Japan

on the World today

TT is difficult for Americans at home to realize | the weight of our impact on Japanese lile. A\e funneled a million and a cpiarter Americans in to reform the country in 194a. Today we maintain a command network, big military and naval bases, airfields, hospitals, and an enormous State Department establishment. Unannounced but manifestly large numbers of l N troops are always in Japan on rest and rotation leave from Korea.

American administrators, often able specialists, tend to assume that what is good for Nebraska is good for Japan. More perilously, the Japanese tend to assume the same thing. Both tire justly proud of a long list of particular political, economic, and technological reforms, and it is in fact easy to trace our tangible contributions. It. is much harder to see what we have taken away from the Japanese.

There are swarms of able American reporters in Japan, but they are absorbed in the Korean War and in concrete Japanese developments. Therefore, cultural changes ha\c remained almost entirely unreported. The new personality structure of the Japanese, their system of values, the complex vocabulary of motives, is not so much misunderstood by us as unknown. Yet these determine Japanese attitudes towards their standard of living, militarism and defense, Communism, and relations with America.

The greatest change in Japanese values is the extent to which the people have become consumption-minded. They have observed the habits of Occupation families and decided to acquire much of the1 paraphernalia of American life. And why not? Well, Japan is a poor country that simply hasn’t the material resources for American living.

Excepting the very wealthy, the Japanese must make do with fifth-best imitations of our bars and cabarets, our bobbysocks and Hawaiian shirts, our radios and phonographs, our shoes and permanent waves (which they call pali-mah), our plumbing, and our food. Heavy, toasted bread called pan rivals scarce rice; meat, coffee, and even cheese are now in fashion.

Fifth best would be belter than nothing, had it not displaced the old first best and its many satisfactions. The Japanese were once able to live close to nature, in what they called elegant simplicity, and to develop a polished and sophisticated culture, rich in human relationships and in aesthetic rewards, that demanded few material props. One has only to compare a Japanese room with an American room to understand this.

Kor«.‘iin war boom

For the moment, the Japanese enjoy a relatively high level of consumption. Since the outbreak of the Korean War we have placed “special procurement orders” in Japan for war supplies averaging $31,000,000 a month. This nicely offsets the average monthly foreign trade deficit of the period of $30,700,000.

The Japanese know that their economy is being floated by the Korean War and its side effects, and that its end will bring an economic crisis. This produces a here-today-gone-tomorrow attitude. The wealthy spend lavishly and conspicuously. The stock market is booming to new highs. Gambling, especially in the form of a kind of vertical pinball game called pachinco, flourishes. Night life is fast. Heavy industry and shipbuilding are working at capacity. Real estate is soaring, and both construction costs and volume are whirling to dizzy heights.

But Japan’s consumer industries, especially textiles for export, are in the doldrums. General retail trade is slow. Savings and capital formation are lagging desperately, in spite ol the temptations ol interest rates well over 10 per cent. While the cost of luxury items, especially Western ones, is very high, the cost of ordinary living is low, and declining somewhat. It has to. The base monthly pay of office workers is $28, of government employees ,$35, and of railroad workers $37. Materially, ihese people arc better off than they have ever been before, but they have an uneasy feeling of instability and rootlessness,

IWutralism

Under our tutelage, and also because they fear Russian bombs more than ( ommunism, the Japanese have become profoundly antimilitarist. They believe fervently that they were misled by their generals. They have seen war at its worst, and are skeptical of all its rationalizations, especially those that paint it as a defensive necessity. Young people say that democracy is just another ideology, no more worth fighting for than the idea of the Emperor.

The big literary award last year went to a novel by Yoshie Hotta called Loneliness in the Public Square, a neutralist tract whose sentiments are echoed in many other books. To reconcile their neutralism with their yearning for science and logic., young writers and painters have become overwhelmingly Francophile. Translations from the French have displaced translations of American books on the best-seller lists. For instance, an omnibus of Camus’s novels was in second place early this winter.

Popular sentiment against rearming is so strong that the Yoshida government would commit political suicide were it to speed up defense measures. Even though the cliquish regime is highly unresponsive to public opinion, Yoshida made a yearend statement that the country could not afford rearmament. The truth is that on this issue big business, which enjoys American war orders and fears taxes, is united with the public, which sardonically cherishes the MacArthur-drafted constitutional ban on armament.

Yoshida has tried to meet heavy American pressure for defense measures through a new National Security Corps, which was booed when it paraded in Tokyo a couple of months ago. Anyone can draw a laugh in Japan by repeating the official word that this organization, equipped with tanks and fighter planes, is a police force.

Tlie C’oiiiiiiuuisis lose ground

In the general election last fall the Communist vote fell from an average of 3,500,000 since the war to 896,000, or 2.5 per cent of the total vote cast; in the previous general election, in 1949, it had boon 2,984,000, or 9.7 per cent of the total vote cast .

Almost all the unions have purged themselves of their once influential Communist leaders. The massive coal and electric power strikes — which all but paralyzed Japan in December, halting factories, curtailing train service, and even inconveniencing compound-sheltered Americans by reducing gas supplies — were not Communist-inspired.

Universities, usually the scene of Communist demonstrations, have been very quiet. University officials say that the attitude of the students has shifted from prankish imitation of a few exhibitionists to apathy, and recently to antagonism. Almost all Japanese, even Party members, resent Communist opposition to the Emperor.

Bit terness runs high on account of those prisoners of war, mostly skilled technicians or engineers, still held by the Russians. All prisoners were heavily indoctrinated in Russia, and the several hundred thousand who returned expected to see their homeland groaning under the heel of American imperialism. Startled by the truth, many of them have publicly recanted and turned anti-Communist. They do not resent captivity itself, having been allowed considerable freedom — to work. To questions about their treatment, they say almost invariably that it was “not bad, not good.”

