Modern technology was introduced into Japan under the sanction of traditional Japanese values. I do not suggest that there was logical necessity in this: that from the values we could infer modernization; nor do I suggest that nothing new was added. But despite amplification and reinterpretation, it was, none the less, traditional ideas that Japanese leaders used to justify change. Japanese mythology, long neglected by political theory, became the core of an ideology that made national power a necessity. At a time when Japan found herself impotent yet plunged into the middle of a world power struggle, mythology was called upon to endow the nation with one kind of greatness: the emperor was descended by unbroken lineage from divine ancestors, and he was father of a nation conceived as an extended family: what other nation could make that claim? A nation unique and precious as this was, could not fall behind others in power—economic and political as well as military—even if inherited institutions had to be scrapped wholesale to keep abreast. Otherwise the claim to greatness must eventually collapse. Belief in the claim, which was bolstered in everyday life by making a cult of the patriarchal family with its values of obedience and hierarchy, gave the nation the will and discipline to transform an almost purely agrarian society into a predominantly industrial one within a generation. No Asian nation has yet duplicated this feat.

In the area under consideration in this paper, eight countries with a population of 600 million people or about 30% of the world's total population have acquired their independence since the end of World War II. National governments in this area are faced with serious economic, social and other problems, many of them long-standing but of more compelling current importance because of the raised expectations of the Asian peoples. The technical and financial resources of these governments for meeting their problems are limited and, in some cases, ineffectively and inefficiently used. Their ability to develop, in the short-term future, solutions to these problems judged effective by their people will determine the survival of these or similarly-oriented governments, or their replacement by chaos or extremism.

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.

During the winter of 1867–1868 the Chinese Foreign Office dispatched its first diplomatic mission to the United States and Europe. The stipulated time for treaty revision was drawing near and the Chinese government had reason to expect that the Treaty Powers, under pressure from their merchants doing business in China, would demand a considerable expansion of the privileges which they had forced the Chinese to grant them on previous occasions. Fearful of the internal effects of a great extension of foreign influence and activity, the Foreign Office decided to send a special embassy directly to the governments of the various Treaty Powers to plead for patience and forbearance.

John Lee's, David Fedman's, and Lisa Brady's essays persuasively show the value of studying environmental issues on the Korean peninsula. Each of the essays carefully explains how drives led by individuals and entities, such as the state, engineered nature for human needs, security, and later economic growth. In so doing, they show how these drives simultaneously altered nature and remade institutions, systems, and cultures that influenced people's agency and identity and reshaped forms of consciousness. By judiciously making visible the agents and social forces behind the reconstitution of nature, the essays collectively introduce diverse approaches to the study of environmental issues in Asia and elsewhere. Most of all, they demonstrate that transnational environmental history on the Korean peninsula can no longer be overlooked when dwelling on and debating major historical and theoretical issues in Korean, Asian, and environmental studies.

Scholarly writings on the Chinese minority in Thailand have stressed the unique cultural values that traditionally have distinguished Thai from Thai-Chinese communities. Skinner and Coughlin, among others, have argued that the Chinese have traditionally been more diligent, ambitious, and materialistic than Thais, and that—while loyal and disciplined within the bounds of kinship and other narrow primordial affiliations—they act amorally in economic and other dealings with persons outside these affiliative structures. Thais, by contrast, are reputed to be more passive and fatalistic, less materialistic, and less likely to manifest social discipline or sustained commitment to others, even within the family. These value differences are held to be responsible, along with other factors pertaining to patterns of ethnic social organization and differential historical economic and political opportunities, for the relative success of ethnic Chinese in the non-agricultural sectors of the Thai economy.

Present disturbed relations between France and the republic of Vietnam add a special significance to the story of how near France came, in 1863 and 1864, to abandoning her colony in Cochinchina. It was by using as a base the three southern provinces of Cochinchina (Basse Cochinchine) which she had conquered from Annam that France subsequently established her protectorate over Cambodia, annexed the remaining three provinces of Cochinchina, and eventually extended her suzerainty over Annam, Tonkin, and Laos. Had she not decided to remain in Cochinchina, therefore, it is doubtful if she would have attained the rank, of an important imperial power in the Far East.