Nara and Kyoto

The Japanese people of today speak of the Yamato plain, nurtured by the low, wooded hills of Nara, as the cradle of Japanese culture. It was in these environs, now level with waving rice, that Japanese history first emerged out of the mists of mythology, with the coming of the Emperor Jimmu into its seclusion, there to establish a rule which has extended unbroken through twenty-six centuries of imperial power. Since that time there has been a succession of imperial seats, set here and there over that plain, each as transitory as the essential power has been permanent. These evanescent dwelling places of royalty have left little visible trace, but the essence of their passing has added a ponderable something to the atmosphere of this place, a sense of ancientness sensible even to the alien who treads the soil and one to which the Japanese patriot is acutely sensitive. This is the psychic environment of Nara. Nara itself is the visible embodiment of that spirit, preserved in red-lacquered Shinto shrines and dim Buddhist temples redolent of a thousand dusty years of existence, and in quiet parks-the age-long haunts of temple cedar, gentle deer, the transient devotee pilgrim. And nothing has come in, from the hurrying outside world of today, sufficiently potent to change the spirit and the brooding beauty of this ancient place. On the contrary, one feels that it must itself subtly alter whatever comes within its quiet influence. So perhaps this new Pacific life, beginning now to be shaped through the conscious efforts of its widely separated humankind, may in its plan and direction feel the impress of these surroundings. There is a certain fitness-the fitness of the bizarre, perhaps-in the fact that here, where one of the most remote and long-secluded civilizations of the world had its origin, the council of a new Pacific internationalism should be laying its future plans. On October 23 the Pacific Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations met at Nara to deal with the business of the biennium just past and to make decisions for the Institute's future. On the same day the Program Committee, created for the occasion, met to draft a preliminary schedule for the conference sessions at Kyoto. The International Research Committee, a standing committee headed by Dr. James T. Shotwell, with Dr. J. B. Condliffe of the Central Secretariat as Secretary, here undertook its deliberations looking toward the continuation of the research program already under way and the formulation of projects for the succeeding two years. At the opening session of the Pacific Council Dr. David Z. T. Yui of China was in the chair, filling as second vice-chairman the post successively vacated this year by Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur and the Hon. Junno

Political science · Economic Zones and Regional Development · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Japanese History and Culture