Confucian historians presented the first succession struggle (in 945) of the Koryŏ Dynasty as simply an abortive usurpation attempt by Wang Kyu (the influential father-in-law of King Hyejong [r. 943–945]), thwarted by the timely intervention of the king's two half-brothers, Princes Yo and So, with military backing from Wang Singnyom of the P'yongyang Regional Military Command (Tae-doho Pu). The traditional account depicted the princes as archetypal protectors who safeguarded the legitimacy of royal succession, thereby placing the responsibility for the bloody struggle solely on the alleged villain, Wang Kyu. Such a treatment was apparently derived from a politically motivated moralistic interpretation intended to impart a lesson to posterity in the tradition of Confucian historiography. In the traditional account, therefore, the issues typically advanced were those best fitted to orthodox Confucian themes: legitimacy in royal succession, and loyalty to the throne. Factors incompatible with these themes were suppressed or perforce left unexplained, resulting in an account containing inconsistencies and gaps, which—surprisingly—went unchallenged until modern times.

“In order to decide whether one can speak of a caste system in a society, one must ask: are status and power completely dissociated, can one find the equivalent of a Brahman/Ksatriya relationship? This question, though it may appear improper, has the virtue of immediately fixing a limit to Indian influence in South-East Asia. Important as this influence has been from the cultural and even social point of view, it would seem, roughly speaking, that nowhere in Indochina and Indonesia has the king been dispossessed of his religious prerogatives.”

This claim concerns the important question of the degree to which the Indian caste system can be, or has been, exported—a question that elicits deep-rooted and contentious problems inhering in our understanding of the nature of the caste system itself. Two propositions may here be identified and distinguished. The first is that, in India, kings—however powerful politically—did not formally possess religious or ritual authority; whereas in Indochina, however weak they were, kings formally possessed religious as well as political prerogatives. This is the contention cited above. The second is that, the first being true, it is also true that in Indochina kings possessed and exercised a degree of real control over social organization, by virtue of their ritual position (which was foreign to India): they were social engineers. In brief, they were oriental despots. The first proposition does not entail the second, but the two tend to go together; many writers have shown an inclination to accept the second, sometimes on the evidence of the first, sometimes on the evidence of facts about Indochinese kingdoms.

Perhaps the first question should be “Why?” Why transport a critical apparatus heavily laden with paradoxical factions and conflicting terminology back a millennium to the Chinese genre known as cbuana? And why a genre study, when so much groundwork is still necessary before Chinese literature can begin to demand for itself a larger consideration in general contemporary literary criticism? To attend to the second query first, genre studies are essential now for two reasons: 1) because genres evolve much more readily than their designations, and 2) because they are so basic to a reader's (and thus a critic's) approach to a work. Misunderstandings of the diachronic changes of what a generic title may include have led to useless critiques, the most notable case being perhaps that of Henry James and Fielding. In reply to the question of why a structural approach, the answer is less definitive.

Severe urban rioting, the accompaniment of an organized political agitation known as the Nav Nirman (Reconstruction) movement, gripped the Indian state of Gujarat in early 1974, bringing to a violent climax social and political discontents from beneath a surface tranquility. Costly in lives and property and damaging to the political fabric of Gujarat, the ten-week-long agitation subsided only after winning two political objectives: first, the expulsion of the Chief Minister and imposition of President's Rule; and second, dissolution of the Gujarat legislative assembly. Resisted by the central government, the overthrow in Gujarat was an embarrassment to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and was a factor leading to the declaration of national emergency in June 1975. Gujarat's recent troubles have a background in the 1969 national split of the Congress party, but the immediate issues of Nav Nirman were food scarcity, rising prices, corruption in governing circles, and grievances in the educational system. These issues were seized upon by college students, who sparked the riots and who thereafter provided the most visible leadership of the movement.

In recent years the glitter of modern economic growth has been dulled, as more attention has been focused upon the attendant dislocations and negative aspects that have accompanied it. One area that has received little attention, especially from economists, is crime. Many writings of criminologists suggest that crime is a negative attribute that accompanies economic growth, for levels of affluence and crime seem to move upward together. A pattern similar to that observed in other modern countries was reported for Japan in 1966 by Professors DeVos and Mizushima.

What relationship should be expected between growth and crime? The usual economic theories of criminal behavior, with crime a declining function of an individual's ability to obtain legal income, would seem to argue for a negative relationship. However, crime is also related to the potential for ill-gotten gains; thus, it might be expected to at least keep pace with levels of income, or perhaps surpass them. This paper represents an attempt to provide some answers to these issues by explaining some of the complex interplay between factors involved in labor market improvement and the degree of criminal activity in Japan.

This study of the East Asian collections in American libraries in 1975 provides new data on the current status of resources, growth rate, geographical distribution, acquisitions, cataloging, personnel, fiscal support, unit capabilities and cost, use patterns, and services. The analysis is based on information from ninety-three libraries, including twenty-two not previously reported.

Of the collections in this survey, eighty-nine are located in the United States, three in Canada, and one in Mexico. About one-half of them were established before, the other half since, 1960 (Table 1). Sixty-six of the collections are in university and college libraries, six in federal libraries, seven in public libraries, and fourteen in museum and special libraries. The size of the collections varies from a few thousand to as many as over a million volumes—with 11 having over 200,000 volumes; 5 between 100,000 and 200,000 volumes; 43 between 10,000 and 100,000 volumes; and 34 under 10,000 volumes. The incorporation of East Asian materials in branches of public libraries is a new trend, primarily for providing materials in vernacular languages to minority groups in the local community.

In July 1976, slightly more than five years after the collapse of the 1971 insurrection in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), the protracted series of trials of alleged insurgents wound to a conclusion. Except for the cases of a small number of suspects not in custody, some of whom are probably dead, and a handful of cases the disposition of which was postponed, the complex and painful process of determining guilt and imposing punishments for the armed rebellion had come to an end. The uprising that erupted on 5 April 1971 had been staged by an organization called the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna QVP), which had been formed five years earlier as a revolutionary movement by a small clique of young dissidents who had broken away from the tiny pro-Peking Communist Party, but which by 1970 had attracted a significant following among rural Sinhalese Buddhist youths.

The long-awaited English-language publication of Maruyama's famous study is a major event for scholars of Tokugawa Japan. Those of us engaged in teaching Toku-gawa intellectual history have often known a malaise and even frustration which this work will ease considerably. Faced with English-language material that is sparse and often of limited usability, communicating the richness or simply a sense of the vitality and development of Tokugawa thought to students who know no Japanese often becomes a problem. This work, however, opens for them the possibility of new levels of sophisticated analysis and discussion.

For over three decades now this seminal work, consisting of three long essays written between 1940 and 1944, has dominated Tokugawa intellectual studies. As the translator, Mikiso Hane, rightly suggests, Maruyama's stature in this field is comparable to the place occupied in Tokugawa thought by the main figure of his work, Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728). Just as Sorai is seen as the “discoverer of politics,” Ma-ruyama can be regarded as the pioneer of intellectual history in Japan, especially of political thought.