A Civilization, as distinct from a primitive society, is expressed and recorded in the written works of its reflective and highly creative minds. It develops what simpler forms of living have not: a “great tradition” of the literate and critical few. Beneath and within this high culture live the common people, whose “little tradition” is creator and then creature of the philosophy, science and fine art of the great tradition.

The present analysis presupposes that in the flow of history there is recognizable societal structure (cultural type) and recognizable societal change (development). It also recognizes the theoretical and practical significance of major societal types, societies—operational units whose peculiarity is determined by the interaction of a number of essential technical, organizational, and social elements. Some of these essential elements are not necessarily specific: they may be compatible with several types of society. But they may become specific through their magnitude or the institutional setting in which they function. For instance, though slaves were present in many societies, in only a few did the institution of slavery become an essential feature. And serfs (peasants attached to the soil or to the village) were present in several societies: they appeared in oriental civilizations long before they were conspicuous in Greek antiquity or in the European and Japanese Middle Ages. But they were essential mainly in feudal societies and in the “helotage” society of Sparta. Similar diversities in compatability characterize corvee labor, irrigation economy, and commercial and industrial capitalism.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries two Americans, E. S. Morse and N. G. Munro, did much to open Japanese eyes to dirt archaeology as one of the historical tools for elucidating Japan's past. Thereafter Japanese researchers published some English or German summaries on Japan's ancient remains and for a few decades Westerners wrote with much interest of new discoveries concerning Jōmon, Yayoi, and, occasionally, Tomb cultures. But Western interest was short lived and Japanese archaeology went out of fashion in Western journals for more than a quarter century. Japanese research went ahead, however, and has given rise to radical reinterpretations which have not found their way into Western language literature. My purpose here is to present briefly a review of the periods prior to the first flourishing of Buddhism in Japan and to offer some suggestions toward fitting these findings into the larger picture of Asiatic cultural development.

One of the most encouraging trends in contemporary scholarship is the considerable raprochment between fields of study conventionally classed as the “humanities” and those called the “social sciences,” or now fashionably, “behavioral sciences.” A strong contributing factor here has been the growth, especially during and since World War II, of so-called “area” studies which focus various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches upon a region. Furthermore, the region which has constituted perhaps the most active front for such experiments in coordination is the Far East.

The present article will analyze some of the major currents in the study of Chinese culture in terms of functioning communities. We will turn, first, to works of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, showing why these accounts, no matter how well done, were not community studies. We shall then turn successively to the pioneer scientific work on Chinese communities, the social surveys, and to the several published community studies which are largely anthropological in their organization and execution. The second section of this paper deals with the methodology of modern community studies in China and discusses problems of field method and of topical organization and interpretation. In a third section the emphasis rests upon subdisciplinary specializations, e.g., economic, sociological, psychological and so on. In this case, the term “subdisciplinary” is used because, with certain notable exceptions, the specialist work has been carried on within a broader anthropological approach. In this section we will attempt to outline what has been done, and to point out the most significant gaps that remain.

In Japan, as in the West, the novelist has become his own favorite character. But the Japanese novelist (or short-story writer) seems less anxious to conceal his predilection than to flaunt it, so many frank self-portraits are there in the gallery of sbōsetsu. He appears in his fiction as a writer. We see him at work—pressed to meet a deadline, interrupted by the visits of literary friends, smoking and sipping tea over a hibachi, or at a desk cluttered with books, papers, pens and pencils, brushes and inkstone. We go with him on a holiday or to a rendezvous; we follow, in quotidian detail, his ordinary monotonous routine. Novels, stories, and sketches elaborate this rather seedy character, which the reader is allowed—sometimes encouraged—to accept as autobiographical.

The problem proposed by the editor of the Quarterly to the members of this symposium is to consider the varying patterns of railway development in three Far Eastern countries. It is a particularly challenging problem because the influential role which railroads have played in Western economic growth leads one naturally to ask whether Western experience has been repeated in the East, and, if not, how the differences may be explained. This question does, indeed, seem to have been the central one raised by the three following articles.

When we speak of social change in China we most often have in mind one or the other of two pictures. The first is the change that we see today, when radically new ideas, techniques and forces from foreign countries have shaken the traditional social order, altering the old patterns rapidly and sometimes violently. The second picture is that of the dynastic cycle, a concept that we have inherited from the traditional Chinese historian, sometimes adding a few embellishments of our own. The political fortunes of a ruling house are often reflected (and perhaps affected) by a characteristic cycle in the whole political and economic order of the nation: from successful adjustment and control to maladjustment and chaos. The end of each cycle, if we focus our attention only on these factors, leaves Chinese society much as it was at the end of the cycle before. But this perspective tends to omit qualitative changes that occur in Chinese society on a different plane.

