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.

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.

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.

Timor, or Timur, is the eighth, numbering from Sumatra, in that long line of islands called the Sunda, which contains the more familiar islands of Java and Bali. Timor is connected by many smaller islands with the Sunda chain and with the islands of Flores and New Guinea, but such connections are lacking with the Australian continent to the south. The island is long and narrow, approximately 350 miles in length and 60 miles in average width.

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.

This article is an introduction to the type of materials available to the historian of pre-1800 Vietnam, particularly that material produced during the reign of Le Thanh-tong. The rule of this Emperor is significant for the bureaucratization of the government and a consequent growth in paperwork which occurred under him. During the last quarter of the fifteenth century, many of the resulting documents were brought together to form major compilations on various topics, Following a brief description of the historical background and the manner in which this material came to be assembled, the article groups such materials, from both this period and later centuries, into the following categories: histories, geographies, personnel records, official records, belles lettres, and general collections. It then proceeds to enumerate the available material under each category and to analyze the uses to which this material may be put for the study of Vietnamese history. A note follows in the May 1970 issue of the JAS describing the major modern collections of these documents and giving the locations of each work mentioned in the article. Characters and Vietnamese romanization are given for each title, term, and name.

As compared with some other countries of the world, Korea is a well mapped land. This brief review lists some of the major maps and sets of maps of the peninsula which are useful to those interested in Korea.

Old Korean maps. Korean scholars for their use in studies of Chinese and Korean literature and for their administrative work if they were chosen for government posts prepared small hand atlases. Some of these atlases have been collected by Western scholars and copies are found in the Library of Congress, American Geographical Society Library, New York Public Library and a number of other map collections. These atlases are usually made up of maps of the world, China, Korea, the eight provinces of Korea, Japan and the Loo Choo Islands.They are hand drawn and copied from some prototype. On their margins or on the reverse side of each map are brief gazetteers or comments. A description of the China-centered world map was given by Homer B. Hulburt, “An ancient map of the world,” Bulletin of the American geographical society, 36 (1904), 600–05. The atlas was described and reproduced in part by H. Cordier in Description d'un atlas Sino-Coréen. Manuscript du British Museum (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1896). A Japanese, Otani, prepared a 37 page catalogue of old Korean maps which was published by the Keijo Imperial University, Seoul, in 1933, but a copy of this has not been found in American libraries.