The Stalemate North of Hokkaido
More than 60 years ago, in the last days of World War II, the Soviet Union seized the four islands north of Hokkaido from Japan, islands that Russia had recognized as Japanese for nearly 100 years prior to their occupation in late 1945. Over the course of the past six decades, the dispute over ownership of these four islands has overshadowed relations between Moscow and Tokyo, frustrating repeated efforts to sign once and for all a peace treaty formally ending the state of war between them that began in August 1945. Japan's desire for greater energy security in recent years has held out the possibility of improved relations with Russia, the world's second-largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, provided that the two nations could reach some kind of modus vivendi over the territorial issue. However, the recent Putin-Koizumi summit held in Tokyo late last year offered little hope that this might occur anytime soon. Observers in both countries are now suggesting that it may take another decade, and the passing of the generation exiled from the disputed islands, before this issue can be resolved dispassionately as a nettlesome historical problem, rather than the matter of personal loss and human dislocation that it has become.
The strange neutrality : Soviet-Japanese relations during the Second World War, 1941-1945
Japan in 1228. It is hard for us to realize that these perfectly fashioned bowls, each one sensitively potted and beautifully glazed, were the product of large shops which made them by the thousands. Plummer describes the bowls in great detail and speculates on the conditions of their manufacture and distribution, and on the cultural factors which might account for their character and function. The temmoku glaze is of great interest. The color range is narrow, including only browns, blacks, yellowish brown and bluish black. But the glaze is typically streaked or mottled, and the various types have been called "hare's fur," "partridge feather," or "oil spot." It is reasonably certain that these glazes resulted from fusible clay slips, and were in most cases composed of a single clay. The firing temperature was high, about I3OO°C. Attempts to reproduce the temmoku glaze effects usually fail because the exact materials are not available. However, in 1954 Plummer collaborated with Charles M. Harder, Willard Sutton and myself in some experiments on Hudson river clays and we succeeded in making from a single clay a perfect "partridge feather" temmoku glaze. Plummer's book does not give much information about the actual techniques employed by the Sung potters to achieve the various glazes, and one would wish that more data of this kind had been included. The book is concerned only with the temmoku wares of Chien, and there is no information about the black-glazed wares of Honan, Hopei, or Chianghsi. A discussion of these temmoku wares, and their relationship to the Chien bowls would have greatly enriched the book. Mr. Plummer has given us a rather specialized work which concentrates on one area, rather than dealing with the broader subject of Chinese temmoku as it was developed in various localities and as it was transformed in Japanese potteries at Seto during the medieval period. The book is handsomely produced and contains many interesting pictures of bowls, bowl fragments, saggers, details of glaze textures and form. Views of the river, the kiln sites and the countryside help to place the pottery in a geographical context. Only sevJOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES
Extranasal type of nasal glioma
Summary A case of a rare congenital tumor; a nasal glioma of the extranasal type has been presented which seems sufficiently unusual to be worthy of reporting. The various theories as to the origin and nature of these lesions have been discussed in the paper by Hill6 and others, 1, 2, 5 but it is the belief of the authors that most or probably all of these lesions represent a congenital malformation.