Like institutions or culture, personality has its own structure, its own forces, and its own impact with the confluence of historical determinants. What a man in shapes his role in an institution just as the demands of the institution mold the personality. The relationship is two-way and dynamic. Also dynamic, as anthropologists long have noticed, is the interaction between personality and culture.

Papers within this book cover a wide range of topics including seventeenth-century political figures, historically interrelated figures who were active in politics in the pre-Restoration period between 1834 and 1858, the sense of the cautious and measured pace of Bakufu action and of the political balancing of the various forces within the country by the fine tuning of personal relations, and twentieth-century figures.