The problem proposed by the editor of the Quarterly to the members of this symposium is to consider the varying patterns of railway development in three Far Eastern countries. It is a particularly challenging problem because the influential role which railroads have played in Western economic growth leads one naturally to ask whether Western experience has been repeated in the East, and, if not, how the differences may be explained. This question does, indeed, seem to have been the central one raised by the three following articles.

With the formal abolition of the Tokugawa Shogunate on January 3, 1868, there was created in Japan a governmental void which was not filled finally and satisfactorily until 1889. The search of Japanese leaders for a satisfactory government structure for the new state was thus one of long duration. It did not begin seriously until the successful outcome of the military struggle with the Tokugawa forces in the early months of 1868 seemed assured.

Whenever the writer has asked anyone within the Soviet Union as to the functions of geography, the answer has invariably been “to develop the productive resources of the state.” Geography has proceeded along the lines of Marxian theory with especial emphasis on economic problems. Thus dozens of geographers are employed in the planning commissions of the U.S.S.R. and the constituent republics. Not only should these plans be in harmony with the natural environment, they are also the geographer's instrument for periodically changing this environment. Elsewhere the emphasis is equally on the political-economic side, with especial interest in people and their welfare, working conditions, and past relations to economic feudalism and imperialism. Those aspects of geography which deal with mere description, or with fields such as geomorphology or human ecology, are regarded as intellectual luxuries which must be postponed until some future date.

In 1931 Malinowski wrote, “Although a great deal is known about the technology of house building and even about the structure of houses in various cultures and although a fair amount is also known about the constitution of the family, few accounts deal with the relation between the form of the dwelling and the form of domestic arrangements, on the one hand, and the constitution of the family, on the other, and yet such a relation does exist.” Malinowski then goes on to explain that the extended house is a function of the large, or extended family; while the club house, or men's house, is a function of age grouping, secret societies, or sexual abstinence or laxity.

Every educational system, whether extant or planned, is an inseparable part of the social structure of the country in which it is, or it is to be, applied. Education is dependent much more than is generally realized upon prevalent political, economic and cultural trends and in turn, reflects these trends. This means that while it is possible to describe an educational system as an isolated cultural phase, it is not possible to understand it properly apart from the total social context. It must be seen and evaluated as a part of a whole.

The year 1964 marked the centenary of the suppression of the Taiping Revolution, China's largest-scale revolution up to that time, and of the death of one of its greatest heroes, the Taiping's Loyal Prince, Li Hsiu-chʻeng. The Taiping movement has ever since been held in respectful esteem by Chinese revolutionaries. Sun Yat-sen considered himself the “spiritual” successor to the leader of the defeated movement. The Communists too maintain a respectful sympathy for die Taipings, whom they regard more or less as important forerunners of their own revolution. This does not mean that Communist historians, when writing from a Marxist-disciplined perspective, fail to point out the revolutionary shortcomings of the Taipings. But, everything considered, the movement and its principal leaders remain objects of considerable historical respect.

Severe urban rioting, the accompaniment of an organized political agitation known as the Nav Nirman (Reconstruction) movement, gripped the Indian state of Gujarat in early 1974, bringing to a violent climax social and political discontents from beneath a surface tranquility. Costly in lives and property and damaging to the political fabric of Gujarat, the ten-week-long agitation subsided only after winning two political objectives: first, the expulsion of the Chief Minister and imposition of President's Rule; and second, dissolution of the Gujarat legislative assembly. Resisted by the central government, the overthrow in Gujarat was an embarrassment to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and was a factor leading to the declaration of national emergency in June 1975. Gujarat's recent troubles have a background in the 1969 national split of the Congress party, but the immediate issues of Nav Nirman were food scarcity, rising prices, corruption in governing circles, and grievances in the educational system. These issues were seized upon by college students, who sparked the riots and who thereafter provided the most visible leadership of the movement.