It is not customary to associate Japan with the Crimean War yet there is a very real connection. When the Russo-Turkish conflict expanded into a general European struggle it made out of the North Pacific and the seas around Japan a new arena of friction. Until March of 1854 the fighting had been confined to the Black Sea and the Near East, but with the entrance of Great Britain and France into the war on the side of Turkey the Asiatic colonies and commercial settlements of Russia were brought within the scope of hostilities. Europe, however, continued to remain the major sphere of battle, which fact tended to eclipse the significance of events that were taking place in and around Japan. Historical treatment of the period of the Crimean War has naturally dealt with these more important phases, ignoring almost entirely the Far East.

Why are histories of colonialism and religious transformation in Southeast Asia so often told as inextricably interrelated? Why were Buddhist movements identified as both the locus for resistance to colonialism and the central means of constructing colonial modernity? Part of the reason lies in how religion served as both a European technique of colonial governmentality and a local repository of techniques for comprehending and responding to change. More than this, religion seems to have offered a multivalent medium for a variety of innovations. Pali examinations were central to Buddhist reform in colonial Burma at the turn of the twentieth century but also fomented conflicts between the colonial state and monastic factions over the purpose of language study. However, beyond such conflicts, Pali examinations proved fertile grounds for Buddhist laypeople to experiment with multiple interpretations of what Buddhist modernity might mean in Burma.

This address was intended to be and remains about global circulatory processes and the ways that human societies have sought to deploy, control, or regulate these processes. In this essay, I principally consider how nationalist ideologies regulate global circulatory processes. The parallel with the current COVID-19 crisis is evident, and my remarks do suggest some similarities. Although COVID-19 is not the topic I engage here, my theme alerts us to thinking methodologically about largely invisible or inconspicuous modes of circulation and their consequences, less dire but deeply transformative.

Rajasthan is a large, unusually diverse state in western India. It has a long frontier with Pakistan, and from north to south touches the adjacent states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat. Rajasthan adds to its own internal, social, economic, and political complexity some of the features of each of these disparate neighbors. The dominant geological feature in Rajasthan is the Aravalli range, which runs south to north through the heart of the state. This barrier almost completely arrests the already faltering summer monsoon, creating a semiarid and desert zone to the west and a more watered region in the east.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This essay explores records from Beijing's efforts to intern and reform the city's “lumpenproletariat” after 1949. Connecting these reports to central government directives about national thought reform policy, I show that reeducators and their superiors discoursed in detail about the existence of resisters, who opposed and defied the government, but whom reformatory staff explicitly labeled as non-enemies. The case of Beijing reformatories suggests that anti-state, but non-counterrevolutionary resistance was an important symbolic and rhetorical category, central to the Chinese Communist Party's articulation of its own purpose. In the context of reeducation, opposition to the party-state constituted evidence of a founding “truth”: feudal, imperialist, and capitalist oppression had so damaged the Chinese nation that only a radical and revolutionary transformation could save it. Over the course of the 1950s, reading and analyzing resistance in this way led policy makers to redefine “The People” as well as the social place of individuals accused of activities like prostitution, begging, and petty crime.

This study examines Chinese imperial polygamy under two aspects, as institution and actual practice. Institution refers to its existence as a set of rules and expectations, practice to the actual ways in which imperial people carried out polygamy as recorded in both historical and fictional sources. The key to the institutionalization of polygamy had to do with the idea that a ruler did not engage in polygamy because he wanted to, but because he had to in order to fulfill his role as Son of Heaven. He was obligated to extend the patriline and was as if following a hallowed directive. Practice had to do with what rules and expectations could not control or predict, including how a man justified his role as polygamist, his polygamous transgressions, and how he dealt with the main challenge to polygamous harmony, women's jealousy and rivalry.

Perhaps the most widely and persistently reported characteristic of Japanese organizational development in the period 1868–1945 is the pattern of behavior known as ringisei. The literature defines ringisei as a system, emerging first in the 1870's and becoming endemic after 1900, characteristic of both public and private bureaucracies in Japan. In this system of decision-making, policy was and, apparently, still is drafted at lower departmental levels by “specialists” and circulated by document or formal approval, indicated by the affixing of a seal, to successively higher levels of the administrative hierarchy. The policy thus circulated was said to become official when the document reached the minister or senior executive official and he affixed the final seal to the document. It is this pattern that is usually viewed as being synonymous with decision-making from below. This assumption appears to stem from the often repeated belief that once drafted in response to a request from superiors the document (ringisho) met only approval or stalling but never rejection on its journey through ever-higher levels of the administrative hierarchy. Analysts have consistently seen the ringisei system as a major, if not the key, factor in the civil bureaucracy's inability to innovate and as the means by which officials were able to avoid individual responsibility for decisions. The system is also often viewed as the means by which, in the pre-World War II period subordinates were able to impose policies on their superiors without being held accountable.

