American military bases and the protests they have elicited have had a major impact on Japanese political culture. But after the end of the formal Occupation, and outside the territory immediately affected, the cultural consequences of the U.S. military presence are much less clear. This article offers a synthetic analysis that integrates diplomatic and social history and relates the strategies of U.S. policymakers to those of anti-base activists. It shows how much the base system has changed over time and how protests have long focused on the same issues, especially sex work and sexual violence, territorial disputes, and nuclear weapons. In each case, Washington and Tokyo worked together to insulate Japanese society, which made it easier for Japanese men and women to tolerate the bases and easier for U.S. servicemen to live within them.

In 1915, riots broke out in the British colony of Ceylon, the climax of a controversy between Sinhalese Buddhists and a new clement among the commercial “Moors” (Muslims). A court ruling disappointing to the Buddhists, combined with economic complaints against Moors in this centenary of British conquest, led to a communal clash in Kandy during Wesak (Buddha's birthday) in May 1915. During the following two weeks, the riots spread to Colombo and along the west coast, greed increasingly matching creed as a prime motive.

The colonial government reacted slowly, allowing disorder to spread, and then changed to a policy of heavy repression of a presumed anti-British uprising at a time the Empire was fighting for survival.

Three months of martial law ensued, more deaths caused by police and military action than had occurred during the actual riots. Prominent citizens were arrested without cause. Shoot-on-sight orders were issued, and over 8000 were arrested and imprisoned. This colonial maladministration reflected the gap between officialdom and the colonial peoples. Little evidence of a general plot against government came to light. Since, however, headmen, monks and traders had planned anti-Moor action, especially in coastal areas, the question of conspiracy remains unsettled.

The 1915 Riots in Ceylon seriously undermined Ceylonese confidence in British justice, led to peaceful mass protests and a mission to London, and stimulated the maturation of nationalism, with independence as its objective.

I Am the joker in the pack—not simply for the obvious reason that I am not an American, but also, and much more significantly, because I have no right to sit on a platform with people learned in Sinology. That I have been invited to join them says a great deal about American broadmindedness and something too about the underdeveloped state of Chinese studies in my own country. But in a way my disabilities qualify me: I am doubly an outsider (maybe that was why I was asked) and can therefore be relied on to be biased. Prejudice is a condition for argument.

Narendranath Bhattacharya, later known as M. N. Roy, was in his youth a devoted revolutionary and lieutenant to a famous Bengali revolutionary leader, Jatin Mukherjee. A description of the revolutionary career of Roy is useful and appropriate for several reasons. First, Roy is one of the few revolutionary Bengalis about whom interesting data is available. Second, Roy followed a pattern oft-repeated among Bengali political workers during the twentieth century: from terrorist and insurrectionary activity to Communism and then open Congress work. Third, both the data collected about Roy and some of his own writings give graphic pictures of two important features of Bengali revolutionary politics: the dal or faction and the dādā or leader of such a group.

The socio-religious songs composed in village Bengal by the adherents of the mystical sect known as the Bāuls are of great interest to students of folk music and poetry, but they are of no less interest to a student of the history of the religions of Bengal. In his songs, the Bāul expresses his religious beliefs and experience, his view of life and of the world, his thoughts and emotions. They are his only form of worship; there is no treatise embodying the doctrines and practices of this sect. It is only in his songs that we can get a glimpse of what a Bāul is and what he believes in. Famous for their spontaneity of expression and charm of melody, their rustic language and imagery, these songs clearly bring out the various themes that together form the general body of Bāul thought. And there are threads of many religious traditions: tantric; Sahajiyā—both Buddhist and Vaiṣṇava; and Ṣūfī.

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.

It is now more than twenty years ago that I was first introduced to the Urdu ghazal —the classical Urdu lyric—and found with something like dismay that there was almost nothing about it which I understood and liked. This was not because I had not an adequate command of the language. I had begun speaking Urdu in 1942, and from about 1945 had acquired some competence in the language of prose literature. Nor was it because I was not moderately well read in the love poetry of various cultures and civilizations, from Sappho and Catullus to Shakespeare and Burns, not to speak of later poets. But this was a new, strange experience. From that day to this I have been convinced that to understand and appreciate the ghazal is the most difficult task that confronts the modern Western student of Urdu literature; and as my own understanding increased I have become equally convinced that this is a task which, once accomplished, brings the greatest reward. Such conclusions of my own about the ghazal as I have put into writing fall short of a comprehensive study of the form, and I have never entirely ceased to hope that others more knowledgeable than I would, either in Urdu or in English, write something in which one would find at least most of the answers to the major problems which the ghazal presents to us who study it with the values of the modern West. Hitherto this hope has not been realized, and for that reason I now attempt to set out my own views—spurred on, I should confess, by Muhammad Sadiq's judgement in his History of Urdu Literature (Oxford University Press, 1964)—the latest, longest, and (so far) best history in English—that the ghazal stands “very low in the hierarchy of literary forms” (p. 19). This judgment could hardly be more completely opposed to my own.

This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.

The Vietnamese story about the arrival of Buddhism and the building of the first Buddhist temples in what is now northern Vietnam contains no distinctively Buddhist content, but rather is a tale of thaumaturgy, the worship of trees and of rocks, and rainmaking. This essay analyzes the textual history of the story, which is dated in the early third century CE. It examines the names of the two major protagonists of the story and, although the names were later absorbed into the Sinitic literary tradition, this study proposes a Tamil Hindu origin for them. One is reminded of the trade route that connected India and China along the coasts of Southeast Asia at that time; the evidence of Brahmans from India in early Southeast Asia, including northern Vietnam; and evidence of Hindu elements in Vietnamese texts.

As Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Japanese occupation was a decisive factor in the shaping of political developments in Indonesia after 1945. It is indeed probable that the impact of those eventful forty months was greater in Indonesia than in Burma and the Philippines, both of which countries had progressed further toward autonomy and self-rule under Western colonial rule than had the Netherlands Indies. It is certainly no coincidence that Japan granted “independence” to these areas during 1943, while in Indonesia a guarded promise of the distant goal of such independence came only as the result of the adverse course of the Pacific War in the latter part of 1944, when Allied landings in Indonesia appeared a probability. It was not until September of that year that, on instructions from Tokyo, the military administration on Java took steps which facilitated the ultimate success of the nationalist revolution in Indonesia. An examination of Japanese policies during the early months of the occupation of Java, the center of Indonesian political life then and now, leaves little doubt that the fate of Indonesia would have been far different had Japan continued victorious in the war.

A former part of the Qing Empire, Taiwan was colonized by Japan in 1895 and returned to China, upon Tokyo's defeat, in 1945. Two years later, a revolt broke out against the mainland Chinese authorities and was brutally crushed. This episode, known as the February 28 Incident, has been at the center of memory wars in Taiwan since democratization. Historical accounts have tended to focus on the background causes of the Incident and on the role played by the Taiwanese elite. This article argues that devoting more attention to grassroots participants and their repertoire of action can shed new light on the events. During World War II, many young Taiwanese were mobilized in the Japanese army and paramilitary structures. This experience persisted in collective memory after Japan's defeat. During the revolt, young Taiwanese spontaneously “remobilized” the repertoire of actions and symbols formed during the war, with important consequences.

This article attempts an assessment of the putative similarities between generic fascism and the revolutionary nationalism of Sun Yat-sen. Whatever characteristics the two ideologies have in common can be traced to similarities between Sun's thought and pre-Fascist Italian Nationalism. The latter was only one of the elements that contributed to Italian Fascism. A distinction is then drawn between Sun's ideology and that of the Italian Nationalists by identifying the latter nationalism as “exacerbated.” Further distinctions are attempted between such nationalisms and the mature ideology of Italian Fascism. Italian Fascism is viewed as a subspecies of revolutionary nationalism, while revolutionary nationalism itself is understood to include a relatively pacific and potentially democratic species and an exacerbated, potentially authoritarian one.

The history of “area studies” as an academic discipline remains to be written. When it is, it will have to begin with a little known, historically important Japanese institution in China. That institution, Tōa Dōbun Shoin (East Asia Common Culture Academy or, after 1939, College) in Shanghai, 1900–1945, was established to train young Japanese for business and government service related to China. The author focuses upon the area studies dimensions of this pioneering institution's training and research program. After identifying five requisites of area studies training and research, he moves on to examine the origins, raison d'être, and meaning of Tōa Dōbun Shoin's program and to chart the phases of that program's development through each of the five requisites. In important ways, the center's curriculum, facilities, research, and publications equalled or surpassed the best American post–World War II language and area programs.

The ch'ing dynasty (1644–1911) was the last and most successful of the dynasties of alien rule in China. “The key to its success,” noted Professor Ping-ti Ho, “was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization.” The integration of the Manchu ruling class with their Chinese subjects was most striking in staffing the bureaucracy. Unlike preceding alien dynasties, the Manchus over the course of 268 years of rule shared a good proportion of key offices with Chinese. The system of dual appointments of Manchus and Chinese operated in the capital, while Chinese dominated the local officialdom.

In the years that followed the overthrow of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1911, China was ruled by military men who set up virtually independent governments in the various provinces. This inquiry into the policies of Yen Hsi-shan, governor of die north-western province of Shansi between 1911 and 1930, has been undertaken in the hope that a study of one of these warlords will result in a broader understanding of war-lordism as a political phenomenon and in this way illuminate further the whole subject of regional government in China during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Ruling large expanses of terrain, imperial Chinese state-builders deployed bureaucratic resources sparingly, explicitly defining administrative priorities for county-level jurisdictions. Supported by primary evidence from the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), this article investigates where exactly the empire placed its priorities, what their effect was, and how rational the system was. The empire's priorities were the product of manmade spatial organization, defying macro-regional center-periphery divides, patterns debated in past issues of this journal. Moreover, even when priorities were biased, outdated, and manipulated, they had tangible effects on local state presence, creating distinct bureaucratic spheres: the many non-prioritized routine counties tended to have smaller governments with more first-time magistrates, whereas priority counties typically had bigger governments led by magistrates who were chosen in a deliberative yet corruptible process. The construction and uses of the empire's mental map demonstrates the merits and vicissitudes accompanying the still ongoing Chinese practice of differentiated local government.

Responding to recent critical reflection on the concept of anuvāda within the fields of translation studies and South Asian literary cultures, this article explores the complex colonial mediations shaping modern Bengali understandings of the term. The goal is to situate the production of new meanings of anuvāda within the zone of the Dubash, a phrase used here to conjure the highly mediated space of vernacular translation as practiced by Bengali intellectuals under colonial rule. This article argues that if we wish to employ anuvāda as a tool for rethinking the meaning and practice of translation, we must first attend to the processes that transformed the norms and goals of textual transmission in the colonial era. In the end we can hope not only to enrich our understanding of South Asian translational practices but also to appreciate the role played by translation in the story of literary modernity in Bengal.