The present analysis presupposes that in the flow of history there is recognizable societal structure (cultural type) and recognizable societal change (development). It also recognizes the theoretical and practical significance of major societal types, societies—operational units whose peculiarity is determined by the interaction of a number of essential technical, organizational, and social elements. Some of these essential elements are not necessarily specific: they may be compatible with several types of society. But they may become specific through their magnitude or the institutional setting in which they function. For instance, though slaves were present in many societies, in only a few did the institution of slavery become an essential feature. And serfs (peasants attached to the soil or to the village) were present in several societies: they appeared in oriental civilizations long before they were conspicuous in Greek antiquity or in the European and Japanese Middle Ages. But they were essential mainly in feudal societies and in the “helotage” society of Sparta. Similar diversities in compatability characterize corvee labor, irrigation economy, and commercial and industrial capitalism.

In reviewing the progress of Asian studies and of this Association, it is necessary both to point with pride and to view with alarm.

For the former, no doubt, there is some justification. There has been a great increase since the early beginnings at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale. Looking back over the last thirty years, one can recall the new stimulus to Far Eastern studies in the 1930's provided by David Stevens at the Rockefeller Foundation through his support of Mortimer Graves of the American Council of Learned Societies and fellowship programs for American trainees in Tokyo and Peking. The imagination and initiative of these men and a few others laid important foundations.

The parish guild, or miyaza, has been studied by Japanese scholars from various perspectives and disciplines. While not wishing to disparage other approaches to the subject, in this paper I shall treat the institution as a socio-religious monopoly. A monopoly, by definition, is a group that restricts or denies resources, services, or markets to other segments of a society. While the word is generally confined to economics—where one thinks of medieval guilds and modern cartels—the concept can be profitably extended to other areas of society. The sociology of religion, for example, provides us with a wide variety of monopolies. These groups restrict access to the sacred, just as economic monopolies corner markets. Access to the sacred can be controlled in various ways—e.g., by maintaining an exclusive kinship tie with the gods (clans), by means of a purity-pollution complex (caste), or by control of a sacramental system necessary for salvation (sacerdotal priesthoods).

The typical internal structure of factions in a particular culture strongly influences the ability of factions to resolve conflict among themselves. This hypothesis is verified by examination of faction structure in India as contrasted to that in Japan. The argument draws on material from the broad range of contemporary studies of Indian and Japanese party politics and some studies of their bureaucracies as well. The major implication of the findings is that the “political culture” concept can be given a sounder empirical base when related to overt political behavior than when viewed as a matter of political psychology.

In the cultural transition from traditional to modern China, the decade of the 1890's, along with the early 1900's, stands as an important watershed the significance of which, so far, has not received sufficient appreciation and adequate assessment by historians. Its importance, indeed, can hardly be overestimated. Intellectually, the period saw the conclusion of the ching-shih tradition in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the search for ideological reorientation in the twentieth century. Socially, these years witnessed the differentiation of a hitherto unitary class of gentry into two important status groups which dominated the social scene of twentieth-century China, namely intelligentsia and landlord-gentry. Yet why has such an important watershed so far not received enough attention?

Perhaps one reason is that in the past there has been a general tendency among historians to focus attention to the dramatic May Fourth Movement of 1919 as the great divide in the cultural transformation of modern China. This tendency resulted in a widespread impression that during the May Fourth period there was a cataclysmic release of new cultural forces which made a clean sweep of the past and thereby made the post-May Fourth period an entirely different intellectual world from what had been before. Such a view would almost inevitably, as it did, have the consequence of diverting attention away from many important intellectual changes which antedated the May Fourth period and whose significance cannot be appreciated by an isolated focus oh that period. There is no intention here to deny the significance of the May Fourth Movement in the cultural development of modern China. All that is suggested is that the May Fourth Movement needs to be reassessed from a broader historical perspective, a perspective which can only be attained by a detailed investigation of the intellectual changes which took place in the late Ch'ing, in particular, in the decade from mid-1890's to mid-1900's.