Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the study of Eastern Asia occupied a marginal position in American education. Each crisis in the Far East, such as the Manchurian “incident” of 1931 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese conflict in 1937, had increased interest in China and Japan in American schools and among Americans at large, but even so the development of Far Eastern studies in the United States had been unimpressive. In general, the higher one rose in the school system of the United States the better chance one had of learning something about the peoples and cultures of Eastern Asia. In elementary and secondary schools the Far East was almost entirely overlooked; at the undergraduate level in colleges and universities there were a relatively few courses offered; in a few graduate schools it was possible to secure the M.A. or the Ph.D. with emphasis on some phase of Far Eastern studies.

The Life and thoughts of every subject of the Emperor of Japan have been guided at every point by an incredibly meticulous officialdom. Accepted as a truism in Occidental discussions, this miracle has escaped critical analysis. That aspect of Japanese governance which through sumptuary laws and minatory regulations grinds so exceedingly small that everything in the life of the individual conforms to authoritative patterns merits detailed analysis.

During the war of 1941–1945, with a minimum transfer of effective authority to local governments, the Imperial Government was able so completely to control its subjects that the pull of a string in Tokyo produced a response from any one or all of the 73 million rippana nihonjin from Hokkaido to Kyushu. The degree to which the wartime controls of the Japanese Government were efficient and effective was due in part to the psychological homogeneity of the Japanese people. To no lesser extent was it due to the centralized nature of Japanese government, to those institutions and techniques peculiar to Japanese life which have tended to concentrate authority in the central government.

It Has been pointed out often enough in recent years that we moderns are dependent at every turn upon goods brought to us from the ends of the world. Some one once took the trouble to count up the number of countries that make their contribution to the typical American breakfast. The total was an amazing one.

But what if one were to attempt to analyze the sources of the ideas and attitudes which are common among us? Would he not find there also the flowing together of a vast variety of influences from widely diversified sources? What the social scientists call interpenetration of cultures is always going on, when diverse cultures come into any kind of contact, and contact of the most distantly separated peoples has become easily possible in recent years through the rapid shrinking of our world.