Among the various issues surrounding Japan's economy, three types are prominent in recent literature: issues concerning the magnitude and measurement of Japan's economic growth; issues concerning Japan's economic structure, behavior, and performance; and issues concerning the nature of Japan's relations with the United States. In the second and third categories, many of the issues, directly or indirectly, have to do with the liberalization of the Japanese economy—in either its internal or external sectors. With regard to policy issues, adversary positions are typically adopted. However, they also emerge in discussions of nonpolicy issues, such as those regarding quantification and measurement. The disagreements among the experts provide a useful point of departure for further research and analysis.

Recent work on Japanese politics, as presented in five representative works reviewed here is based increasingly on comparative (cross-national) frameworks of analysis. The studies allow us to consider once again the relationship between area-based (contextual) and comparative-based knowledge. This essay argues that we are further ahead in our understanding of Japanese politics if we move toward strategies of theory construction that place Japanese and comparative research in explicit juxtaposition. Arguments both for and against area-based and comparative-based explanations form the foundations of the conclusions developed.

Four recent studies of the modern Chinese economy show how the disciplines of economics and history have produced different judgments about the economic changes of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. These differences are overridden, however, by shared disciplinary concerns with problems of inequality and the growth of the modern state. Economists have demonstrated statistically that regional variations (particularly urban-rural differences), coupled with the size of the Chinese polity, continue to pose many of the same administrative problems for the modern state that they posed during the late empire and in turn have produced some similar strategies for ruling. These enduring problems are located squarely in the order of production in China's agrarian peasant communities and in the logistical problems of distributing what is produced there through an integrated political and economic system.

A major shortcoming in much Western writing about recent events in Indo-China is that the inhabitants of the region are seen as objects of policy rather than as subjects of history. Focusing in this, way leaves out much of the picture and demeans the inhabitants of Indo-China who are largely responsible, after all, for defeating France and the United States. A number of the books reviewed here take a sympathetic insider's view of U.S. intervention in the region and try to approach the war objectively but still have an American focus. One book is a systematic attack on U.S. behavior in Cambodia since 1970. Finally a recently published collection of documents will be indispensable to students of the war, partly because it pays close attention to Vietnamese as well as American decisions.

Korea's historical roles as a cultural intermediary and military buffer between China and Japan have been frequently noted, yet as the exhibition “5,000 Years of Korean Art” makes apparent, Korea is also a nation whose distinctive social history Korea's historical roles as a cultural intermediary and military buffer between China and Japan have been frequently noted, yet as the exhibition “5,000 Years of Korean Art” makes apparent, Korea is also a nation whose distinctive social history fostered an equally distinctive art history. Although Korea's arts have repeatedly incorporated influences emanating from China and elsewhere, these influences have always been modified by the unique historical conditions prevailing on the peninsula. It follows, therefore, that the objects appearing in the exhibit—and in its comprehensively illustrated catalogue—can fruitfully be viewed both as lessons in history and essays in art.