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A list of contributors for the current issue of the journal is presented, with brief biographical information, including Olivier Ansart, Janet Borland, and Hugh Clarke.

The article presents contributors to the September 1, 2007 issue of the journal "Japanese Studies." They include Timothy Amos, a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore, Olivier Ansart from the University of Sydney who specializes in Tokugawa political and moral philosophy and Celal Bayari, a Nagoya, Japan-based writer who has published about economic, social and business issues in Japan and on Australian-Japan economic relations.

Ogyu Sorai's eighteenth-century theory of rituals pushed to an unsettling conclusion the assumption made popular by many contemporary authors that internalization of social norms is better achieved through the subtle control of bodies and gestures than through coercion, threats or argumentation. Because Sorai's rituals aimed at shaping in everyday life, according to pre-determined status, body gestures, utterances, and all the objects surrounding the body, from clothes to houses, furniture and conveyances, they would have transformed life into a performance of a scripted play. They would also have represented the ideal and absolute form of authority, following Hannah Arendt's famous definition of the concept as that which elicits obedience or conformity without need for coercion or argument. The fluidity inherent in the urban life of Tokugawa Japan, however, made sure that Sorai's utopia would remain just that - and probably explains why Arendt found authority so elusive in our modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chu, usually translated as loyalty, is supposed to have been the paramount virtue of samurai, inspiring them to the selfless service of their daimyo. Analyzing the understandings of this notion among samurai thinkers of seventeenth and eighteenth century Japan, this article stresses that, far from there being one understanding of chu, many interpretations were competing with each other; it examines the various dynamics that can explain this fragmentation. One, opening the possibility of higher values, was the necessity of justifying the demands of chu. Another was the competition from other moral notions, such as the concern for one's reputation. The problems that chu inevitably encountered in practice - the dilemma of conflicting loyalties, or the rivalry from non moral goods like wealth and power - were also powerful factors. Yet another dynamic was the weakening of the private feudal bonds and the subsequent recognition of the contractual nature of many social relationships. The cumulative effect of those dynamics explains that in the end chu could even become an object of incomprehension or derision. Ultimately chu only survived because it was enlisted to construct a relationship that could withstand any test, being, quite unlike that of samurai and daimyo, purely imaginary and empty: that between the Emperor and his subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers brief profiles for contributors to the issue including the Professor at the National University of Singapore Timothy Amos, the Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds Kweku Ampiah and the lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sydney Olivier Ansart.