This paper explores the contradictory discourses on manners, safety and emotion that arose with mass motorization in Japan in the 1960s and which continue through the present. It documents the way in which multiple government entities end up working at cross-purposes in their attempts to cultivate safer drivers and slow the epidemic of traffic accidents. On the one hand, the discourse on driving manners suggests a widespread embrace of the Traffic Bureau's and other government agencies' concern with safety. On the other hand, the emphasis on manners may lead to angrier driving, which promotes accidents according to psychological studies of driving. The picture that emerges is one in which attempts at social control are complicated by the often unpredictable emotional reactions of subjects caught in a web of institutional and ideological processes. By exploring the relationship of emotion to driving school curricula and the discourse on manners, this article extends previous studies of self, social control, and social management in Japan.

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.

It is reasonable to assume that Kaga han, in view of its size, large rice and other exports, and central coastal location, provided the lion's share of ships and shipowners operating in the Japan Sea during the two centuries before Perry. Villagers were going from Noto to North Honshu and Hokkaido both for temporary occupation and for permanent residence in the mid-seventeenth century and diereafter; and some of these emigrants became useful Kaga han trade agents. Moreover, transport of rice and salt respectively to Tsuruga and Echigo from Noto villages early in the Tokugawa period can be documented. Kaga han needed an all-water route to Osaka because of the high cost of transshipping rice by land from Tsuruga to Osaka. This may have been the main reason for the development in the latter part of the seventeenth century of nishi mawari, the route for ships going from the Japan Sea through the Inland Sea.

This article critiques the HIID-KDI eight-volume Studies in the Modernization of the Republic of Korea from the perspective of Korean studies. The Studies' critical contributions to the field are the comprehensiveness of treatment, wealth of data, and disciplinary sophistication of the analyses they present of the principal economic and demographic phenomena of Korea's development after the Korean War and especially after 1961. The overall weakness of the Studies is their inadequate treatment of Korean history, culture, and society in relation to development, despite their great emphasis on the developmental importance of certain cultural phenomena in Korea. Their usefulness, both from the perspective of development studies and from the perspective of Korean studies, would have been enhanced by examining additional questions concerning industrial organization, labor, and the role of the military, as well as by more thorough and knowledgeable analysis of the historical, cultural, and social basis of Korea's modern development.

The present article will analyze some of the major currents in the study of Chinese culture in terms of functioning communities. We will turn, first, to works of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, showing why these accounts, no matter how well done, were not community studies. We shall then turn successively to the pioneer scientific work on Chinese communities, the social surveys, and to the several published community studies which are largely anthropological in their organization and execution. The second section of this paper deals with the methodology of modern community studies in China and discusses problems of field method and of topical organization and interpretation. In a third section the emphasis rests upon subdisciplinary specializations, e.g., economic, sociological, psychological and so on. In this case, the term “subdisciplinary” is used because, with certain notable exceptions, the specialist work has been carried on within a broader anthropological approach. In this section we will attempt to outline what has been done, and to point out the most significant gaps that remain.

It is impressive how, in Prasenjit Duara's essay, Asian regions are understood and presented—in the breadth of the world, not as objects with sharp edges, or compact entities of cultures, economies, and politics, not as blocks of which the present and the global so often are still thought to be made. Reading Duara's essay, I was made to think of the celebrated Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki's current grand plan for Singapore, the epitome of Asia today, a design conceived not as a space made of buildings, offices, and flats, not of blocks, but of flows—bridges and flyovers, “links,” as Maki calls them. These links are there as the most powerful part of the whole, making the city-state space by cutting through it, over the blocks, and along them. The links are empowered to make everything in the city-state to face the open, and to move into the open. A skeptic, of course, may ask, “into what open?” Indeed, the “links” of Singapore, at least those already in action, often lead from offices, flats, and blocks into one mega-supermarket and then into another.

Each of the three following articles concerns gifts. Although written independently of each other and dealing with significantly different topics, they have been brought together here because their common attention to the practice of giving encourages comparative reflection on a subject of considerable scholarly interest.

Every religious system in Nepal, including that of the Tamang, is multifaceted and has numerous practitioners. Without apparent contradiction, western Tamang simultaneously engage Buddhist lamas who preside over elaborate rites of death, sacrificial lambu who propitiate chthonic divinities and exorcise harmful agents, and shamanic bombo who recapture lost shadow souls, revive life-force, unveil an enigmatic divine, and reveal. Interpretations of religion in Nepal have treated divergent ritual strands as isolates, and there is a persistent image of the religious situation in Nepal as an amalgam of Hindu, Buddhist, and indigenous strands. This article, which ends with a Tamang myth about diverse ritual strands, concludes that particular ritual practices must be interpreted with reference to their relations to other strands in an encompassing ritual field. The field, though, need not be coherent and unified, as has often been assumed in culture theory. The ritual structure of the Tamang emerges as a variant of other ritual systems found throughout Nepal and in greater South and Southeast Asia.

