Throughout eastern and southern Asia the village stands in a position of critical but often unacknowledged importance. It provides the residence and social focus for an overwhelming proportion of the people living in those parts of the continent lying east of Afghanistan and south of the Soviet borders—perhaps some 72 per cent of the total, or roughly 900,000,000 persons. Or, if only the regions specifically under examination in this symposium—Japan, India, Java, and the Philippine Islands—are taken into account, it will be discovered that some 62, 83, 80, and 75 per cent of their respective populations reside in villages.2 When one speaks of village government or politics in eastern or southern Asia then, a vast preponderance of the area's total population is involved.

In 1920 about 18 per cent of the total population of Japan lived in the 81 cities which existed then. By 1950 the percentage had increased markedly but still amounted to only 37.5 per cent while the number of cities had grown to 248. On April 1, 1954 not less than 383 entities had the legal denomination of a city. In 1950 of Japan's 46 prefectures there were five in which the population living in cities outnumbered the populations of towns and villages; in April 1953 their number had risen to seven.

The progress of India during the last fifty years in industrialization and urbanization, though considerable, has not significantly affected the predominantly agricultural and rural character of her society. Five out of every six persons live in villages and four out of every five of these live by agriculture. According to the census of 1951 there are 558,089 villages and 3,018 cities and towns in the Indian Union. Out of a total population of 357 millions, 295 millions or 83 percent live in villages and 62 millions or 17 percent in cities and towns.

Rural settlement patterns on the island of Java conform in general type to the dominant mode throughout the rest of monsoon Asia: a nucleated residential unit surrounded by the lands cultivated by the residents, forming a community with political, economic, and religious dimensions. The dominant form of agriculture depends upon irrigated lands planted primarily with rice. In upland areas, where the topography has limited the spread of the irrigated land, the residential units are relatively small and isolated, and a characteristic village organization has developed in which the daily patterns of interaction can encompass the entire village. The much larger part of Java's population, however, lives in lowland areas where gentle, even gradients, plentiful sources of water, and the seasonal rains have permitted the establishment of widespread systems of irrigation. Here the residential units have expanded and coalesced into large blocks and strips of several square miles, alternating with large uninterrupted areas of irrigated land. Under these conditions, village units have expanded far beyond the daily interaction group, and vaguely denned neighborhoods (barisan or lingkungan) have developed within which most of the daily patterns of mutual interest and aid take place. Within the area studied, the average population of the lowland rural village is roughly 600, with a range from 200 to 2000. The average area encompassed by each village is roughly a quarter square mile, with a range approximately proportional to the population.

The primary unit in the hierarchy of Philippine local government is the barrio. The term, barrio, is employed to describe any and all sub-units of the municipalities which lie outside the poblacion (municipal center) as well as sub-divisions of some of the smaller chartered cities. This double use of the term leads to confusion, for the rural barrio differs considerably from a barrio located within an urban or semi-urban area. The latter closely resembles a ward or precinct in a small American city, while the former is more akin to the prototype of an Asian village. In this paper, barrio will be used only in reference to the rural units and where mentioned is made of barrios which are city units, the distinction will be made.

One wonders what the general reading public has made of the translations of traditional Chinese fiction which have recently appeared in bookstores, in several instances in paper-bound series usually devoted to up-to-date novels of violence and vampires. Chinese colloquial fiction before the coming of Western influences certainly contains enough of both murder and adultery to give the average reader a sense of literary familiarity; but the thoughtful reader must be puzzled by an undefinable inadequacy, by a feeling of literary promise unfulfilled, to which even the student of Chinese stories and novels must confess. Unconsciously conditioned as are we all to the premises and achievements of European fiction, we cannot fail to weigh this fiction of another culture in the same balance and find it vaguely wanting. In the following pages I intend to isolate several of the factors which contribute to our impression of disappointment upon reading those works which have long been a source of delight to the Chinese.

The notion that democracy, as the West understands democracy, is meeting a crucial test in the conflict of ideas that agitate the minds and emotions of Indians, is everywhere receiving greater attention. It is a notion as commonly understood by the Indian intellectual as it is popularly appreciated by those who would observe the process from the West. That the Indian view of China plays a significant role in this process is readily apparent.