The Japan Association of International Relations, which was established in 1956, considers one of its main objectives to contribute to the progress of the study of the history of international relations, in paticular to research into the history of Japanese diplomacy. Japan's Road to the Pacific War is a representative example of what can be done by the joint endeavour of this association.
We would like to point out, as a specific characteristics of recent research on the history of international relations, firstly, a tendency to remove the limitations which are encountered by a study of so called “diplomatic history” in isolation from everything else.
We would like to examine the change from the move traditional approaches, which have emphasized only bilateral or multilateral relations between states, to the more modern, original approaches. The interest of researchers will be to cover a wide area of historical phenomena, such as the political decision-making process, public opinion, economic pressure groups and the process of communication amongst other things.
The second characteristic has been the flowering of collaborative reserch between Japanese and foreign scholars, and we are now receiving the excellent results of their labours. For instance, the conference at Lake Kawaguchi in 1969, the result of which was, “The history of Japanese-American Relations, 1931-41” is a representative example of this trend. However, it is regrettable that the participants in these collaborative research projects have been mainly limited to Japanese and American scholars. It is to be hoped that, in future, there will be further opportunities for collaborative research and conferences not only with American scholars, but also with scholars from China, England, Korea, the Soviet Union and South East Asia.
We hope the future tendency of research will be for the themes of the role and limitation of the individual in international affairs, as well as the problem of individual responsibility, to become the common interest of scholars.
We hope that, in future, the increasing variety of scholarship will not become merely scattered and diffused.

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