In Japan, as in most modern, industrial societies, medical care has become highly politicized. Doctors and patients are part of a network of relationships which include politicians, bureaucrats, and leaders of organized interest groups. The politicization of medical care is reflected in the objectives and activities of the Japan Medical Association which claims to represent the medical profession. Roughly seventy-five percent of Japanese doctors are members of the JMA. Even though it is organized along democratic lines, the national leadership under President Takemi Taro exercises considerable control over the affairs of the Association. JMA leaders accept the fact of extensive governmental involvement in medical care and die principle of compulsory, national health insurance. However, they strongly oppose the present system of health insurance and demand fundamental revision which would lead to a single, unified, community based system. They insist that such a system would be best for both doctors and patients. While the organization and activities of the JMA have a peculiar Japanese flavor, students of western politics will find much that is familiar and characteristic of associational interest groups in general.

Introducing these three critical essays on Edward Said's Orientalism† raises perplexing questions of scholarly and professional definition. In the case of the recent JAS symposium on Thomas A. Metzger's Escape from Predicament, the organizer of the group effort came to the Journal with a proposal which the editor ultimately encouraged, accepted, and brought to publication; this time the editor initiated the Said symposium himself, persuaded his colleagues to participate, and then subjected them to varying degrees of editorial suggestion before sending the whole package off to the printer. It might well be suggested that editors should stick to processing and avoid initiating; that there is a built-in conflict of interest, a potential for abuse of editorial discretion, if the editor not only decides what ought to be accepted for publication but also dabbles in what ought to be written about in the first place. As is obvious from this symposium's appearance in the Journal, I would hold that occasionally crossing the line from processing to initiating—in the case of a work like Said's, for example, which does not fall within the ordinary domain of the Journal's primary readership—can be constructive.

The Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) claimed credit for bringing democracy to Japan during the Occupation. With some exceptions, the predominant result of SCAP's activities in economic (as distinguished from political) affairs, was just the opposite. SCAP imposed comprehensive economic controls on Japan and suppressed the free market system. Its intervention was especially repressive on the international plane.

Prior to mobilization for the Pacific War, Japan had never had a planned or controlled economy. As the occupation drew to a close, SCAP authorized the Diet to pass legislation for international economic controls to be employed by successor peacetime governments. An extensive Japanese government bureaucracy with a vested interest in the perpetuation of economic controls took charge of their implementation. The economic control laws, and the bureaucracy to which they gave rise, constituted an important part of SCAP's legacy to postwar Japan. This legacy became a primary conditioning factor in Japan's subsequent resistance to economic liberalization—a source of continuing friction in relations between the United States and Japan.

How to best maintain public goods under conditions of chronic resource shortage and insufficient state administrative capacity is a challenge for nearly all developing states. This article concentrates on a range of attempted reforms in China's forestry sector in the 1990s. It first evaluates the dynamics of long-standing “leakiness” in forestry conservation initiatives. After a set of major floods in 1998, major uncertainties remained as to how to effectively implement conservation initiatives, given systemic underfunding and patchy administrative supervision from higher levels. The article then argues that higher (central and provincial) levels of the state have employed measures substantially unchanged since late imperial times: (1) the partial rationalization and extension of formal bureaucratic systems of direct control, and (2) the manipulation of moral incentives through exhortation and appeals to a complex trope of “cadre quality,” concluding that subjective notions of moral “character” in local leadership can combine with objective economic and infrastructural factors to either support or undercut central state initiatives.

Women's studies an interdisciplinary area of inquiry is a recent phenomenon in India. Some scholars view women's studies as a harmless fad; others see it as a threat to the intellectual integrity of disciplines, or at least to the male domination of faculties. Women's studies certainly questions the androcentric assumptions of many scholarly fields and seeks a greater piece of the academic pie for women scholars, but that is not the whole story. In the past decade or so, gender has joined class, race, and ethnicity as an element in theories about the major forces that shape society. Women's studies is not only concerned with changing intellectual inquiry but also with changing society itself. Scholars and activists sometimes inhabit different bodies, but by and large people who are concerned with inquiry into women's condition are also engaged in trying to change that condition.

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.