Return to Japan.

Three weeks after the atomic bombs were dropped, the 11th Airborne `secured'Tokyo for General MacArthur's triumphal entry. Fifty years later,one soldier returned to witness a modern Japan. William Letwin Mr. Letwin is the author of The Origins of Scientific Economics.

DURING June and July, 1945, I was expecting to visit Japan. We -- that is, the 11th Airborne Division, then stationed just south of Manila -- were working out the plans for our allotted part in the invasion of Japan, which was scheduled for the end of that year. We were supposed to drop into landing zones behind the southern coast and hold out there until our seaborne friends arrived to back us up and move us forward. The prospect was not very amusing, in the light of Normandy, not to mention Nijmagen.Besides, the Japanese armed forces had provided us with an object lesson on this score. On the interesting date of December 7, 1944, during the sleepiest part of a sunny afternoon, a company or two of Japanese paratroops dropped into Leyte, right on our heads. It was a big surprise: we hadn't even known that any such troops or the transport planes to carry them were in the Philippines. Their objective was to seize the airfield next to which we were lodged and, after reinforcement by Japanese infantry, to drive us out of Leyte. But their infantry never broke through, and after a hectic night and day the paratroops were mopped up. A discomforting omen, we felt.Suddenly in August the outlook brightened. News came that two ``very big'' bombs, each equivalent in explosive force to 20,000 tons of TNT, had demolished Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A few days later the Japanese government accepted the Allied terms of unconditional surrender (except for the one condition that Hirohito would remain Emperor of his depleted empire), and V-J Day was declared on August 15. As the most mobile division in the Pacific, the 11th Airborne was quickly flown to Okinawa, and from there an advance party of about 1,000 flew into Tokyo. Instead of arriving in Japan as a prospective casualty, I came as a forerunner of the Occupation.Our mission when we landed on August 27 was to ``secure'' the Tokyo - Yokohama area so that it would be safe when General MacArthur and the other eminences arrived for the signing ceremony. We didn't expect Tokyo to be safe, nor did we see how we few were going to make it safe within a few days. Truly imaginative pessimists among us interpreted the ``surrender'' as a trick: we would be ambushed as we landed in Tokyo, and the Japanese would resume the war against a diminished invasion force. But of course nothing of the sort happened. The Tokyo area was not only safe but weirdly placid.We traveled in a convoy of dilapidated open trucks supplied by our hosts from the airport to our temporary quarters at a naval base in Yokohama. The road ran alongside the commuter railroad that connects Yokohama and Tokyo. It was the evening rush hour. The station platforms were packed, then as now, with passengers. They saw us, knew what we were -- but never looked at us. Instead they looked straight ahead, faces expressionless, like soldiers standing at attention. They simply snubbed us, as French patriots had snubbed German soldiers after 1940. But unlike the French, many of whom resisted after their government surrendered, the Japanese faithfully followed instructions.The instructions had been delivered by the Emperor in a broadcast just before V-J Day, the first broadcast that any Japanese emperor had ever made. It was an address of consummate subtlety. ``The war situation,'' he said, ``had developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage.'' If Japan continued to fight, it would be obliterated by the enemy's ``new and most cruel'' bomb. He had accordingly ``resolved to pave the way for a grand peace.'' So he admonished his people to ``beware most strictly of any outbursts of emotion'' and to ``cultivate the ways of rectitude.'' Never once did he use the word ``surrender.'' But the orders were plain, and the Japanese obeyed.So the peacefulness that we were supposed to establish in the Tokyo area was there before we arrived. But orders being orders, our mission to secure the area had to be carried out, at least symbolically. Therefore, on the next day our divisional commander, Major General Joseph Swing, sent a reconnaissance party into the center of Tokyo. It consisted of one jeep, one driver, and three second lieutenants, of whom I was one.We began our reconnaissance by calling in at the Bank of Japan. During the war it had issued occupation currency for use in the Philippines. As Japanese troops retreated in Leyte and later Luzon, their occupation notes became worthless, and we collected wads of them for souvenirs, bookmarks, and ersatz poker chips. When we arrived at the headquarters of the bank, we announced to a startled receptionist that we needed urgently to confer with a senior official. One such appeared at once, dressed in a morning coat, striped trousers, stiff stand-up collar, and sober tie: just the kind of costume that