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.

One of the perquisites of age is reminiscence. It is the function of the historian to recount the past. As one of the elders of our fellowship and as a historian it would seem to be both my privilege and my duty on this occasion to trace the course of Far Eastern studies in the United States since I first became familiar with them. We are told on the authority of an ancient book which has come to us from the Orient that “your old men shall dream dreams.” It may not be amiss, therefore, not only to survey the past, but also to attempt, in the light of that past to look into the future and to formulate such dreams for it as that past and the prospect for the future inspire.

According to traditional Indian belief and practice every creature has a function (vrata) which he fulfills in the universe. What function did the artist or craftsman fulfill in society, and in that other invisible part of the universe, which he was able to convey by his work to those around him and to posterity?

The distinction often made in the West between artist and craftsman did not affect India. The practitioner of one of the sixty-four recognized branches of art (kala), which provided channels for every possible kind of creative endowment to be trained and employed, fulfilled his calling in the best way possible to him, and thus carried out his universal task.

The concept of “Sanskritization” was found useful by me in the analysis of the social and religious life of the Coorgs of South India. A few other anthropologists who are making studies of tribal and village communities in various parts of India seem to find the concept helpful in the analysis of their material, and this fact induces me to attempt a re-examination of it here.

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.

Many Japanese rose to political greatness during the turbulent history of modern Japan from the collapse of the Tokugawa regime in 1867 to the recovery of independence in 1952. Such men as Itō, Yamagata, Ōkuma, Konoe, Tōjō, and Yoshida (to name only a few of the more important figures) have occupied in turn the center of the political stage and exerted great influence, for good or ill, on the course of recent Japanese political history.

Throughout the entire period from Meiji to MacArthur Japan, however, one solitary figure stood by the proscenium arch, occasionally entering into the action of the play, but more often serving as a persistent critic of both actors and audience. This stern and durable individual was Ozaki Yukio (1858-1954), whose death at the age of ninety-five removed the oldest veteran of the Japanese Diet, and closed the career of a man who might well be called the political conscience of modern Japan.

Out of that anthropology which rested on studies of isolated primitive or tribal peoples arose the concept, “a culture.” The Andamanese had a culture, the Trobrianders, the Aranda of Australia, and the Zuni. Each culture came to be conceived as an independent and self-sufficient system. Recently words have been found to make clear this conception of an “autonomous cultural system.” It is “one which is self-sustaining—that is, it does not need to be maintained by a complementary, reciprocal, subordinate, or other indispensable connection with a second system.” Such units—such cultures as those of the Zuni or the Andamanese—are systems because they have their own mutually adjusted and interdependent parts, and they are autonomous because they do not require another system for their continued functioning. The anthropologist may see in such a system evidences of past communications of elements of culture to that band or tribe from others, but, as it now is, he understands that it keeps going by itself; and in describing its parts and their workings he need not go outside the little group itself. The exceptions, where the band or tribe relies on some other band or tribe for a commodity or service, are small and do not seriously modify the fact that that culture is maintained by the communication of a heritage through the generations of just those people who make up the local community.

Even if one uses Sanskrit only as the instrument of investigation, it is apparent that Indian culture was a current which, as it flowed and spread, was fed by many a stream and absorbed many a small and stagnant pool. With volume, it gathered often bewildering variety, which was synthesized in a systematic plan. That diverse sources contributed to its making is obvious, but to identify each of them, to survey all the material accepted, and to be reasonably precise in the innumerable details that such a study involves, seems a stupendous and baffling task. It is possible, however, to point out certain instances in which the main tradition embraced smaller group-cultures and incorporated regional elements. As this culture became consolidated throughout India, it employed certain characteristic methods wherever it went, not only in India and the peripheral regions, but in all those trans-Indian territories to which it expanded. Sanskrit was the ultimate medium of transmission used by the main body of this culture and Sanskritization the chief technique of the take-over. Hence an examination of Sanskrit literature, in its different branches, will prove useful in investigating the incorporation of regional and folk elements. Without going into questions of pre-Vedic or Indus Valley cultures, or the problem of contributions by Munda, Austric, Dravidian, and Mongoloid, data can be found in Sanskrit literature which help to illuminate Hindu sociology, religion, and the arts during the historic period.

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.

It is not wrong to say that the nature and intent of a society reveal themselves in the legal and customary concepts of property held by the various members and classes of that society. These property concepts do not change without an incipient or fundamental change in the nature of the society itself. The history of property relations in a given society is thus, in a way, the history of the society itself.

The problem of the economic condition of the peasantry in societies in the early stages of an industrial revolution has long been a matter of interest to economic historians, and recently it has been taken up by economists concerned with the contemporary problem of economic development. The prototype has traditionally been the career of the peasantry in England during the period after 1750. The classical description of the fate of this peasantry is well known, a tale of ruthless enclosure, steady increase in landless day laborers, and a persistent decline in the standard of life. The ablest description of this process in the venerable vein can be found in the writings of Arnold Toynbee, Paul Mantoux, and John and Barbara Hammond. Since about 1925, however, the canonical view of the career of the English peasantry has come under serious attack by J. H. Clapham, T. S. Ashton, and J. D. Chambers. In fact, the older view so passionately explored by the Hammonds has been much modified, and a new picture of the impact of the industrial revolution on the peasantry is slowly emerging.

During a visit with my wife to India in 1954–1955 I had an opportunity to do a methodological field study in South India. The purpose of this study was to chart an intellectual map of some of the researchable territory that lies between the culture of a village or small community and the culture of a total civilization. This study is not easy to classify in terms of prevailing conceptions about “research,” since it is something that falls between the intensive anthropological field study and the purely conceptual types of methodological analysis. But despite its unorthodox character, it seemed an appropriate type of study to undertake in a new and not well known field. Although the study was primarily designed to serve the methodological purpose of giving an empirical content to some very general ideas and to suggest concrete hypotheses for further research, it also turned up some substantive findings which have importance on their own account. In this report I shall mention some of these in passing but will in the main confine myself to the problems of method posed by the study. A more detailed and documented account of the entire study is in preparation.

The current Chinese language reform movement is of the most profound cultural and political importance in China itself as well as to foreign students of the area. Its goal is within a relatively short period to standardize the basic northern dialect as the common national language of China and to replace traditional Chinese characters with a phonetic script. As Mao Tse-tung stated in 1951: “The written language must be reformed; it should follow the common direction of phoneticization which has been taken by the world's languages.”

Japan's role in Far Eastern history has been unique in many respects. Traditionally an integral part of the Chinese zone of civilization, Japan has nonetheless demonstrated a marked ability to remain independent of continental influence. In recent years Japan's remarkable record of adjustment to the conditions imposed upon her by the spread of Western civilization to the Orient has raised the provocative question of why Japan, of all Far Eastern societies, should be the first to climb into the ranks of the modern industrial powers. Is it possible, as one scholar has suggested, that Japan “has been the country which has diverged the most consistently and markedly from Far Eastern norms, and these points of difference have been by and large, points of basic resemblance to the West”?

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 first decade of the Meiji era, 1868-77, was a period of bewildering experiment in political forms for the nation-state emerging in Japan. The administrative structure of the new central government underwent a kaleidoscopic series of forms ranging from the direct copy of an eighth-century Japanese pattern to a system modelled on the American doctrine of separation of powers. First in Kyoto and later in Tokyo, during the 1870's and 1880's, government departments rapidly divested themselves of ancient nomenclature derived from China and assumed the forms of European administration as the Japanese tried increasingly to demonstrate that they knew how to run a government in western fashion.