During the Meiji era, foreign trade in such treaty ports as Yokohama facilitated the entry of much acute infectious disease into Japan. The morbidity caused by such disease was so high that city authorities were forced to take preventive measures. In 1879, the Yokohama Local Board of Health (YLBH) was organized to deal with an Asiatic cholera epidemic and consisted of Kanagawa prefectural officers, local leaders and medical physicians, both Japanese and foreign. Since the Japanese authorities could not impose the Board's rulings directly upon foreigners, the Prefecture decided to employ foreign doctors to deal indirectly with sanitation problems in the foreign settlement there. Focusing on the administrative side of the YLBH, the author argues that 1) Kanagawa Prefecture was able to establish disease control throughout the Yokohama treaty-port and 2) by virtue of foreign physicians taking the initiative within the YLBH, it was their organizational skills, medical know-how and ideas that determined the sanitary measures implemented throughout the treaty-port. Large-scale measures, like the development and construction of toilet facilities and implementation of hygienic inspections, deserves special mention, since it was such measures that contributed significantly to the sanitary improvements that occurred in Yokohama under the YLBH. In addition, the successful efforts of the YLBH did not go unnoticed by the Japanese central government, which then instituted a similar system of local boards of health in all of Japan's prefectures.

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It was in 926 AD that Bohai was conquered by Yelu-Abaozhi 耶律阿保機, founder of the Kitai 契丹 (Liao 遼) Dynasty and was designated as Dongdanguo 東丹国. There were many aspects of Dongdanguo that had escaped researchers until 1992, when the inscribed epitaph of Yelu-Yuzu 耶律羽之 was discovered. In this article, the author first investigates the genealogy contained in the inscription and concludes that the leaders of Yelu Abaozhi's tribe (迭剌部 Dielabu) participated in the governance of Dongdanguo. At that time, the Dielabu had been broken up in order to control its burgeoning power over the other seven tribes, necessitating a redistribution of land and people for the purpose of herding. Dongdanguo was established by allocating authority over Bohai to such members of the Dielabu as the brothers of Yelu-Yuzu. In other words, in the background of the establishment of Dongdanguo there lay not only the problem of governing the former subjects of Bohai, but also the aspect of a nomadic state distributing land and human resources among its members. Secondly, the author puts the bureaucratic chaos of Dongdanguo described in the existing source materials into better perspective based on the inscription. Here, the former bureaucratic system of Bohai, with such offices as Daneixiang 大内相, was not only kept in tact to govern Bohai, but was also instituted as a means for organizing Kitai tribes ; that is, adapted to Kitai society itself. Finally, concerning the reason for moving the capital of Eastern Kitai to Liaoyan 遼陽, the inscription shows that king of Kitai was involved in a decision based on the proximity of Liaoyan to the territory controlled by the Dielabu, rather than the conventional explanation that the move was motivated by the desire to monitor the activities of Yelu-tuyu 耶律突欲, the king of Dongdanguo. There is also the view in the research to date that Dongdanguo did not in fact exist, but the discovery of the inscription clearly shows that Dongdanguo was incorporated into the ruling class of Kitai tribal politics, adapted to its nomadic society and was a functioning polity.

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The objective of the present article is to investigate the activities of the (Rikken-) Minsei Party (1927-1940) under Japan's national consensus governments of the 1930s, especially its extreme opposition to the claim that the will of the people was being usurped, leading to its refusal to form a government. To begin with, the author examines the process by which the Party decided upon a national consensus platform under the leadership of Wakatsuki Reijiro 若槻礼次郎. The Party's two main factions, led by Wakatsuki and Kawasaki Takukichi 川崎卓吉, respectively, reacted violently to the claim that that they had usurped the will of the people and chose to abandon any effort to form a partisan government. This claim came from the movement to reduce the sentences of the conspirators involved in the 15 May 1932 assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi by a group of young naval officers, which held the Minsei Party responsible for the London Arms Limitations Treaty of 1930. On the other hand, the opposition faction formed within the Party by Ugaki Kazushige 宇垣一成 and Tomita Kojiro 富田幸次郎 took charge of movements to activate the party politics within the Diet and promote cooperation between the public and private sectors in attempts to find a way to form a Minsei Party government. Then the discussion turns to the efforts by Ugaki to form a new party from within after Wakatsuki stepped down in August 1934, followed by a wavering in the Party's national consensus line, and finally the establishment of such a platform under the leadership of Machida Chuji 町田忠治. The new party movement ended in failure after Ugaki's refusal to stand for party chairman, resulting in the election of Machida. Then leadership of the public-private sector cooperation movement was assumed by Kawasaki, while Tomita abandoned efforts to form a government. The 19^<th> party elections of 1936 pitted Tomita's call for partisan politics against Machida and Kawasaki's appeal for national consensus, as the Machida-Kawasaki line emerged victorious, from which time on, the Minsei Party made no further effort to form a partisan government in the world of Japanese politics following the 26 February 1936 coup d'etat attempt.

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