Akira Iriye's Across the Pacific first appeared in 1967, two years after publication of his dissertation, five years after he received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and ten years after he began graduate work: two books and a doctorate in ten years. Since then the pace has quickened. Across the Pacific is a deceptively simple book. It leads the student into the complexities of American-East Asian relations by way of familiar popular assumptions and stereotypes. Footnote-free, non technical, the narrative moves the interplay of perception and policy deftly around the American-Chinese-Japanese triangle. Its thesis is compelling that ignorance and misperception on all sides fostered imaginary friendship, misunderstanding, and enmity. The book is a brilliant synthesis. It has been a requisite introduction to American-East Asian rela tions, greatly admired as such by students, but it is not superficial. It is sound as well as innovative: its policy side presenting the latest scholarship at the time from each national perspective and its percep tion side penetrating virtually new terrain. For the period it covers, the scholarship and interpretation of the 1967 edition remain largely valid today. Now we have an updated version, available in paperbound and clothbound copies. In Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American East Asian Relations, revised edition (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1992; xxii + 424 pp.), the original has not been changed. Iriye has added two chapters to bring the story to the present and a short bibliography of recent works. The new edition makes this classic available again. One expects a synthesis to appear later in a career, after years of crafting the parts in monographs and articles. With Akira Iriye it came almost first and seems to have had the opposite function of laying out the field in which he planned to work—essentially twenti eth century American-East Asian relations—and the sort of interna tional history he wanted to write. He set out, first, to write truly multinational and multicultural history. With his extraordinary command of the relevant languages,