JAPANESE instructors in American history now have a superb six-volume set of sources and commentary to which they can direct their students.' It is fitting that American studies in Japan, although quite "new," should begin with the documents, for no aspect of the historical tradition of modern Japan is more striking than the zeal to assemble and publish the texts. It is a trend that began with Hokiichi Hanawa (I745-i822)2 and has its most remarkable product in the chronologically arranged series of sources issued by the Tokyo University Historiographical Institute, a project (begun in I902) that now totals close to four hundred volumes and that shows no signs of slowing down. While our historians prefer to use the sources, and publishers quail before the costs of assembling them, Japanese historians prefer to make them available before drawing on them for analytical treatment. Thus it is typical that little work on the Meiji Restoration preceded the publication of the i86 volumes of papers assembled by the Association for Japanese Historical Sources (Nihon Shiseki Ky5kai) between I9I5 and I93I. In the United States, despite the considerable volume of American studies of Japan, we have until recently had available only one documentary collection, and that by a Japanese.3 Genten Amerika shi was a decade in preparation. A study group began weekly meetings in I948 and met over two hundred times before the completion of Volume V, the originally anticipated terminal point (I940) in