The leadership of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry in the opening of Japan to Western commerce has received just renown. Rarely, however, does one hear even the most casual reference to Perry's other activities in the Far East. Of these activities, perhaps the most neglected is his controversy with Humphrey Marshall over the diplomatic policy to be pursued by the United States regarding the Taiping rebellion.

Studies of Japan and the Japanese have tended to deal in large proportion with phenomena and problems of the nation as a whole rather than with its component parts. In contrast, community studies focus upon some of the smallest social units of a nation. Community studies have been attempted as an approach to understanding Japan and the Japanese only recently and by relatively few foreign scholars. Moreover, even though a recent survey of work done by the Japanese lists 126 localities from which data at the community level have been gathered, no fully rounded community study has yet been finished by Japanese social scientists. Western scholars, following beaten paths, simply have not ventured into communities for small scale studies, whereas in the case of the Japanese the partial intellectual isolation which delayed the arrival of some of the concepts basic to community studies seems largely responsible for the low returns from so much field research.

Our understanding of Cambodia/Kampuchea's immediate past is gradually being enlarged by recent works dealing with pre-1975 Cambodian society, the development and policies of the Communist Khmer Rouge, and local life during the beginning of the Vietnamese occupation. Research using a broad range of primary source material, including a growing number of interviews with refugees, provides a more detailed picture than previously available of the two successive Kampuchean regimes. There remains, however, a persistent problem in many writings: political/ideological biases that can lead to different perspectives on the Khmer Rouge and on Kampuchea under the Vietnamese.

My intention is to discuss a particular approach to these problems rather than the problems themselves. This question of approach does seem of basic importance at a time when so many Americans are about to develop their wartime interest in Southeast Asia. Naturally this first interest has largely been focussed on political and economic issues. Now I think it is time that we bring to the fore the concept that in the longer view it is the matter of our cultural contacts with the East that is of most penetrating significance. I am going to show why I think that we must rid ourselves of the common impression that these contacts are going to be ruled by westernization, or acculturation, and that hence we absolutely must try to build our future relations with the East on a basis of sympathetic understanding.

It is a common statement of writers of Cambodian and Siamese history that the Siamese overran Cambodia and captured Angkor Thom on one or more occasions before the final sack of that capital in 1430–31. The dates on which this event is said to have occurred are variously given as 1350–53, 1372–73, 1384–85, 1388, 1393–94, 1408, 1420–21. As authority, these writers can cite almost any of the common versions of the Cambodian chronicle and some versions of the Annals of Ayuthia (Siam).

This bibliography is designed to guide the reading of instructors, students, and general readers interested in gaining an understanding of the backgrounds of the present war in the Pacific and the Far East and the problems of peace which will confront the post-war world in that area. It lists 169 of the better and more general introductory books relating to the area. There are 7 5 starred items, 25 of which are double-starred, for the guidance of librarians of institutions with more limited means seeking to build up basic collections of books on the Pacific area. No periodical articles have been included in the list, but a list of the leading periodicals in the field has been given at the end. The Far Eastern Quarterly carries in each issue a classified list of currently appearing articles and books in the field.

It has often been claimed that the Dai Nihon shi is one of the towering monuments of traditional Japanese historiography, and it is indeed a work of rare scope: a general history of Japan in 397 kan, or chapters, dealing primarily with the affairs of the imperial dynasty from its legendary founding in 660 B.C. to the healing of Japan's only extended dynastic schism in 1392. The entire text is in literary Chinese, and the pattern of organization is that of the Chinese dynastic histories. The Dai Nihon shi was conceived by Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628–1701), the second daimyo of the Mito han, and compiled by the Confucian retainers of Mitsukuni and his successors. Two large sections of chronological Main Annals and Biographies (approximately half of the finished book) were completed by 1715, but the rest remained unfinished at the time of the Meiji Restoration.