Japan provides a fascinating case for studying economic development. With her real GNP rising at an annual rate of 4 percent during the period 1878–1942, Japan was the only Asian country that emerged from a backward agrarian society to become a modern industrial power. Her postwar economic performance has been even more phenomenal; the average growth rate of real GNP in 1955–1964 was 10.4 percent—the highest in the world. Her investment rate reached an astonishingly high level of over 40 percent in several years in early nineteen sixties. Believing that there is no miracle in economic affairs, economists began to search the secrets of Japan's extraordinary achievements in economic development. To offer possible explanations, they usually stress the active role played by the Japanese government in economic modernization, the vigor of the country's response to new stimuli, and a strong national consciousness. These factors, while undoubtedly important, do not reveal the whole story. There are in Japan a number of institutional traits which, in my opinion, are highly conducive to economic growth. However, the contribution of these institutions to Japan's economic development has not been fully recognized because, in part, they were not designed for that purpose. Their growth-stimulating effects are accidental and unexpected. As a matter of fact, some of these institutions may even appear as economically irrational or socially unjust. Consequently, when students of the Japanese economy study these institutional factors, attention is usually directed to the negative side.

A disproportionate amount of scholarly attention has already been lavished upon the provision for communal electorates in the 1909 Morley-Minto reform scheme, imparting to it a significance which it lacked during both John Morley's secretaryship of state for India and his lifetime. Most recently, M. N. Das has stretched the elastic material in the Morley and Minto collections—his only sources—over a prefabricated ideological structure; he portrays Lord Minto as a Machiavellian schemer, who introduced communal electorates in a deliberate attempt to disrupt the forces of Indian nationalism and thereby perpetuate the British Raj, and he assumes that Morley—who chose the Florentine statesman as the subject of his 1897 Romanes Lectures—was unable to recognize a twentieth-century facsimile. Without attempting to absolve two centuries of British rule in India of its Divide and Rule stigma, one may confidently assert that during the first decade of the twentieth century, neither the Viceroy nor the Secretary of State consciously implemented the pernicious theories which allegedly produced two warring nations within the bosom of Mother India.

A. The peninsula before the conquests by Funan. The first known contact of the Khmer Empire or any of its antecedents with what is now called the Malay Peninsula1 occurred when Fan Shih-man of Funan conquered a considerable portion of that peninsula early in the third century; although it is believed, from the terms in which the account of his voyage are expressed, that Hun-t'ien, or Hun-shen (Kaundinya), who conquered the native queen, Liu-yeh (Willow Leaf), and founded the kingdom of Funan about the middle of the first century, came from an Indian settlement on the eastern side of that peninsula.

Around 1700, the Osaka publisher Shibukawa seiemon collected and printed twenty-three medieval short stories and put them on sale labelled Otogi bunko, or The Companion Library. Shibukawa's sales techniques, aimed at selling his anthology to female readers, led later scholars to view these stories anachronistically as women's literature from the Muromachi period. Evidence from medieval diaries, however, makes it clear that these stories were not originally written for women. To date close to five hundred of these largely anonymous stories have emerged to form a substantial medieval genre. Although present scholarship tends to seek authorship of the stories through analysis of social classes depicted in them, it is submitted that the more fruitful approach is rather through analysis of textual origins in pre-Muromachi literary traditions: Heian novel, Kamakura military epic, religious narrative, or oral folktale; and that the most important source proves to be the religious narrative tradition, where textual comparison reveals clearly some Muromachi stories are derivations from such works as Shintō shū. Medieval jongleurs and missionaries such as biwa hōshi, etoki hōshi, and Kumano bikuni played a crucial role in spreading medieval tales, popularizing the picture scroll and book, and contributing to the development of the short story genre.

From past to present all is but talk, and all talk is but laughs. The birth of yin and yang from the original chaos, the voluntary abdication and forceful overthrow of the sage kings-who's ever witnessed this sort of thing? It's nothing more than talk. Future generations will talk about our generation, just as our generation talks about past generations. To talk about something and doubt it is laughable; to talk about something and believe it is even more laughable. Classics, philosophy, and histories are nonsensical talk, and people compete to transmit them. Poetry, rhapsody, and prose are preposterous talk, and people compete to perfect them. Praise or sneer, advocacy or suppression-these are whimsical talk, and people compete to respond to them. Sometimes we laugh at others; some other times we are laughed at. Those who laugh at others are in turn laughed at by others. The Treasury of Laughs is a collection of jokes. With all its thirteen chapters, some may still say it's a thin book. If you read it and are delighted by it, please don't be. If you read it and are enraged by it, please don't be. The world from past to present is an immense treasury of laughs; you and I are all in there as laughingstocks. Without talk there're no human beings. Without laughs there's no talk. Without laughs and talk there's no world. Cloth-Sack Monk, you're my master, you're my master!