The Confucian system of thought, society, and government has a long JL history in Korea. Knowledge of some of its forms can be traced in the earliest days of our real knowledge of the peninsula. For many centuries, its influence on Korea was continuous but not pervasive. With the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, its influence on government and society began to be decisive and, especially from the sixteenth century on, it dominated almost completely the thought and philosophy of the peninsula, continuing to do so until the opening of the present century. So closely were Confucianism and Korea intertwined during this latter long period, that Korean history cannot be understood without Confucianism while the study of Confucianism itself will be greatly enriched by resort to its Korean experience.

In a 1926 article Wada Sei criticized the chronology of early Ming history given in the Ming T'ai-tsu shih-lu and other official sources. His conclusions have won general acceptance. Wada based his revisions on the Chi-shih-lu of Yu Pen, a lost work surviving only in fragmentary quotation. Recently, a more extensive text of the latter has come to light, and internal analysis of the longer text shows that its chronology is too confused for any of the Chi-shih-lu to be reliable as a corrective to the official sources. This removes the evidential basis for Wada's revised chronology, and requires the substitution for it of the order of events given in the Ming T'ai-tsu shih-lu.

Harry benda's association with Asian studies stemmed from bitter accident, for he had been of a Prague Jewish family; when Hitler took over Czechoslovakia, his father arranged for Harry's exodus by getting him a job in a Dutch trading firm in the East Indies. A brother was the only other member of the family to escape death under Nazi rule. In Java, Benda settled down to learn the life of a European merchant, but he had too lively a mind to be content with latter-day colonial society. He saw the remnants of a great indigenous tradition around him, and the stirrings of a new life; he began to meet scholars who were interested in Indonesian culture and from them developed a broad intellectual interest in the people of Java. Many of these intellectuals vanished into concentration camps with the coming of the Japanese; and in 1943 Benda joined them, when the Japanese decided to intern Jews. For many of those intellectuals who survived the camps, the experience was a time of learning and reorientation; so also for Benda, whose interest in Indonesian society deepened into the determination to pursue its study as a career.

On May 18, 1948, the Archivist of the United States accessioned from the Foreign Documents Branch of the Central Intelligence Agency a collection of over 30,000 volumes of official records which had been seized in Japan by the United States government. Known as the “World War II collection of seized enemy records: Japan,” these volumes now form part of record group 242 and occupy some 3,450 cubic feet of space in the War Records Division of the National Archives. Being in good condition and unrestricted, they form basic sources for any study of modern Japanese military history. They are one of the largest bodies of primary Japanese materials on any subject available in the United States and can be expected to shed light also on various phases of Japan's modern social, economic, political, and diplomatic development.

Mainstream media faces challenges in developed democracies like never before. On one hand, seemingly “free” digital (including social media) options are eroding the market for print drastically. Ads are not so much shifting from print to digital, but apparently simply disappearing. In the face of the pressures stemming from changing economics of the news business—which still has to be gathered at great expense, even if it can be distributed or shared by third parties practically for free (denying the gatherers their share of revenue)—one now encounters a new form of threat that is more political and cultural, namely, “fake news” and state and nonstate actors who wield it to undermine the public's trust in traditional media or news sources.

The concept of political culture was formulated in the postwar period as a way of bringing human motivation more sharply into account in cross-cultural analyses of behavior. A persistent difficulty, however, has involved validating its theoretical premises and methodological criteria. So frustrating has this problem proved to be that many have relegated political culture to a residual category of explanation. Indeed, a major reason for the popularity of the rational-actor paradigm is its effort to circumvent these difficulties by utilizing a value-maximizing dimension for motivation.

Since well before the symposium on Sinology and the Social Sciences, carried in this journal more than a decade ago, modernization theory has provided a key theoretical orientation for many Western students of China. Immanuel Wallerstein has launched a major frontal attack on modernization theory and has proposed an alternative of considerable interest to those of us studying late imperial and modern China. Indeed, “Wallersteinism” is becoming something of a major academic growth industry. Wallerstein's perspective is not without problems, but his views deserve fuller exposure in the China field because of their implications for the study of change in Chinese society.

One of the most striking facts about the history of modern Vietnam has been the persistent strength of the communist movement. In part, of course, this strength must be attributed to the organizational abilities of the communists themselves. But it might also be said that it is a testament to the weakness of the more moderate elements within the nationalist movement. Resistance to French control has a long history in Vietnam, dating back to the original conquest in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet only after the Second World War, when the communist-dominated Vietnam Independence League (Vietminh) led resistance to French authority, did a movement of truly national proportions arise in the country. By their leadership of the Vietminh, the communists became the most potent political force within the nationalist movement. By contrast, non-Marxist parties were consistently plagued by political factionalism and lack of unity, a reality that has been a major contributing factor to the contemporary tragedy in that country today.