Ardath W. Burks

The City, Political Change, and Modernization in Japan

I T is difficult to understand how anyone can generalize about political change (spontaneous or directed) and modernization without reference to Asia (more specifically to the urban experience of Japan). And yet data on and analysis of the urban phenomenon in Asia remain scarce. Academic studies have concentrated on the venerable Great Tradition, of East Asia for example, or on the so-called Little Tradition of village Asia.’ On the policy-centered, operations front, domestic national plans have paid close attention to the rural community; a generation of point four assistance technicians and peace corpsmen have been trained and have labored near the rice roots of tradition at the village level. From one point of view this is as it should be, for the village in eastern and

The William Elliot Griffis Collection

The William Elliot Griffis Collection in the Rutgers University Library, New Brunswick, New Jersey, embraces material on Japan, Korea, and China. It is contained in twenty-nine legal-size manuscript file cases: twenty relate to Japan; four to Korea; three to China; and one contains miscellaneous data. The collection is now in shelf order and the following is a summary of the arrangement of the Griffis papers.