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.

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.

After three-quarters of a century of fluctuating efforts, the development of railways in China remains an unfinished task today. In contrast to industrially more advanced countries, which had built most of their existing lines by the turn of the present century, railway construction is regarded even now as an indispensable part of the economic development of China. Measured by the potential demands of the country the existing railway facilities are small indeed. Recent data indicate that at the end of 1952 the Chinese railway system consisted of some 17,570 miles of tracks, including all lines in operation on the mainland and Hainan but excluding those on Formosa. This means that there is one mile of railway for every 216 square miles of territory (or approximately 463 miles per 100,000 square miles), and that for every 1,000,000 of population there are 39 miles of rail transportation. Small though the figures appear to be, they nevertheless represent an increase over those of a decade ago. In 1942 the estimate was 12,036 miles of railways in all of China, including those in Manchuria and the occupied areas; the ratio was then 274 miles of railroads per 100,000 square miles, and 27 miles per 1,000,000 population. The vast potential development that lies ahead is apparent when we compare the above figures with those for the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.

One of the topics of Chinese history that deserves greater attention is the nature and direction of the expansion of the Chinese people beyond the geographical confines of China. It is a subject which, for want of more information, is still so cloaked in generalities as to present the misleading impression that the Chinese have always been a landbound people oriented towards the land frontier of the north and northwest. A Western scholar, for example, has written: “China has never been a sea-power because nothing has ever induced her people to be otherwise than landmen, and landmen dependent on agriculture with the same habit and ways of thinking drilled into them through forty centuries.” In a recent work we find this statement: “Essentially a land people, the Chinese cannot be considered as having possessed seapower…. The attention of the Chinese through the centuries has been turned inward towards Central Asia rather than outward, and their knowledge of the seas which washed their coast was extremely small.”

India alone of the countries with great railway networks is unindustrialized. In the other leading railway powers—particularly the United States, Russia, Germany, though to a lesser extent in sparsely settled areas like Canada and Australia—the railway was the veritable dynamo of the Industrial Revolution. It has had no such effect in India, even though the country's network by 1947 was 40,500 miles long, counting only first-line main track, or 57,000 miles long, counting just about everything. I propose to sketch the setting in which railways were brought to India and then to review the 75 years of argument and experiment as to which form of enterprise (public, private, or some combination of the two) was best suited to India's railway development. I shall attempt to give a picture of the absolute and comparative magnitude of the Indian railway system as of 1947, and to discuss its economic and historical significance for Britain and for India.

Traditionally, Chinese dynasties were characterized by the maintenance of a highly centralized bureaucracy whose prime objective was the preservation of central control over all important aspects of national life. The degree of effectiveness of the bureaucracy determined the degree of central power, the diminution and loss of which invariably led to the weakening and downfall of a dynasty. Since the economy of China was based on intensive farming, regulation of water, either for the positive purpose of irrigation or the Negative purpose of flood prevention, remained throughout Chinese history a matter of utmost importance and a principal concern of the state. The success or failure of a dynasty in handling this vital problem reflected the effectiveness of its bureaucracy, which in turn determined the fate of the dynasty itself.

Spencer has been called the most widely read and possibly the most in fluential Western social and political thinker in Japan during the 1880's. Between 1877 and 1900, at least thirty-two translations and one critical study of Spencer's works were published, besides many articles in journals and magazines. The writings of John Stuart Mill ranked next in popularity. Other Western thinkers—such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Guizot, Haeckel, T. H. Huxley, Darwin, Bentham, and Bagehot—received much less public attention.

In november 1841 a young Englishman named Thomas Taylor Meadows, who had spent some three years studying chemistry and mathematics in Germany, happened to attend Professor Karl Friedrich Neumann's lectures on the Chinese language at the University of Munich. The young man “almost immediately gave up every other study” and prepared for the British service in China. Hardly more than a year later, at the beginning of 1843, Meadows arrived at the new crown colony of Hongkong. When George Tradescant Lay opened the first British consulate at Canton on July 23, Meadows was Senior Assistant and a year later became Interpreter. This made him, in modern parlance, the chief British intelligence officer at the leading treaty port. After a stretch of seven and one-half years at Canton, during which he reported the beginning in Kwangsi of the great domestic uprising later known as the Taiping Rebellion, Meadows became Interpreter at Shanghai (Jan. 1, 1852), and by the time the Taiping horde erupted down the Yangtze from Wuhan to Nanking in early 1853, he was well prepared to study them at first hand.