In recent years, several empirically based studies of blue collar and white collar Japanese workers—notably by Taira, Hazama, Marsh and Mannari, Cole, and Evans—have resulted in a substantial “revision” of our understanding of Japanese labor markets.2 These studies have disputed previous claims that Japanese workers commit themselves irrevocably to their employers and have shown that familiar economic and non-economic incentives affect marketplace behavior. Moreover, while these studies recognize the importance of paternalistic practices in shaping employment relations, they prove that these practices are not simple reflections of traditional values.

Sun Yat-sen is well known as the founder of the Hsing-chung hui (Revive China Society), but few realize the significant role played by Yang Ch'ü-yün who, for almost five years, was the first chairman of that revolutionary organization. According to one source, it was Yang who insisted on the establishment of a republican government in what is now known as the “first revolutionary attempt of Sun Yat-sen.” This article is a study of the interplay of their leadership and the Chinese revolutionary movement from 1895 to 1900.

In 1943, towards the middle of Japan's occupation of the Philippines, as the tide of war was turning, Jose P. Laurel accepted the Presidency of the Republic. Two years later, when he was under indictment for treason, he claimed that he had been forced to take that office. He maintained in his War Memoirs, supposedly written while interned in 1945 by the Americans in Japan, that his collaboration was ex necessitate re and that “forced collaboration is not collaboration. Voluntary collaboration as a means of national survival and to tide over our people to better times is not punishable.“

One of the striking differences between the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions was the Chinese use of rural bases (Soviet Areas) to capture national political control—surrounding the cities with the countryside. Remarkably, these bases, their evolution, characteristics, and role in the various intra-Party struggles remain one of the least studied or understood elements in our knowledge of Chinese Communist history.

One of the first and most pressing problems to confront Qubilai, after his election as khan in 1260, was the problem of food supply for the military and civilian population of the imperial capital. This was a problem which had plagued rulers of China long before the coming of the Mongols, ever since the rise of the lower Yangtze area as the economic center of China. During the Sui, T'ang and Northern Sung periods, a fairly adequate solution had been found in a system of waterways which, running in a northwesterly direction, carried food supplies to the nation's capitals, located far inland. This system of waterways became the lifeline of China for over five centuries. But, when Qubilai Qaqan established his administrative headquarters at the northern corner of the great Yellow Plain close by the sea, food supply again became an urgent problem and new solutions had to be found.

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.

There has always been a sizeable gap between public and national interests and needs and the capacities of a society's educational system to respond adequately thereto. Both teaching and scholarship are by their very nature conserving disciplines heavily involved with the preservation, elaboration, and passing on of a heritage of experience and knowledge acquired over great lengths of time. When one considers the degree to which our own national intellectual heritage is derived from the classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions, therefore, it is not at all surprising that our educational system should be profoundly Eurocentric in both form and content. But if it should persist in so confining a bias at a time when the central tendencies of the major technological, economic, and political developments of the past several centuries have been the compacting of global space, the convergence of cultures, and the emergence to positions of increasing salience and importance of an ever-expanding array of non-Western people, states, and interests, is this not cause for serious national concern?

Bureaucrats have historically dominated many Asian polities, and Japan is no exception. Ever since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, public servants in national ministries have enjoyed special privileges and powers. They shaped Japan's emergence as an industrial state, they collaborated with militarists to govern during the wartime era, and they presided over Japan's postwar economic ascent. Only in recent decades has a bureaucratically dominant polity in Japan come under challenge. A more organized, affluent, and demanding populace has been one force encroaching on bureaucratic influence. The other has been a long-standing, increasingly experienced, and cautiously pragmatic contingent of Liberal Democratic party (LDP) leaders and legislators.

In order to understand the current crisis in native affairs on Guam we need some knowledge of the changes that have taken place on the island since its discovery by Magellan in 1521. In the four centuries which have elapsed since discovery this small island of only 225 square miles has been the meeting place of many diverse influences from the Old World, the Americas, the Orient and the Pacific. It became a port of call for early European trans-Pacific voyagers, for the Manila galleon, and for whalers in the nineteenth century. Thus, due to certain accidents of history, we have been able to assemble a documented account of culture history and change on Guam across several hundred years, and this record is fraught with meaning as regards current problems on the island.

Recent work on Japanese politics, as presented in five representative works reviewed here is based increasingly on comparative (cross-national) frameworks of analysis. The studies allow us to consider once again the relationship between area-based (contextual) and comparative-based knowledge. This essay argues that we are further ahead in our understanding of Japanese politics if we move toward strategies of theory construction that place Japanese and comparative research in explicit juxtaposition. Arguments both for and against area-based and comparative-based explanations form the foundations of the conclusions developed.

In his provocative essay, Prasenjit Duara argues that prior to the nineteenth century, the web of maritime trade networks infused the ill-defined area we call “Asia” with a genuine coherence, providing a conduit for cultural flows that readily permitted interactive relationships and the mutual adoption of new beliefs and practices. By the late nineteenth century, however, the imperial powers sought to ensure their global dominance by creating regional blocs consisting of territories that were economically subservient to the metropole. The consequent focus on the establishment of territorial boundaries encouraged a “nationalist congruence between state and culture” that gathered pace over the next hundred years. Only now are we beginning to see an Asia where interdependence and increasing cultural contact, carrying echoes of past connectivities, have opened up new opportunities by which a “transnational consciousness” can and should be encouraged.

There is a bewildering contrast between the superficial calm of the 1930s in Indonesia and the turbulence of the immediate post-war period. In addition to the enormous upsurge of anti-colonial militance, the years following the Japanese surrender were marked by an unprecedented degree of conflict amongst Indonesians, as society adjusted to the radically changed conditions of independence. In other countries occupied by Japan, notably Burma and Malaya, ethnic animosities were also unusually overt after the war. It seemed natural to ask, as Elsbree did in his pioneering essay of 1953:

did the [Japanese] occupation, with its dissolution of existing ties, aggravate the fissures of the old order? … Did the Japanese deliberately pursue a “divide and rule” tactic, and is their policy to be held responsible for the violent outbursts and the general increase in racial tension since the end of the war?