The study of Russo-Japanese relations falls naturally into two parts: a period primarily of private initiative (ca. 1700 to ca. 1850) and one of government leadership (ca. 1850 to present). This is a survey of the earlier phase of Russo-Japanese contacts.

The initial reaction of the foreigner upon his first contact with Chinese law and legal system is one of frustration and noncomprehension. Those given to facile generalization are apt to declare either that China is devoid of any serious juridical tradition or that it is still in a primitive state of legal development. But both of these conclusions are clearly false since the Middle Kingdom has a long and complex legal history, and, while certain jural notions of responsibility which characterize Western law have not come into being in the East, their absence is not proof of arrested growth but merely that jural problems are envisaged in another fashion in the Sinitic body politic. The basic fact which the foreigner slowly comes to recognize is that, while the need for justice is constant in any culture, in Chinese society it is attained in a unique fashion.

During the first century of contact with the outside world, the history of Ponape has been marked by a series of violent outbreaks against Americans, Spaniards, and Germans. The causes and implications of these surprisingly effective uprisings, in which two governors of the island were killed, have become the direct concern of the American people. Ponape has been governed by the U. S. Navy since 1945, and was assigned to the United States by the United Nations in 1947 as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.

Lewis Hodous in both experience and achievement was a remarkably balanced and integrated personality. He experienced, understood, and appreciated the influence and value of three great national cultural patterns, and he united significant elements of each one in his mature outlook on human life. He combined, without internal conflict, religious devotion and scientific scholarship; while with all his keenness of mind and scientific objectivity he was persistently concerned in generous and kindly relations with individual persons. In achievement he was an effective and distinguished Christian missionary in China, a notable teacher of religions in America, and an outstanding Sinologist, contributing greatly to the development of Chinese and Asiatic studies in the United States.