A SITUATION which cannot be described as other than bizarre reached its climax on October 14, 1944. On that day, Baron Miyagawa Tada-maro, younger brother of Prince Konoye Fumimaro, alighted at Shanghai from a Japanese army transport plane, ostensibly on business for the South Manchuria Railway. Actually, this mild-mannered little man had come to China as the representative of the Itsuyūkai , a secret organization whose aim was the achievement of peace in the “year of the bird” – 1945.

The three maps accompanying this brief text are meant to be the body of the article. They tell a major story in themselves. Railway development in Manchuria is shown graphically to have been rapid and extensive over a period of less than half a century. The rate of railway growth received exceptional impetus after the occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese in 1931, and by 1945 the total trackage of the railways in that country was estimated to be close to 13,000 kilometers as compared with 5,600 kilometers in 1931.

The six conditions for good painting set by Hsieh Ho in the fifth century a.d. were apparently the first Chinese attempt at a systematic approach to the theory of the art. Their primacy ensured them the respect of later centuries; and since they satisfied the general requirements of classical lore by being at once ancient, terse, and superficially simple about a core of mystery, they came as early as T'ang to acquire a unique weight of authority. The emphasis given them, by quotation and long discussion, in the theoretical sections of the first two grand histories of Chinese painting–Chang Yen-yüan's in the ninth century and Kuo Jo-hsü's in the eleventh–is an obvious sign of high esteem. To these instances might be added countless others, throughout the later literature of the art, in which the Six Laws or the name of their author appear in a place of honor.

Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, when the native movement in the East Indies got its start, the more extreme elements among Indonesian nationalist groups have looked to the figure of Prince Diponegoro, the early nineteenth-century mystic and leader of the native rebellion against the Dutch known as the Java War (1825–30), as a source of inspiration in their struggle for independence. Members of the nationalist movement still commemorate his death and are hailing him today as “the hero of liberty of the Indonesian people.” Many are also sympathetic to Diponegoro's old program of national purification with its emphasis upon the distinctive Hindu-Mohammedan antecedents of the Indonesian, as opposed to the “contamination” of Western civilization brought in the wake of more than three centuries of Dutch rule over the East Indian Archipelago.