The study of nationalism, the most powerful political emotion in the modern world, has often become enmeshed in polemic and ideological combat. In Japan during the past century, evaluations of the historical role of nationalism have tended to oscillate between extremes. Some of its first serious students in the late nineteenth century, writers like Kuga Katsunan and Miyake Setsurei, opposing the prevalent Westernism, were convinced that nationalism was a necessary ingredient of Japanese survival; and they would have agreed with Tocqueville's aphorism that “the interests of the human race are better served by giving every man a particular fatherland than by trying to inflame his passions for the whole of humanity.” Since 1945, however, in a mood of national self-alienation, many Japanese writers have shared Veblen's turgid conclusion, “Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to lead human institutions to the service of dissension and distress. In its material effects it is altogether the most sinister as well as the most imbecile of all the institutional incumbrances that have come down out of the old order.” Once seen as necessary and beneficial, nationalism came in the post-war period to be villified or simply ignored amidst the scholars' preoccupation with their anti-establishment liberal heroes. With some notable exceptions, nationalism has been slow to receive in Japan the thoughtful, dispassionate study it needs.

Historians of religion who investigate the myths, rites, and symbols of the multilocal Indo-European speakers are not unlike historians of the planet earth who investigate the dispersed continental land masses and ocean floors of the present time. The former labor to reconstruct from hundreds of thousands of mythological, philological and iconographical details the language, religion and social structure of an ancient parent culture, while the latter proceed from an equally bewildering variety of geological and oceanographical puzzle-pieces to determine the character of that primordial “Pangaea” from which continental plates of the earth's surface originated. Interestingly, both areas—comparative mythology and earth science—have recently been reinvigorated by fresh schools of investigation after long lapses subsequent to the discrediting of nineteenth-century hypotheses. A generation ago no Asian studies scholar would have supported the claim that the massive Indian epic Mahābhārata and the Iranian epic Shāhnāmeh have preserved significant structures of the Indo-European mythological worldview that went unreflected in the vedic and avestan texts, any more than a reputable earth scientist would have maintained the idèa that the Himalayan massif was created by a wayward “India” crunching into central “Asia” after a multithousand-mile journey from the loins of South Africa.

A critical review of four recent works which examine the role of the United States in Southeast Asia; its policies, goals and interrelationships with the several successor states of French Indochina: Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.