, when the imperial Chola kings of southern India sent invading armies into Ceylon, bent upon occupation and plunder. A more general aim of this analysis is to suggest thatorganized plundering activity was a more important politico-economic instrument in the traditional Indian state than most historians have hitherto acknowledged.

In the industrialized democratic world, broadcasting news monopolies and oligopolies have all but disappeared. Whereas public broadcasters in Western Europe in the earlier postwar period had a monopoly or duopoly on televised news, today there is a more diverse market with competition from other public and commercial broadcasters, often carried by new technology such as satellites. In the United States, the oligopoly of the three networks in news has been broken by both CNN on cable and, to a lesser extent, PBS in its program “News Hour.” Thus the new competition introduced into broadcasting systems has been the result of either changed government policy or new technological mediums, or in certain instances both.

On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. local time, an earthquake with an epicenter 130 kilometers east of Sendai off the Pacific coast of northern Japan shook the Tohoku region more violently than any tremor in a thousand years. The quake was approximately 9.0 in magnitude, and it in turn triggered a set of tsunami hurtling across the Pacific Ocean, striking first the coast of Tohoku with waves of unprecedented height and strength, along a coastline stretching roughly 400 kilometers. In Fukushima, 180 kilometers west-southwest of the epicenter, 15-meter waves roared over seawalls supposedly protecting a nuclear reactor built just a few meters from the ocean's edge, starting a chain of events that resulted in an explosion the following day that began the release of radioactive materials (which continues still), sparking high anxiety if not palpable panic in Tokyo, the center of which is 240 kilometers to the south-southwest of the Fukushima nuclear complex.

Sinologists have long agreed that many aspects of Chinese culture vary widely from region to region and even from valley to valley and town to town. The question for contemporary scholars is why and with what consequences. The problem we face is that while evidence from widely scattered communities is adequate to demonstrate the fact of regional diversity, it is not adequate to test hypotheses concerning its causes and consequences. What we need are detailed maps of the distribution and frequency of such practices as male adoption, uxorilocal marriage, cash bride-price, double burial, and foot binding. The only chance we have of discovering why Chinese culture varies is to see how that variation relates to the location of such likely causes as relations with non-Han peoples, the strength of state control, and the balance of forces in local modes of production.

John Fee Embree some time ago remarked that “… we can never learn the nature of a religion simply by a perusal of the sacred texts, i.e., written words, torn from their social context; nor will a life of Buddha and a study of his original teachings in 500 B.C. tell us much of the nature of religion in contemporary Japan.” This statement from a decade and a half ago is as applicable to religious behavior and belief in a modern Buddhist country like Burma as it originally was to pre-war Japan. There is a good deal of literature which purports to be descriptive of Burmese religion and Burmese religious behavior. Much of this literature takes as an initial premise that Burma is one of the most actively Buddhistic countries in the world and that we may therefore gain the most intimate understanding of Burmese religious behavior through a perusal of the sacred canons of that faith. This approach is not without merit, and it would be foolhardy indeed to take as a premise that Burmese religion is not Buddhistic and that the Pali scriptures are worthless as explanatory points of reference. Such an alternative would be unrealistic, and would be infinitely shocking to Burmese, who certainly regard themselves as Theravada Buddhists. At the same urne, the imported nature of the Buddhist faith in Burma is well understood, and its historic superposition upon a more ancient substratum of customs and beliefs is appreciated, even though descriptive details in the matter may largely be lacking. All objective reporters speak, in greater or lesser detail, of residual elements in Burmese religion which owe little or nothing to Buddhism.

China's 2010 census revealed a population of 1.34 billion, 50 percent urban, 13.3 percent above age sixty, and with 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls. In this article, we discuss how gender imbalance, population aging, and their interaction with rapid urbanization have shaped China's reform era development and will strongly shape China's future. These intertwined demographic changes pose an unprecedented challenge to social and economic governance, contributing to and magnifying the effects of a slower rate of economic growth. We organize the analysis according to the proximate determinants of economic growth: first, labor input and its productivity; second, capital investment and savings; and finally, multi-factor productivity, including social stability and governance. We argue that the economic, political, and social context that turns labor and capital inputs into economic outputs is perhaps the most important and least understood arena in which demographic change will shape China's rise.

