When students of Japanese literary history view the latter part of the Tokugawa period, two developments stand out. First, Edo replaced Kyoto and Osaka as the center of cultural activity. Second, a baffling variety of forms of prose fiction arose. The former stemmed largely from the policies of Yoshimune, the eighth Tokugawa shogun. Although his suppression of “pernicious literature” had a baneful effect on publishing in Kyoto and Osaka, it indirectly improved the competitive position of Edo booksellers. During Yoshimune's reign, also, the city of Edo underwent enormous population growth. Many hatamoto and samurai were forced to resettle in Edo, where they lived on rice stipends rather than on the direct produce of their land. Bureaucracy expanded. Samurai turned from the rigors of rural life to polite urban pursuits. Need for additional services led to a growth in the number of merchants. Likewise, Yoshimune's personal interest in mathematics, science, and even Western learning resulted in the import of books and ideas from the outside world, particularly China. Proscriptions against foreign learning became less rigid.

Even as recently as a dozen years ago, one learned basic Sinological methods rather much the way one learned about sex: by osmosis and “from the gutter.” One puzzled over the remarks of his professors, looked up the strange words in the dictionary, and listened to the older boys in the hall. “I got it from the Kanshi taikan,” some graduate student would say, and you made a mental note to ask a friend about the Kanshi taikan the next time you could be alone together. For all the limitations, it was a pleasant and reasonably effective way to learn Sinology. The atmosphere was clubby, the pace was slow, and there was usually time for patient professional attention.

One would hardly expect extreme political theories like anarchism to be popular in Japan, where there is a strong tradition of obedience to political authority, and where those in control of the government do not hesitate to use police power to check what they consider to be “dangerous thoughts.” In fact had it not been for the famous Taigyaku Jiken or the high treason incident in 1910, anarchism might have been relegated to obscurity, having made but an imperceptible ripple in die course of Japanese thought. As a result of this incident, however, there are probably not many among the older generation in Japan today who have not heard about Kōtoku Shūsui, the leader.

Two years ago our revered elder statesman Kenneth Scott Latourette gave us a comprehensive review of the development during the last few decades of studies in the United States of the Sinic world. In a sense I wish to follow in his footsteps, on the one hand broadening the base to include studies by people of all nationalities, and on the other narrowing it or restricting it to cover only one branch of the many fields of learning represented by our membership. For good reasons too I limit the discussion to China alone. Not that important discoveries have not been made elsewhere, from the Indus River to the island of Hokkaido and from Siberia to the Maldive Islands, many of them bearing importantly on the growth of civilization amongst the Chinese people; a Han crossbow lock in Taxila, T'ang cash at Anuradhapura, a rock-cut representation of a Sung junk at Angkor, a late Han bronze at Oc-Eo, pre-Han silk in the frozen graves of the Altai, Ch'i state coins of the third century B.C. in northern Korea, and tenth-century block printing in the bosom of the lovely Buddhist statue which Chōnen brought back to Japan from Pien-liang in the year 985. All these and many more were discoveries of recent years in the regions now included in the Association for Asian Studies. One might, if desired, construct a much wider horizon, and so take in the Han dynasty hu or vase found in Dane John at Canterbury and now a prized possession of the British Museum, or Sung to Ming porcelain turned up at Fostat and the Kilwa Islands off the coast of Tanganyika, and the items of presumed Chinese inspiration discovered on the west coast of Central America and in Peru. But this would take us far afield, interesting though the subject may be. They show us how mobile the early Chinese were, or, if not the people themselves, certainly the work of their fingers, and how valued it was, giving tongue to the comment of Abū Zayd Ḥasan (ca. 916): “Amongst all the creatures of Allah, the Chinese have the cleverest hands at designing and creating things: for the execution of all manner of works there is no people in the world who can do better than they.”

The Iwakura embassy's encounter with Hamilton Fish at the State Department in 1872 is far more than a quaint but insignificant episode in the relations between Japan and the United States and deserves resurrection from the footnotes of history. The two sides, much to the surprise of both, met in a long, drawn-out series of trying and painful interviews, stretching from mid-March to the end of July, to argue and then attempt to revise the terms of Japan's 1858 treaty of friendship and commerce with the United States. This confrontation marks the proper, though halting, beginning of the treaty revision movement in Meiji diplomatic history and also illustrates the Grant administration's policy, or more accurately, cluster of attitudes toward East Asia during the early period of post-Civil War expansionism.

A Civilization, as distinct from a primitive society, is expressed and recorded in the written works of its reflective and highly creative minds. It develops what simpler forms of living have not: a “great tradition” of the literate and critical few. Beneath and within this high culture live the common people, whose “little tradition” is creator and then creature of the philosophy, science and fine art of the great tradition.

If the several articles assembled here dramatize a long-standing suspicion that our understanding of nationalism has not progressed very far beyond its original conceptualization, they also reveal the limitations of this tradition of discourse which we have had to work in. Yet in disclosing the limitations of this tradition they have in fact gone beyond it. In viewing the subject as a condition of a more basic problematik they have raised new questions demanding serious accountability and, perhaps, cleared the way for a total reassessment of nationalism as history and hermeneutic. In the following pages I would like to rehearse a few of the ideas found in these papers and pursue some of the implications of their suggestiveness.