Until recent times, and to a certain extent, even at the present, most historians have spoken of the movements which led to the Meiji Restoration as lower samurai movements. It is my aim in this article to show that they were not. First, negatively, I hope to show by a consideration of what is meant by the term “lower samurai” and by the application of this to the Chōshū scene that the early Restoration movement or sonō jōi (Honor the Emperor, Expel the Barbarian) movement cannot be described as a lower samurai movement. Second, positively, I will attempt an alternate characterization in terms of the different groups participating in this movement in Chōshū from its inception in 1858 until its culmination in the Chōshū Civil War in 1865.

Takechi Zuizan was born in 1829, the eldest son of a gōshi in Nagaoka A district in Tosa. By 1856, when he was 27, he had become known as a leading master of fencing (kenjutsu) in Tosa. He then travelled to Edo, where he met and cooperated with fellow spirits from Mito, Chōshū, and Satsuma. H e returned home the undisputed leader of Tosa loyalists. For a brief period in 1862 and 1863 he controlled, as much as any one controlled, the turbulent extremists in Kyoto and Edo. But at the point of his greatest success he overplayed his hand. His lord, Yamauchi Yōdō, proved to be unsympathetic to Takechi’s goals, and on the national scene the excesses of the Chōshū loyalists swung the balance temporarily in the direction of moderation. Takechi was restricted in his movements, imprisoned for his complicity in political assassination and his clear guilt in a presumptuous forgery, and he was finally ordered to commit hara-kiri in the summer of 1865. His career provides a useful close-up for the study of the loyalist movement in Tosa.

In the transition of Japan into the modern world, the role of those who first introduced the techniques, institutions, and ideas of the West deserves special attention. Performing the service of what Toynbee has called “the human counterpart of the ‘transformer,’” these were the men who learned the secrets of a foreign civilization and adapted them to their own community to enable it to adjust its life to the intrusive Western society. To some degree the whole leadership of Meiji Japan carried out this function, for soon after the Restoration the pursuit and application of knowledge from the West was made official policy. For the most part the military and political leaders were concerned with the mastery of Western military techniques and administrative and economic forms. But among the intelligentsia there were those who performed the broader task of learning and teaching the manners and morals, customs, and beliefs of European society. As advocates of Westernization they were important agents of change before as well as after the Restoration.

The Anglo-Indian community of India is one of several hybrid Eurasian populations which have found themselves in precarious social positions in some of the newly independent Asian nations. Eurasian populations originated in early periods of colonial domination when European women were scarce, and grew over the years through natural increase and occasional mixed contacts. Their original size relative to the indigenous populations and policies of both governing European and native populations have determined whether they: (1) have been submerged in the numerically dominant local population (e.g., White Russians in China); (2) have attempted to return to the European countries of their male progenitors (e.g., Indos of Indonesia); or (3) have been forced to attempt the maintenance of social and cultural solidarity as permanent minorities (e.g., Ceylonese “Burghers” and the Anglo-Indians). Events of the contemporary nationalist revolution in Asia have increased public awareness of the problems of these minority groups.

The Mongolian People's Republic completed its Second Five-Year Plan in 1957. A Thus although it has been a Soviet satellite since 1921 it has had full-scale planning of its economy for only a decade.

It is true that the Mongolian government had tried as early as 1931 to introduce ‘Five-Year Planning.’ But in that year it also tried to collectivize and settle the nomads who formed the bulk of its population. It further ordered the socialization of industry, handicrafts, transport, and trade. Finally it passed measures designed to liquidate the richer Mongols and lamas as a class. This program aroused such violent opposition that the government virtually lost its hold over the country and had to rely on Soviet tanks and airplanes to restore order. The Mongols resistance to their government's policy was probably encouraged by the general run of events in the Far East. In any case the presence of the Japanese on the Mongolian borders at the time demanded a swift resolution of the domestic crisis. The government, on regaining a grip on events, hastily abandoned its attempts to plan and to bring about sweeping social change.

An outline of the history of Confucianism in the Three Kingdoms, Silla, Koryŏ, and Yi periods and a consideration of certain political and factional problems of Confucianism in Korea occupied Part I of the present “Outline History.” Part II will now attempt to deal briefly with the schools of Confucianism as they developed during the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) and with the principal Confucian institutions of Korea.

Beginning with the classification of the schools of Yi Confucianism, we find a problem hardly less complex than the analysis of factionalism which was considered at the end of Part I of the present study. The corpus of Confucian doctrine and interpretation was vast when the dynasty opened; it increased steadily as the scholars of the contemporary Ming and Ch'ing dynasties produced their works. Within China, schools of interpretation were numerous, and their names more so. Korea inherited both the possibility of establishing on its own soil schools modeled after the Chinese and of proliferating native-grown variations.