Our impression of Communist influence in Japan has been exaggerated because scattered anti-American violence and demonstrations by Communists nre necessarily played up by our press, while quiet is not news. A visitor has to hunt hard to find visible animosity. On the other hand, Americans who have been injured by common criminals sometimes receive flowers and apologies on behalf of the nation from strangers.

Anti-Aiucricanisiu

Antagonism to American culture is a different matter. Westernization is not a one-way process, and the frustration of new desires for material things plus disdain for American materialism set up complex ambivalences, often in the same individual. Many .Japanese say they are glad the American Occupation lasted as long as it did because they were able to learn so much from us. Still, its aftertaste is not all sweet. Parents regret the coarse American habits their children have picked up, and it is true that some of the Japanese youngsters can out-bo bbysoeks ours.

The way the Japanese have worked themselves up about the £00,000 illegitimate children (the figure is theirs) left behind by the Occupation troops suggests that this is a catalyst for seldom expressed general animosity. A novel about an orphanage shell(*ring some of these waifs has just, become a top best-seller, and a movie, the success of which is certain, is being made from it. It is called Vassa-Mossa, a colloquial word meaning confusion.

The subject is brought up everywhere. Recently there was a furious public debate over whether these children should be educated separately. Illegitimacy is no real stigma to llie Japanese; what really worried them was the large infusion of w hite and Negro blood into what they hold to be the purity of their race. Fortunately, the Ministry of Education took the course of reason.

’iTIit* noisy biirlmriiins

Even in the most Westernized hearts, some feeling for tradition persists, along with admiration for our science and technology. So the stock American is drawn as a red-faced, noisy barbarian leading an overactive life full of artifices, and covering his insensitivity to human feeling by an informal, stereotyped jocularity. This kind of cultural anti-Americanism does not take violent forms. Jt takes the form of gentle and often very funny satire, of withdrawal, of irritation, and sometimes of sec rut contempt .

In a brilliant Tokyo theater season last fall, for example, a satire called East Is East, by a popular novelist, Bunroku Shishi, was an outstanding success. It deals with a Chinese scholar shipwrecked on the coast of Japan long ago who, although he lived with a cultivated Japanese woman for three years, learned neither her language nor her country’s customs. It captivated its audiences because it so obviously applies to Americans who have lived for seven years in their stainless steel compounds knowing nothing of Japan.

Even Japanese who live in Western style rail at Americans who have sealed themselves and their dependents off in aseptic, mechanized, gadget-filled compounds that, their Japanese names not being good enough, arc now called something like W ashington Heights.

SCAP’s biggest blunder

But irritation flares most over extraterritoriality, our greatest political and psychological blunder. In February, 10.5£, in anticipation of the end of its authority in April, but against the wishes of the Stale Department, SCAR concluded an administrative agreement of which Article XVII gives complete criminal jurisdiction over American military and civilian personnel and their dependents to L.S. military authorities. It could not have done worse. Extraterritoriality lias for a century been, in Oriental eyes, the most irritating as well as the most, conclusive evidence of Western imperialism, not to mention race prejudice.

The Japanese do not object to our jurisdiction over crimes committed on American military bases, or over off-base crimes committed by men on duty. But they strongly and justly resent our jurisdiction over crimes both olf base and off duty. They are angered because American personnel in NATO countries do not enjoy ihe same privilege. And they arc fully aware of the trickery of a dictated agreement concluded just before Japan regained her sovereignly.

Japanese and American observers agree that relations between Americans and the population are very good. But in the nature of things, the normal incidence of misconduct by American (and British) troops is featured in the Japanese press, and every detail of apprehension, trial, and punishment is watched with hawklike attention. Even in eases in which our authorities act with extra severity (thus offsetting any imagined benefits of American justice):. incalculable emotional forces are aroused.

The folly of SCAB was all (he greater because the administrative agreement is lo serve only during a transitional period. This April, one year after (lie resumption of full sovereignty, the Japanese have the option of reopening the question as free agents and equals. If we exact our full pound of flesh and yield only at the last legal minute, we shall lose an immeasurable amount of good will. The time is limited; we must instantly surrender this mockery of a privilege.

TIM» now linf ionnlisin

Contempt for Americans is mixed in with a national inferiority complex. But the Japanese will sometimes point out that the movie version of Gone with the Wind, released in Japan only in 1952, met with an entirely disproportionate and unexpected success because it shows what an army of occupation can do to a civilized country.

Amid the craze for Western methods, there arc a few Japanese thinkers and evaluators — critics, philosophers, teachers, editorialists, and even speech-writers — who feel that the destruction of traditional Japanese values has gone too far. These intellectuals should not be chalked off too hastily as reactionaries.

One of them, a very distinguished man, recently said that a nationalistic reaction is bound to occur. If it comes soon, it will help to re-establish Japanese self-confidence, self-respect, and dignity. It will be a new nationalism, based on Japan’s very real cultural assets, devoid of militarism, of chauvinism, and of impossible territorial or economic ambitions. But if the reaction is delayed too long, it will become ext rente and ugly.

Although Tojo’s Japan used the methods of the police state, most Japanese even now believe they were merely copying Western imperialism. As they say, not without irony, they had a serious case of nineteenth century morality. If they turn to aggression again, they will be under line compulsion of far more terrible beliefs. But they will turn to aggression only if they fail to recover a moderate, healthy self-esteem.

They still think that all things Japanese must be bad because they lost the war. We have no experts to send them to teach them pride and dignity; these they must find for themselves.