Matthew Calbraith Perry visited Japan twice, in July 1853 and the early spring of the following year. On the first visit he successfully delivered President Filmore's letter addressed to the Emperor of Japan to the Shogun's representatives at Kurihama on the 14th of July. Along with the Presidential communication asking for the opening of Japan, Perry presented his own “three” letters addressed to the Emperor of Japan. But according to the Japanese sources, Dai Nihon ko monjo available since 1910 in a published form (Tokyo University Press), there was a “fourth” letter handed presumably on the same day to the Bakufu officials along with “two” white flags. The letter explained that in case of war between the United States and Japan, Japan was bound to be defeated. “Then Japan should ask for peace by hoisting the flags.”
Curiously enough, this piece of document has never been seriously considered in the historiography of U. S. -Japanese relations. Even at the height of the anti-American campaign of the post-Pearl Harbor years during the Pacific War, that intimidating letter of Perry's was never mentioned in Japanese literature. A natural question arises: How did this happen? One obvious reason, as was discovered in the course of research for this essay, was attributable to Perry himself. He destroyed it from all American sources to keep his record clean from having deviated from the President's explicit instructions not to resort to hostile actions as the mission was for friendly relations.
No mention had ever been made of the letter and the flags in American literature until a partial exception was made by Peter Booth Wiley in 1990 based on an English translation from the Japanese documents noted above. The Japanese scholars who assumed that all the primary sources were apparently to be found in the United States duplicated the American writers' mistakes. Still it does not seem fully to answer the question why the Japanese writers, among them especially the specialists in American diplomacy toward Japan, had not become aware of the existence of the document in two versions of Japanese translation in a published form since 1910.
There are many conceivable reasons. But one outstanding cause which this essay explores concerns Inazo Nitobe. In his virgin book, The Intercourse between The United States and Japan: A Historical Sketch (The Johns Hopkins University, 1891), he came close enough to disclosing the threatening letter of Perry's but refrained from doing so. He presented even a Japanese document which had an explicit reference to the “white flags, ” but from his abridged English translation, Nitobe chose to drop the reference even by distorting the meaning of the paragraph. In his mind U. S. -Japanese relations were much too precious to be adversely affected by the reminder of such an episode. His students of American studies at the Imperial University of Tokyo in the 1910's and their students after them must have accepted it as a tradition.
It is indeed proverbial that while Perry destroyed a historical document for the preservation of his own honor and his illustrious family's record in U. S. history, Nitobe and his students kept it away from public knowledge for the sake of Japan's smooth passage into a “civilized and enlightened” modern nation in friendship and “mutual understanding” with the American nation.

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The Glossary of English and Japanese Words' written by Ranald MacDonald (1824 -1894) contains a few words peculiar to the dialects of Northeastern Japan and those of Kyushu. About the Kyushu dialect, there have been comments by numbers of scholars, however, about the Northeastern dialect, no one but Dr. Yoshio Yoshimachi, has ever suggested the existence of Northeastern dialect in the MacDonald's 'Glossary'.
This paper attempts to find out some phonological regularities in descriptions in the vocabulary of the 'Glossary' and determine the words in questions whether they are dialectal words or not, referring to the phonological characteristics observed in both dialects at present.
Regarding the fact that MacDonald had been captured in Ezo, the present Hokkaido, for almost 3 months before being sent to Nagasaki, he must have heard the Japanese language spoken in that area. His first Japanese informant, Tangaro, is likely to be a temporary employee of the guard house in Rishiri Island, then under the control of the Soya Headquaters of the Bakufu. The history of the Northern Japan tells that there were numbers of military people despatched from northern parts of Honshu to Ezo to defend the land and the people from the Russian intrusion; besides them, many fishermen and farmers also crossed the Tsugaru Straits seeking the temporary jobs. Tangaro must have been one of them.
This paper includes on the result of the interview check with the native speakers of the two representative cities, Aomori and Nagasaki, in order to check if the people there accept or approve of the words in questions in the MacDonld's 'Glossary' as their dialects. Also, other Word Lists written by foreign scholars such as Thumberg, Curtius, Sansom are refered to, to observe how they describe the Japanese dialectal words in their works.

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新型コロナウイルスの感染拡大の中で、偽情報・誤情報の広がりが喫緊の課題として認識される中、世界の公共放送の代表格といわれるイギリスBBCは、「信頼できる確かな情報の担い手」として、自らの役割と価値を改めて打ち出そうとしている。 本稿は、その取り組みの最優先策として挙げられた「不偏不党の徹底」に焦点をあて、その理念がどのように放送で実践されてきたのか、その変遷を概観した。スエズ危機やフォークランド紛争など、時として権力と激しく対立しながら模索してきたそのアプローチは、デジタル化と多民族化が進む中で、「シーソーのようにバランスをとる」ことから、「多種多様な価値を反映」させるべく、「正確性、バランス、文脈、公平・公正、客観性など」が合わさった多様なものであるべきだとの認識へと進化を遂げる。そして、戦後最大の外交政策の転換と言われるEU離脱によって政治社会が分断し、対立感情があらわになりやすい雰囲気が広がる中で、左右からの批判にさらされたBBCは、再び変革を迫られる。本稿では最後に、これまで視聴者とのエンゲージメントの手段としてきた取材者のＳＮＳ発信を制限するなど、新たな実践の形を模索する姿を紹介する。

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