My main concern in this article is with statistics relating to such basic matters as the sizes of farm-holdings, the output and yield of crops, household income and expenditure, occupational statistics, cattle ownership, the sizes of villages, etc.—though I shall also range more widely. While the distinct and professional field of demographic statistics is necessarily outside my scope, I shall criticize some features of the Karnataka population census.Although since 1953 most of my fieldwork has been undertaken in the West African countryside, I am obliged to take most of my examples of bad statistics from south India, since West African statistics, which were never abundant, are now scantier than ever. Throughout my discussion I take it for granted that the lack of reliable statistics gravely impairs our understanding of the working of tropical rural economies.

Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) stands at the forefront of those thinkers in Japanese history who are attracting the greatest attention today. When the work entitled Motoori Norinaga, a study of Norinaga's thought and method of scholarship written by the eminent literary critic, Kobayashi Hideo, was published in 1977, its sales triggered substantial journalistic comment, especially because the book was widely read even among those outside the academic community, such as mid-level business executives. At roughly the same time, there also appeared academic studies by several other scholars. Furthermore, while collections of Norinaga's works appeared three times prior to the end of the second world war (1901–03, 1924–27, and 1943–44, the last incomplete), a new large-scale collection totaling 23 volumes and including diaries, letters, and other related materials, as well as his published works, has been in publication since 1968, and is now nearing completion.

Widely recognized as a leading writer of prose fiction, Kurahashi Yumiko (b. 1935) produced several early works permeated by stark modernist imagery, then combined this approach with an imaginative drawing upon the ancient prose narrative tradition. She thus developed a unique style which has been characterized as a fantasy that ‘relies for its powerful effects upon a kind of imagination that does not so much engage in romanticizing … as lay things bare with shocking candor and with a cynicism comparable to [that of] an anatomist at [an] autopsy.This attribution of cynicism to her works undoubtedly derives from the author's dispassionate treatment of various kinds of heightened sexuality, including trading sexual partners and the practice of incest. Kurahashi's unusual ‘kind of imagination’ also encompasses the portrayal of contemporary situations suffused with many attitudes and values expressed in the early prose narratives which mirror the court tradition of ancient Japan. One of the earliest works, The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari c. 1015? by Lady Murasaki Shikibu), seems to have exerted a strong influence on Kurahashi's recent novel, A Floating Bridge of Dreams (Yume no ukihashi, 1970). Kurahashi is likely to have been attracted to The Tale of Genji not only because it is the first important long narrative written by a woman, but also because this complex and beautiful work has long been held in esteem as the greatest narrative in Japanese literature, and has been accorded the same stature as The Divine Comedy or Don Quixote. The following essay considers the ways that Kurahashi's novel adapts the Japanese classical literary legacy, and explores the potential of this inheritance to act as a framework for describing contemporary experience.

A curious and as yet little discussed phenomenon of the Edo period is the immense increase among ordinary lay people in journeys of pilgrimage. From the middle of the seventeenth century people of all classes, alone and in groups, began to make their way in ever larger throngs to the Ise Shrines, to Kōyasan, to Zenkōji, to Fujisan, and to the various circuits of thirty-three places dedicated to Kannon and the eighty-eight places dedicated to Kōbō Daishi.

Long ago in my early reading on Japanese literature and thought—I think I was studying G. W. Knox and A. Lloyd in their essays in Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan—the name of Fujiwara Seika was mentioned as that of the founder of a movement of great historical importance. But until very recently the history of Japanese culture has not aroused much interest, and the local neo-Confucianism tended to be seen as a pretty poor reproduction of the Chinese models. This assessment of Japanese culture in such modest terms was accompanied by the standardized conception that saw in Shushigaku nothing more meaningful than an instrument of power in the hands of the Tokugawa family, a kind of intellectual build-up stimulated and protected merely because it served to prop up the régime that Ieyasu had founded, and to organize support for it.

As an aspect of the Kansei Reforms at the end of the eighteenth century initiated by the Councilor of the Elders, Matsudaira Sadanobu, the Tokugawa bakufu officially took over the administration of the Shōheikō (The Confucian University in Edo). The Shōheikō had been operated as a private school by the Hayashi family, who held the hereditary position of education councilors to the bakufu. With the expansion of the faculty and facilities under the new administration, ways were opened even for the children of any domain retainer and for those of peasants and merchants.

The formal, authoritarian organization of people with similar occupations or interests has been a feature of Japanese society throughout its history. As such, it must be of interest for its own sake and, no less perhaps, for the indications it can provide of the nature of Japanese society as a whole.