The research on the Chinese Maritime Customs Service during the early Republican period is generally based upon a given premise that the Customs Service/the Inspector General represented the imperialist powers. This viewpoint prevails especially in the matter of customs revenue, which is commonly regarded as an important part of China's government revenue controlled by the Inspector General as an imperialist. Both the so-called control over the customs revenue and the so-called relationship between the Inspector General and the powers there, however, are not always investigated thoroughly enough to prove them to be true. In this paper, through reexamination of these points, the role of the Customs Service/the Inspector General between 1912 and 1926 is placed in its true light, so as to reappraise the above-mentioned premise. During this period, the Customs Service constituted a de facto 'caisse de la dette,' which at first had been exclusively foreign, but then began to turn domestic in part. China's customs revenue, which had been committed entirely to pre-1900 foreign loans and the Boxer Indemnity, was also appropriated for some domestic loans after World War I. That was made possible only by the Inspector General supervising the collection and disposal of the customs revenue. In the meantime, he came to have control over the customs revenue surplus to secure domestic loans regardless of the interests of either the foreign powers or the Chinese government, central or provincial. In this respect, the Inspector General came into conflict with the Southern Government, foreign creditors, the Diplomatic Body and the Foreign Offiice. On the other hand, this transformation involved the incorporation of the Inspector General's credit into the financial system of China. Since the Peking government's fiscal debt and the treaty, port economy surrounding the Chinese modern banks were linked to each other through the medium of domestic loans, both of them could not but depend on the Inspector General's credit. This system led to a definite fiscal distinction between the central government and provincial authorities thereafter. The role of the Inspector General in the 1920's is, therefore, embodied not always in foreign predominance over China, but typically in the financial structure of China bound up with domestic and foreign obligations of the central government.

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The Thessalian Confederacy played an important role in the course of the conquest of Greece by Philip II. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between the Third Sacred War and Philip's invasion in the context of Thessalian history. At the time of the outbreak of the Sacred War in 356 B.C., we find no conflict within the Thessalians, but the next year, tyranny was revived in Pherai and set to recover the rule of Thessaly, in alliance with Phocis, who had occupied Delphi and provoked the Sacred War. In oppositon to them, the Thessalians urged Philip to support them, which forced him to concern himself directly with the Sacred War. In 354 B.C., the allied forces of Phocis and Pherai defeated the Thessalians and the Macedonians, and gained superiority in Thessaly. Then, at least three polis stood for Pherai. In 353 B.C., Philip marched south again. In the Crocus Plain, the Macedonian and the Thessalian army enjoyed a great victory over the Phocians and the Pheraians. Philip banished the tyrants from Pherai and recovered the unification of the Thessalian Confederacy. During the same year, the Thessalians appointed Philip as archon of the Confederacy for life. It was the Aleuadai, the great aristocrats of Larissa, who proposed this appointment. They had had friendly relations with the Macedonian royal house since the fifth century, but it was unprecedented for a Greek state to entrust their supreme power to a foreign king. Why did this occur ? In the first place, the Aleuadai aimed at exterminating the Pheraian tyranny and unifying Thessaly under their hegemony. Because they have not been able to control the Pheraian tyranny by themselves since c.400 B.C., they decided to rely on Philip, even if it meant that they had to be content with the position of an ally subordinate to Philip. Secondly, the offensive of Pherai and Phocis in 354 B.C. was so critical to the unification of Thessaly that the Thessalians welcomed Philip as a liberator of the confederacy. Thirdly, there was a profound suspicion among the Thessalian cities. The Aleuadai chose to give the office of archon to Philip, who was a reliable ally rather than to share it with the other cities. Finally, Philip was not a mere foreigner to the Aleuadai, because they and the Macedonian royal house alleged that the Heracleidai were their common ancestors. On the other hand, Thessaly was extremely valuable to Philip both in securing the south frontier of his kingdom and in its abundant resources. Now Philip 'legitimately' gained it. In the end, the complicated situation of Thessalian politics, connected with the course of the Third Sacred War, opened the way to Philip' invasion of the south.

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The clarification of the actual relationships between authorized Buddhist sect temples and their patrons (danka 壇家) is necessary if we are to 1)better our understanding of religious policy and registration of community members under the Tokugawa regime, 2)discover the actual patterns of everyday life in rural and urban Japanese society during that time, and 3)expand the study of ideas existing among the various social strata of the time. In the research on the subject to date, scholars have come to understand the relationship (jidan 寺壇 relationship) in the literal sence and have proceeded to investigate the relationship from the viewpoint of the relationship between political power and Buddhism or the common people. However, at the same time, we should also try to understand this relationship between temples and their patrons in terms of the organization of the congregations themselves, referred to in the source materials as danchu 壇中, thus focussing on the relationships between patrons. This viewpoint also demands that we look at the relationships between patrons and non-patrons of a temple living in the same area: that is, the relationship between those who were members of speciflc danchu and those who were not, resulting in an important insight on the local society around a given temple. In reality, temple-patron relationships were much more complicated in many areas depending on regional characteristics, and each member of a local community was entangled in patron relationship to different temples in the area. It is this intricate pattern of jidan relationships that is the focus of the present paper: that is, the author is attempting to examine the relationship between temples and their patrons in terms of the patron organization and the entanglement of belief systems in any one village or local area. For this purpose, he presents the case of the area around the village of Yoita 与板, Santo-Gun 三島郡, in the region of Shimo-Echigo 下越後. Shin 真 Buddhism has been predominant around the area. After clarifying the local patron organizations, he attempts to place the resulting temple-patron relationships in terms of beliefs by going beyond the temple-patron relationships and viewing, the total relationship between the religious institutions and the local community as a whole through an analysis of local kami 神 beliefs, centering around village guardian deities, in addition to a description of how the Yoita branch of the Nishi-Honganji 西本願寺 Shin sect was established. From these examples, he concludes that 1)a village-level patron organization existed with the function of not only local beliefs but the relationship between the patron organization and its patron temple (danna-dera 檀那寺), or religious sect, and 2)a relationship that transcended relationships between individual temples and their patrons also existed, which tied local religious institutions (shrines and temples alike) to all local groups and individuals.

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