Recent developments in Korean archaeology, especially the discovery of well-preserved rice grains in clear archaeological contexts, have caused a reassessment of the timing, distribution, causes, and effects of the beginning of rice agriculture in Korea. Kim puts the rice discoveries in historical perspective, discusses details of the recent evidence, and explores possible diffusion routes based on the new data. Choe focuses on semi-lunar knives—the agricultural tools believed to be associated with rice cultivation. The typology of the knives and the distribution and chronology of the types are used to propose a diffusion route directly into Korea from North China. Nelson examines the cultural changes from the preceding Chŭlmun period when rice grains and semi-lunar knives are found. Mechanisms to explain the change are proposed as hypotheses. Comments on the papers disclose an agreement on the likelihood of a northern diffusion route, but no consensus on the cultural processes.

This paper is a preliminary study of Kim Yuka, a seventeenth-century reformer and statesman, and his role in the introduction of the tribute tax reform in the two southern provinces of Ch'ungch'ŏng and Chŏlla. It is also intended as a case study of one aspect of the actual operation of seventeenth-century Yi government. Special attention is paid to the inter-relationship between the mode of operation of the Yi government and Kim Yuk's reform efforts.

When George Coedes writes a book on Southeast Asia, it is an event in the history of that region; for, in a lifetime spent in Indochina, he has come to be considered as one of the all-time authorities on that part of the world. His connection with l'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient has covered more than 40 years, and in his capacity as epigraphist it has been his task to decipher and translate the inscriptions of Champa and Cambodia — Sanskrit, Cham, Khmer, and Pali — and to fix the place of each in history; which inscriptions he has published, generally in the Bulletin of that institution under the title of “Etudes Cambodgiennes,” but also in other journals and in collections. During the twelve years (1918–30) when he was loaned to Siam as Secretary of the National Institute, in charge of the National Library and Museum, he collected, translated, and published the inscriptions of Siam— in Siamese, Tai, Mon, Khmer, Sanskrit, and Pali — and translated and edited important chronicles and other historical documents. He organized and classified the National Museum and founded there the Dvāravatī and Srivijaya Schools of Art. Nor has all his attention been given to French Indochina and Siam. One of his earliest tasks was to collect and publish the references to the Far East in the texts of Greek and Latin authors. While at Bangkok, he translated the inscriptions in Old Malay found within the former kingdom of Srivijaya and wrote several articles on that kingdom.

Postwar Japanese scholarship, in its quest to explain Japan's modern history, has yet to deal adequately with the so-called right wing. Survey histories sometimes write it off as a lunatic fringe, or equate it simply with militarism and putschism. My purpose here is not to venture a total picture of the right but to present a microcosmic analysis of doctrines attributed to it through focusing on the theory of revolution formulated early in the Taishō period by Kita Ikki (1883–1937). Japanese writers regularly identify Kita as a leading rightist. Maruyama Masao refers to him as “the ideological father of Japanese fascism,” and his 1919 book on the “reorganization” of Japan (later published as Nihon kaizō hōan taikō) has been called by Kuno Osamu “the Mein Kampf of the Shõwa ultranationalist movement.”

The growth of China's population and die veracity of the figures that purport to measure it are both puzzles. Critical in die solutions to both puzzles are die records of an alien dynasty that ruled China from 1644 to 1911. All reconstructions of the growth of the population in recent centuries trace to one or the other of die two Ch'ing series—die local reports ordered by the emperor Ch'ien-lung in 1741, or the survey that began in 1909 and ended with the revolution in 1911. The results of the registration of 1953–1954 are consistent with the first Ch'ing activity. The statistics of the Republic of China had lineal descent from both series, but at a level of total population consistent with the limited results of the 1909–1911 survey.

Takechi Zuizan was born in 1829, the eldest son of a gōshi in Nagaoka A district in Tosa. By 1856, when he was 27, he had become known as a leading master of fencing (kenjutsu) in Tosa. He then travelled to Edo, where he met and cooperated with fellow spirits from Mito, Chōshū, and Satsuma. H e returned home the undisputed leader of Tosa loyalists. For a brief period in 1862 and 1863 he controlled, as much as any one controlled, the turbulent extremists in Kyoto and Edo. But at the point of his greatest success he overplayed his hand. His lord, Yamauchi Yōdō, proved to be unsympathetic to Takechi’s goals, and on the national scene the excesses of the Chōshū loyalists swung the balance temporarily in the direction of moderation. Takechi was restricted in his movements, imprisoned for his complicity in political assassination and his clear guilt in a presumptuous forgery, and he was finally ordered to commit hara-kiri in the summer of 1865. His career provides a useful close-up for the study of the loyalist movement in Tosa.

There is a bewildering contrast between the superficial calm of the 1930s in Indonesia and the turbulence of the immediate post-war period. In addition to the enormous upsurge of anti-colonial militance, the years following the Japanese surrender were marked by an unprecedented degree of conflict amongst Indonesians, as society adjusted to the radically changed conditions of independence. In other countries occupied by Japan, notably Burma and Malaya, ethnic animosities were also unusually overt after the war. It seemed natural to ask, as Elsbree did in his pioneering essay of 1953:

did the [Japanese] occupation, with its dissolution of existing ties, aggravate the fissures of the old order? … Did the Japanese deliberately pursue a “divide and rule” tactic, and is their policy to be held responsible for the violent outbursts and the general increase in racial tension since the end of the war?

In 1943, towards the middle of Japan's occupation of the Philippines, as the tide of war was turning, Jose P. Laurel accepted the Presidency of the Republic. Two years later, when he was under indictment for treason, he claimed that he had been forced to take that office. He maintained in his War Memoirs, supposedly written while interned in 1945 by the Americans in Japan, that his collaboration was ex necessitate re and that “forced collaboration is not collaboration. Voluntary collaboration as a means of national survival and to tide over our people to better times is not punishable.“

In the period since the end of World War II, the Japanese economic achievement has been of prodigious proportions. During this period, its growth rate—an average of almost 10% in GNP per year—has been the highest in the world. Japan has become the third-ranking industrial nation and its world standing, in terms of per capita GNP, has risen from fortieth in the early 1950s to twelfth at the present time. Growth so sweeping and rapid inevitably has brought a multitude of changes, not least in the composition of total output. At a highly accelerated rate, industries have declined, others have blossomed, new industries have appeared, and the importance of various sectors of the economy has changed. Amidst the continuing adjustments and readjustments, it is of interest to consider the nature of the impact on Japanese industrial organization. More specifically, what has been the effect on economic concentration and monopoly in Japan?

As the tide of Japanese occupation recedes from the Philippines, one of the most unique experiments in modern nation building is being resumed. In a world where the aspirations of colonial peoples offer a major threat to peace and stability, what is happening in the new Commonwealth is of the greatest importance.