This ICAS supplement to The Newsletter # 56 stands in a tradition of supplements devoted to both the ICAS Book Prize (IBP) and to publishing in relation to Asian Studies: ‘Publishing in Asian Studies’ (ICAS 4/2005); ‘Academic Publishing Today’ (ICAS 5/2007) and ‘Choice in Academic Publishing’ (ICAS 6/2009). This supplement focuses on book series in the field of Asian studies.

While going through the nearly 200 books submitted for the IBP 2011 in August of last year, we were struck by the great number and variety of series into which the books were organized. Almost half the books were published in one of more than 50 series. Worldwide there are over 100 such series. The attention paid to the series relationship in the books was quite uneven. In the majority of cases only scant information is included on the series as such: often only the name of the series is printed on the (back) cover. Then there is a fair number of cases in which both the series and the series editors(s) are mentioned. Only for a couple of series did we find full series information: a series description, a list of editor(s), the editorial board, and an overview of books published and forthcoming books in the series. This is the basic information the reader needs to contextualize the book series.

There are big cultural diff erences in the way leadership is exercised from country to country. In some places, there are historic patterns of strong, personal leadership. Others prefer consensual forms of power, where, if there is a prime minister or president, they are at best only ‘fi rst amongst equals.’ Some political cultures have strong aversions to the kind of rhetoric-loving, ostentatious country heads that one sometimes gets in the west.

ASIA CONTAINS EXAMPLES of almost all of these approaches. The diversity of its political models must be the most extensive in the world. Even the ten members of the Association of South East Asian Nations encompass liberal democracies, monarchies, and outright dictatorships. The Asian region extends from robust, new democracies like Indonesia, to trenchant one party states like North Korea and China, to any number of systems in between. Democracy in Japan has only recently seen an opposition party gain real power, after almost half a century of dominance by one party. In the Philippines, there remain plenty of questions of just how much benefi t the oldest democratic system in the region has delivered to its people, in terms of economics, accountability and stability.

No comprehensive and authoritative history of science and technology of India has till today been written that would be even remotely comparable to the achievement of Joseph Needham (1900-1995) for China, through his still continuing series Science and Civilisation in China or SCC (1954- ). One of the reasons is no doubt that much substantial spade work on the history of science and technology in India remains to be done before such an encyclopedic project can be undertaken.

JUST AS MUCH OF HIS OTHER RESEARCH, the present work of Prof. Dr. Sreeramula Rajeswara Sarma would provide a reliable basis at least for important sections of an SCC-like history of science and technology of India. This also applies to a still ongoing project of Prof. Sarma’s, a descriptive catalogue of “all extant Indian instruments in all private and public collections in India and abroad, with historical surveys of the development of each instrument-type, its use and geographic spread, and a full technical description of each” (Sarma, The Archaic and the Exotic [AE], p. 27).

Sarma’s AE contains fi fteen chapters divided over four parts. The author explains the title as follows: “The history of astronomical instrumentation in India is dominated by two mutually contradictory – yet complementary – currents: on the one hand the resilience of certain archaic instruments that held sway for long even after they had become obsolete; on the other, Indian astronomers’ receptivity to exotic instruments from other cultures. Hence the title of the volume: The Archaic and the Exotic” (AE, p. 13).

Thirty years ago, under a strict socialist regime which prohibited private-sector activities in education and other sectors, China was very different from its capitalist neighbours in East Asia. Now it increasingly resembles them. The scale of shadow education is among the similarities. But China still has some distinctive characteristics.

With 208 million children in primary and secondary schools, China’s education system is the largest in the world.1 Like the country as a whole, the education system has undergone radical shifts in the last three decades. One dimension has been the nationwide emergence of the shadow system of supplementary private tutoring.

In some respects, the shadow education system in China resembles that in its East Asian neighbours. However, China has some distinctive ingredients in the dynamics of change. First is the dramatic economic growth of the last few decades, which has given families disposable incomes beyond their greatest dreams. Second is the one-child-family policy, which means that parents can concentrate their increased incomes on just one child. And third has been the emergence of new avenues for social mobility, which have increased competition between families. Add to that the traditions of a Confucian culture that value learning and diligence, and the stage seems to be set for massive growth of private supplementary tutoring. And that is precisely what is occurring.

For the past five years or so, I have answered questions about my research interests in Japan very simply: “juku” ( ). Generally, this is met with a surprised look, so that I specify further: “academic juku” ( ), but that only seems to resolve this puzzle to a small extent.

It seems st range to many Japanese interlocutors that any scholar would concern himself with supplementary education (juku being the catch-all term for the various forms of schools within the supplementary education industry that parallel conventional primary and secondary schools), even though virtually all of these same interlocutors would concede that their children – if they have any – are attending or have attended juku. The existence of juku is taken for granted to an extent in Japan that no aspects of this industry are questioned by scholars, and juku and supplementary education more broadly are still marred by the whiff of the slightly illegitimate, along the lines of “It’s too bad juku exist, but it can’t be helped.”