Meeting of US and Japanese Historians

With the generous support of the Hen­ry Luce Foundation, the AHA sponsored, jointly with the National Commit­tee of Japanese Historians, a meeting of the Conference of United States-Japa­nese Historians, held in conjunction with the eightieth annual meeting of the AHA’s Pacific Coast Branch, at Occi­dental College and the Huntington Li­brary, August 16–19. The last US-Japanese Historians’ Conference had been held in Japan in 1983. As a result of consultations between William H. McNeill for the AHA and Masao Ni­shikawa for the NCJH, plans were made in 1985 for a summer conference in the United States in 1987, with Chinese history as the main subject of inquiry. A committee was appointed consisting of Akira Iriye (University of Chicago), Chair; Philip Kuhn (Harvard); and K.C. Liu (University of California, Davis).

Topics of the panels at the conference were: Imperial Authority and Bureaucracy in Sung China; Economy and So­ciety Under the Sung; The Continuity (and, as it turned out, also discontinui­ties) of Social History from Sung through Ming; Modern Chinese His­tory: New Research Inquiries and Prob­lems of Teaching; and East Asian Inter­national Relations.

The Japanese participants were: Pro­fessor Sadao Nishijima, head of the delegation, and Professors Tokushi Kasa­hara, Mamoru Kawakatsu, Hideo Ko­bayashi, Tsuyoshi Kojima, Masao Nishikawa, Masaaki Oyama, Yoshinobu Shiba, and Setsuko Yanagida. In addi­tion to Akira Iriye and K.C. Liu, American participants included: Professors William S. Atwell, Wellington, K.K. Chan, John W. Dardess, Roger Ding­man, Patricia B. Ebrey, Joshua A. Fogel, Charlotte Furth, Immanuel Hsu, David Johnson, James Lee, Stephen R. Mac­Kinnon, Brian E. McKnight, Evelyn S. Rawski, Conrad Schirokauer, Richard Shek, John E. Wills, Jr., and R. Bin Wong.

The History Department at Occidental College performed yeoman service in the matter of local arrangements for both the PCB and the US-Japanese Historians meetings. Impressive hospi­tality was offered by Occidental College and the Huntington Library, and a din­ner party was held in honor of the Japanese visitors at the California Insti­tute of Technology.

Those present at the meeting ex­pressed warm interest and satisfaction in this mutual discussion of topics of American historians of China, and in this opportunity to meet and converse with colleagues in their field from the two countries. Some thirty auditors at the conference panels were enthusiastic. Richard Shek was meticulous as aca­demic interpreter, and Professors Lynne Miyake and Yoko Pusavat served ably as general interpreters. K.C. Liu’s presidential address to the PCB meet­ing, “Chinese Merchant Guilds: A Historical Inquiry,” was relevant to the area of interest at the conference. Akira Iriye, the AHA’s president-elect, was discussant at the final panel on East Asian International Relations.