Sir George Bailey Sansom, who died on March 8 in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 82, was the last of the great amateurs and first among professional students of Japan in the Western world. Like Aston, Satow and Eliot, earlier pioneers of Japanese studies, he began his studies of Japan during his tenure in diplomatic posts. The long exposure and intimate knowledge of Japanese life that he received in the British Embassy in Tokyo between 1905 and 1940 provided a setting very different from contemporary academic arrangements whereby stays in Japan are reliefs from, and not the center of, professional life and activities.

After expressing his appreciation of the honour of an invitation to be the principal guest at the Annual Ceremony and his pleasure at being able to speak under the distinguished chairmanship of Lord Scarbrough, Sir George Sansom said:—

My only qualification for addressing this learned assembly is a claim to be one of the few survivors of a vanishing race, or perhaps it would be better to say a small fossilized remnant of that race.

It has become customary among many Western scholars to consider Japan as part of an East Asian cultural area, or as a participant in Chinese or Sinic civilization. In a general conception of Asian culture viewed as consisting of East Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern cultural areas dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Islamic civilizations respectively, it seems obvious that Japan belongs in the first category. Yet most Japanese scholars use another classification which would divide Asian culture into four areas: Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and—as a separate category on the same level as the other three—Japanese. Without denying the close relation to China, the Japanese scholar is apt to emphasize the unique configuration of Japanese culture which makes it in some sense sui generis. This is only one among many manifestations of the widespread feeling in Japan that Japanese culture is “unique,” and “different.” This sense of Japan's uniqueness may give rise to pride, sorrow, or a feeling of loneliness; but that it is shared by Japanese with otherwise quite varying views is itself a fact of significance.

The tardy and ineffectual response of China to the Western challenge remains one of the most significant problems confronting historians. This article attempts to shed light on one of the factors that appears to have contributed in some measure to the decline of the Chinese empire in the nineteenth century, viz., chʻing-i, or literati opinion. An initial section sketches the historical origins of chʻing-i. Then, I trace the influences that chʻing-i brought to bear on the process of policy formation during the early 1880's, when the Chinese empire fought a war with France in a vain attempt to save an imperial tributary from Western domination. Finally, I speculate upon the course the empire might have taken had not the throne—a term that here refers essentially to the Empress Dowager Tzʻu-hsi—had to tack and shift to meet the demands of chʻing-i.

The Deccan Riots of 1875 highlight the social transformations brought about in rural Maharashtra in western India during the first five decades of British rule. The riots are of special interest to the social historian since they hinged upon relations between two important and well defined rural social groups, namely, the cultivators and the moneylenders. This paper will focus on the social changes which precipitated this conflict. I shall also attempt to link these changes with the social ideals and the political objectives which inspired the new rulers of Maharashtra and determined their administrative policy.

Few contemporary poets writing in Bengali are more widely read than is Jivanananda Das. He is considered in many respects the most modern of Bengali poets, as well as the one most independent of the influence of Rabindranath Tagore. His orginality has even been considered eccentric, but another leading Bengali poet, Buddhadeva Bose, says this of him: “He is important because he has brought a new note to our poetry, a new tone of feeling, and has tuned our ears to a subtle melody drawn from apparently conventional patterns of verse, for, despite the metrical seductions of modern Bengali, he has confined himself throughout to a single metrical norm, and that the oldest. It is rather remarkable that, though metrically a hermit, he has yielded to the prose poem and made it as haunting as his verse.”

The archives of various British missionary societies, whose representatives were scattered throughout large parts of Asia in the nineteenth century and earlier, contain many manuscripts of interest and are potentially useful to the historian and social scientist. With few exceptions, however, scholars have overlooked or ignored these collections: partly because they are not centrally located; partly because they often are inchoate or lack guides; and partly because their value has not been appreciated.

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.“

When people build cities—and particularly planned cities—they intend more and do more than simply meet their practical needs. The cities they build and the cities they leave behind in archeological remains and in the pages of history dramatize for us their social order—both actual and ideal—their view of the cosmos and their place in it, their hierarchy of values. Thus, for example, Akbar's palace city of Fatehpur Sikri is more than a vainglorious display of newly-won power; its subtle blending of Hindu and Islamic elements symbolizes Akbar's dream of an ecumenical Indian order informed with tolerance and mutual respect.