There's a short article by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, 'Mark Twain in Japan,' in the latest _Mark Twain Circular_ (vol. 13, no. 3, July- September 1999) reporting on her trip to Japan and her lectures on Twain. She also expresses disappointment that a lot of excellent Japanese scholarship on Mark Twain has not been noticed by American scholars (not appearing in bibliographies, and seemingly having been entirely omitted from the last couple of volumes of _American Literary Scholarship_). When the Forum began in 1992, it immediately struck me that the largest number of subscribers, after the U.S., were from Japan. This continues to be true. Here's the current tally of the Forum's geographical distribution, which also gives a rough idea of Mark Twain's popularity outside of the U.S.: Country Subscribers ------- ----------- Australia 1 Canada 3 China 1 Germany 6 Great Britain 6 India 2 Israel 2 Italy 1 Japan 20 Norway 1 Russian Federation 1 Spain 1 Taiwan 1 USA 431 Total number of "concealed" subscribers: 8 Total number of users subscribed to the list: 477 (non-"concealed" only) Total number of countries represented: 14 (non-"concealed" only) The last paragraph of Prof. Fishkin's article reads: As Twain scholars, we need to develop strategies for making sure that more of this interesting work by Japanese scholars (in both Japanese and English) finds its way into Twain bibliographies in the future. And as American literature specialists, we need to encourage the editors of _American Literary Scholarship_ to open its pages on a regular basis to work published in Japan, China, and Korea. There is no shortage of qualified scholars who could do the job. (p. 4) The annual volumes of _American Literary Scholarship_ are necessarily static and condensed reviews of scholarly happenings. Rather than unwittingly ignoring Japanese scholarship, I wonder if its editors are simply having to become more selective; in response to the information nightmare posed by the 'net, for example, its editors have adopted a semi-official policy of excluding web sites and e-mail discussion lists. The Internet and Japan, it seems, might as well be the same place, as far as ALS is concerned. Rather than worry about ALS, then, it would be great if members of the Mark Twain Forum would try to make a positive contribution toward alleviating the problem that Prof. Fishkin has identified. I've always felt that the Forum should facilitate communication between Twain scholars and enthusiasts from different countries, and I'd like to offer TwainWeb as a host for any bibliographic material that scholars from Japan (or any country) would like to contribute, with the hope that such scholarship will thereby find some attention in the U.S. and elsewhere. Actually, there were a couple of threads about Mark Twain in Japan here on the Forum in 1996, and Ryota Iijima of Fukushima University has periodically kept us informed of new Twain publications there. If it's desirable to exchange international ideas about Twain (and it surely is), members of the Forum are in an excellent position to do this. If we can get references to some of the Japanese (etc.) scholarship online, it can potentially be brought to a wider audience--perhaps even back to ALS. Taylor Roberts