Two articles published in early 1992 in the monthly opinion journal Chūō kōron set off a minor debate on the essence of Japan's historical experience. The articles were written by Kawakatsu Heita, a professor of economic history at the Waseda University, as a critique of Ueyama Shunpei, a noted cultural historian. A rejoinder by Ueyama was published subsequently in the same journal, and a critique of Kawakatsu by another economic historian, Tsunoyama Sakae, also followed.

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's suicide in July 1927, coming little more than half a year after the beginning of the Shōwa period, seemed to many at the time to signify the end of an era. A number of writers and critics, for example, interpreted his death as marking the defeat of an intellectual (or aestheticized) literary practice disengaged from historical and social reality. This point was particularly emphasized by several prominent Marxist critics, who read his personal crisis as “one aspect of a collapsing bourgeoisie” (Sekiguchi 1993, 4: 334). Miyamoto Kenji crystallized this sentiment in his landmark 1929 essay, “Haiboku no bungaku” (The Literature of Defeat), in which he wrote that Akutagawa's late writings and death constituted a warning to bourgeois intellectuals of the inevitable and disastrous result of their aestheticism and hermeticism (Sekiguchi 1993, 6: 222–46). Indeed, Akutagawa's expression of “vague anxiety” as the cause of his suicide, coupled with the turbulent and transitional character of the 1920s, transformed his death from a personal, private catastrophe into a general historical allegory, an empty vessel into which a variety of narrative interpretations could be projected. In this way, Akutagawa's suicide achieved the status of an eminently historical gesture.

Terms, like monuments, long stand unchanged. They might acquire new contexts, attract new associations, and thus be transformed in content or meaning. Yet the very constancy of the term beguiles us to assume some immutable essence instead. Such has been the case for the term fangsheng, which literally means “releasing lives,” but specifically referred to the practice of freeing animals from captivity or rescuing them from death, and which I therefore translate variously as “releasing,” “liberating,” or “saving” animals. The term fangsheng is usually traced back to the fifth century, when it appeared in the Book of Brahmā's Net (Fanwang jing); and it can be tracked forward to the present, where it is still used for practices observed in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and New York. Understood to have originated in a Buddhist text and to have beenin currency for at least 1500 years, it thus signals the power and durability of a Buddhist belief.

Some historians who study medieval Chinese women have tended to neglect the situation of common women who stayed at home dealing with family affairs, preferring instead to examine the far more complete documentation on exceptional women who gained power or prominence outside the home in the largely male-dominated world. In recent years, as more historians have paid closer attention to women's daily life in medieval times, they have made great breakthroughs in drawing on a multiplicity of sources (Ebrey, 1993). Yet sometimes they are still embarrassed by the problem of insufficient materials. The oasis of Turfan, lying on the Silk Road between China and India, contains the Astana-Karakhoja graveyards that have been excavated by different explorers, both Chinese and not, since the beginning of the century. The tombs contain many goods preserved by the dry desert climate, including paper shoes, belts, and hats which Chinese scholars have pieced together to form documents. This paper draws primarily on those materials shedding light on women's activities, which most historians interested in women have yet to utilize.

While boating down the ganges delta on a visit to the Reserve Forest Tiger Sanctuary, I noticed on the bank some idols overlooking the river. When I asked about their significance, it was explained that a tiger had killed and carried off a girl; these idols were meant to ward off future attacks. Since I was on tour with a West Bengal government Secretary who had police bodyguards to protect him against pirates and tigers, we had none of the apprehensions locals experienced. As the launch continued downstream, the conversation among the government officials took an unexpected turn. They talked of a massacre in the area of Untouchable refugees who had illegally settled in the protected forest reserve: the killings were said to number in the thousands of families.