"Revolution was still in the air in Berlin (the venue for the triennial conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies) in September 1991", notes the editor, Ian Neary, in his introduction to these papers from the first post-Cold War international Japanese Studies conference. "The previous month an attempted coup by army officers in Moscow had seemed poised to reverse the liberalization of the Soviet Union. Its failure led to the rapid unravelling of the Soviet state, a process whose consequences are still not at all clear. What is clear and what was commonly felt, is that we had been witnessing, even participating in a series of events at least as important for Russia and the wider world as was the Meiji Ishin (the Imperial Restoration of 1868) for Japan and world history". The historical range of the papers, including contributions from Eastern European scholars, is very broad; from a discussion of the Tokugawa view of Japan's place in the world to the relevance of the "Japanese model" for the future development of Eastern Europe. Among the other papers are an examination of how the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe were viewed in Japan, Russian interpretations of the events of the late 19th century and accounts of two groups offering alternative views of Japan and her future, the anarchist labour union movement and the "Shinshin Fujinkai", the "True New Women's Movement".