Writings of – serie

Less noticed in the West than wars, terrorism and economic trends has been the historic development since World War II of constitutional government and law in Asia. Lawrence W. Beer has been a close observer of Asian linkages among law, politics, culture, and national security issues for over fifty years. His perspectives have been refined during long residence in Asia, especially Japan, by substantial friendly interactions with Asian legal scholars, judges and attorneys involved in the world of human rights constitutional law. This volume, which will be widely welcomed by students and researchers, brings together a selection of Beer’s many works previously published in diverse venue, but no longer easily accessible. The collection opens with a review of constitutionalism in Asia and the United States and concludes with a recent examination of Japan’s rejection of war: ‘Japan’s Constitutional Discourse and Performance’. By way of Afterword, the author offers an in-depth review of ‘Globalization of Human Rights in the 21st Century’.

Britain’s foremost scholar of the international shipping industry, based at the Centre for Port and Maritime History, University of Liverpool, here examines the growth and development of Japan’s modern shipping and shipbuilding industries across a wide range of topics, through the pre-war, Pacific War and post-war periods, to the transfer of shipping technology, the role of bulk carriers and world trade and the organization and structure of the Japanese merchant navy. Prompted originally by his research into the decline of the British industries in a global context, his focus inevitably turned to Japan which in the post-war years had replaced Britain as the world’s largest ship operators and ship owners and remains so today.

It was Louis Allen’s work on Japan which dominated his prodigious output as a scholar, researcher and writer and which received greatest attention internationally. This collection of his writings focuses entirely on his principal fields of research, viz, Japan and the Pacific War, the post-war conflicts in Burma, Malaya and Indochina, and the immediate post-war years in the context of Japan, security and reconciliation. Importantly, in addition to the 24 essays brought together here from both known and unknown sources, we are pleased to publish for the first time Louis Allen’s own undated autobiographical paper entitled ‘Innocents Abroad: Investigating War Crimes in South-East Asia’, providing a unique, first-hand account of his war-time life and activities. This volume also includes a complete bibliography of Louis Allen’s writings covering all disciplines.