This paper examines the problem of theodicy as seen by the medieval Tamil poet, Kampaṉ. God appears throughout Kampaṉ's retelling of the Rāmāyaṋa as the ideal man, Rāma, an incarnation of the great god Viṣṋu, the source of the moral law and universal order (dharma). But in the famous episode in which Rāma slays Vālin, the king of the monkeys, Kampaṉ challenges the assumption of the deity's righteousness and freedom from evil. Kampaṉ's treatment of this issue is unusual among South Indian devotional texts because of its clarity and boldness; the answers suggested by the poet lead the devotee to a recognition of the relativity of dharma and to an acceptance of a basic dimension of evil within the deity. This conclusion is seen to be consistent with the positive attitude of the South Indian theistic traditions toward mundane reality—an attitude that contrasts markedly with important elements of the classical Sanskritic tradition.

Throughout Burmese history people donated money, land, and labor to the sangha in the hope of acquiring merit and ensuring rebirth in a better existence. Each dynasty was confronted with the flow of wealth from state properties and taxable public holdings to tax-free sanghika estates. Since all religious donations were given in perpetuity, and so were cumulative, the pattern had serious economic consequences. It also posed an ideological dilemma for the monarch: while he was supposed to be the major benefactor of the Religion, the state needed these essential resources for its own survival. In order to halt this trend temporarily, or reverse it within the confines of legitimate Buddhist kingship, Burmese kings used sasana reform, a religious ritual for purifying the sangha; sasana reform was structurally related to economic factors. Although this paper is concerned primarily with Burma, evidence is provided to suggest that similar economic pressures may have been responsible for sasana reform in India, Ceylon, and Thailand.

Most studies of wartime Japan have assumed a close and complementary relationship between business and the military. This essay challenges this view by examining the complexities and tensions of wartime institutional dynamics. The lack of a monolithic industrial and political structure hindered efficient economic mobilization. This can be seen in the industrial control associations (kōgyō tōsei kai), which were intended to be the most important link between military, government, and business after 1941. Their organization and functioning reveals a three-way administrative struggle between business, military, and bureaucracy. All three power groups were internally divided over both the formulation and the implementation of policy. Japan, the epitome of government-business cooperation in the postwar era, was surprisingly divided during the war.

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.

This comment on Leon Hollerman's stimulating article on international economic controls adopted during the Occupation of Japan focuses on his thesis that a contradiction existed between SCAP's professed policy and its actions. After a brief discussion of some problems of Occupation research and the need to integrate the period more fully into Japanese and American history, the comment attempts not to challenge Hollerman's thesis but to explore it in other spheres of SCAP's activities. It is argued that the inconsistency noted by Hollerman ran through many Occupation reform policies, and that its origins are to be found in the sharp divergence of views among American policy makers in the summer of 1945 concerning pre-war Japan and Japanese militarism, and different assumptions about the extent of change necessary to achieve American objectives in the postwar period.