This introduction considers the issues raised in the debate, recently joined in the works of James Scott and Samuel Popkin and explored in the papers in this symposium, regarding the relative salience of moral and rational economic approaches to the study of the adaptation of peasantries to worlds transformed by their incorporation into modern states and into a global economy. The author offers a refiguration of theoretical assumptions, arguing that, in order to understand the variations in modes of adaptation that have been described in the symposium, it is necessary to assume that the constraints on the worlds of peasants generated by political-economic changes are made meaningful for social action not only in terms of instrumental rationality, but also with reference to culturally distinctive moral premises.

Proto-Industrialization has been defined as a transitional phase on the way to modern, factory industrialization, characterized by “the development of rural regions in which a large part of the population lived entirely or to a considerable extent from industrial mass production for inter-regional and international markets” (Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm [KMS] 1981:6). This article will use protoindustrialization as a lens through which to reexamine a number of issues in early modern Japanese history, including the relationship between commercial agriculture and rural industry, the role of the state in economic development, and the economic geography of the late Tokugawa period. Perhaps most importantly, I hope by looking at proto-industrialization to reach a better understanding of the transition from the feudalism of the Tokugawa era to the capitalist development of the Meiji period and beyond.

One aspect of the intellectual upheaval which accompanied the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was the phenomenon of bummei kaika, “civilization and enlightenment.” Although it may be useful to think of the early Meiji years as a Japanese siècle de lumières, it is significant that the country's most progressive scholars derived their main inspiration from such contemporaneous Western social philosophies as positivism and utilitarianism, not the European enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It is natural that the proponents of bummei kaika turned for guidance to John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte rather than Diderot or Rousseau, because their goal was to expose Japan to those urbane modes of thought from abroad which would bring her to the “civilized” stage of development envisaged by European social philosophy. The means to be employed consisted of empiricism, not abstract reasoning: “what we should call the truly enlightened world,” wrote Tsuda Mamichi in 1874, “is when practical studies become popular in our country and each person attains an understanding of truth.” Similarly, Fukuzawa Yukichi took nineteenth century England, not eighteenth century France, as the model for Japan's efforts to achieve “enlightenment.”

“The horse of these islands has arrived at such a state of degeneration,” concludes a report to the Governor-general of the Philippines in 1883, “that it is useless to think of its rejuvenation, it being much easier and more convenient to create a new breed with the importation of mares and Stallions from Spain” (Raza de Caballeria de Filipinas 1883). The debate over the colonial government's attempt to improve equine bloodlines through a selected breeding program with Arab stallions in the 1880s reveals much about changing Spanish attitudes toward nature in tropical regions. Although colonialism had endured in the Philippines since 1565, it was only in the nineteenth century that Europeans began to see themselves as maladapted to settlement in the islands. The tropics were increasingly regarded as a hostile and deleterious environment, and prolonged exposure to a hot and moist climate was blamed for the poor health of individuals and a progressive degeneration of race. Yet far from having to await the advances in bacteriology and parasitology of a new century (Anderson 1995), Spaniards displayed a growing conviction as to the efficacy of their own ability to control the natural world through an understanding of the processes of acclimatization.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il can be criticized for many failings, but if one of his goals has been keeping his country in the global media spotlight, he has been wildly successful. Of course, North Korea gets this international attention for all the wrong reasons: military provocations, a clandestine nuclear program, a bankrupt economy, an atrocious record on human rights, and an eccentric if not deranged leadership. Some of the accusations leveled against North Korea in the Western media and popular press may have a basis in fact, others are more questionable. But until recently, substantive knowledge of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was notable mainly for its absence. Before the 1990s, little was written about the DPRK beyond official North Korean propaganda and its opposite, anti-North Korean propaganda from the South. Much of this has changed, both because of new sources of information (including material from North Korea's former communist allies), but more importantly because of the growing interest in the subject after South Korean democratization in the late 1980s and the first US-North Korean nuclear crisis of the early 1990s.