the Emperor wore on state occasions -- even, for instance, at a cabinet meeting in a crowded bunker the night after the first atomic bomb. The official bowed deeply to us. We explained that we wanted to convert the occupation notes into yen. He scrutinized one of the notes as if he had never seen such a thing before and couldn't make out what it said. Finally he announced slowly, with many interspersed apologies, that such notes were most unfortunately inconvertible. That was just what we thought too, and seeing no point in pressing on with our little joke, we turned to our real business. Could we exchange dollars for yen, and if so at what rate? Of course, said he, and pointed to a poster on the wall that showed the latest official exchange rates; the poster, as we saw and at once understood, was dated December 7, 1941. We signed documents, took our yen, and were bowed out ceremoniously.Armed with yen, we went off happily to shop. After many months in many jungles, a shopping spree was an essential first step in postwar rehabilitation. We found a large department store, crowded with customers buying goods that were by no means necessities, all this even though much of Tokyo had recently been destroyed. The small things that we bought were beautifully wrapped for us; neither war nor defeat had interfered with the skill of decorative wrapping, one of Japan's distinguished minor arts.Then finally we turned to our strictly military duty. We proceeded to the Imperial Hotel (the original one, later replaced by a much grander version). It was an architectural triumph, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in a style distinctly his own and yet definitely echoing traditional Japanese modes. Our business there was to make sure that rooms had been reserved for General MacArthur, Admiral Nimitz, and their retinues. Of course they had been, and the rooms were standing empty until they arrived. Mission accomplished, we left. On returning to headquarters, we reported to General Swing that in our considered opinion Tokyo was secure. A few days later our division was sent up north to garrison the provincial capital of Sendai.When I returned to Japan a few weeks ago, Tokyo seemed far less foreign. The central streets are lined with skyscrapers, Western clothing is the norm, many advertising signs carry English translations, and Coca-Cola is always within reach.But of course there are obvious differences as well. Few of Tokyo's skyscrapers really scrape; the very highest one does not quite get up to fifty floors, perhaps as a precaution against earthquakes. Many of the less monumental skyscrapers stand shoulder to shoulder rather than in the spaced-out islands favored by current American urban planners. Kimonos are rarely seen in public places during the day, though they are worn for grave or festive occasions and, I am told, at home. At properly Japanese restaurants, the menu posted outside describes the set dishes in words and often illustrates them with photos; just to make quite sure, many restaurants display plastic models of the dishes in the window. Policemen are much in evidence, which is said to be why Tokyo is so free of violent crime. Tokyo offers all the facilities of a great world metropolis, and some parts of it, especially old shrines, parks, and gardens, are very attractive. But taken as a whole, it seemed too big, too sprawling, and too disorganized; it did not strike me as lovable or admirable.Early in September of 1945 we arrived in Sendai. The civic authorities put on a welcoming banquet for the dozen or so officers of divisional headquarters in a fine old wooden inn on the outskirts of town; our bombs had wiped out all the suitable venues closer to the center. In deference to our strange incapacity to get through a long meal while sitting cross-legged on the floor at knee-height tables or to eat with chopsticks, our hosts had provided chairs, high tables, and cutlery; we wondered very much where they had found them.The occasion was memorable in other ways too. On the way from our jeeps to the inn, we walked through a perfectly tended small park and passed over two or three short bow-shaped bridges made of wood covered with bright red lacquer. This was my first real-life sight of the authentic picturesque Japan I had come to know during the 1930s via Lowell Thomas travelogues shown before the double feature at the Majestic, our neighborhood movie house in Milwaukee. The banquet opened with a brief speech by the mayor, in halting English, bidding us welcome, almost as if he and his colleagues had invited us to visit their fair country and city. Though it was certainly courteous, it was faintly ludicrous in view of the real relation between them and us.Thinking of it brings back a clear recollection of a parallel episode when the Japanese contingent arrived on the Big Mo for the surrender ceremony. They were received by Major General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's chief intelligence officer, then acting as a sort of protocol officer. The most senior Japanese general put out his right hand as he approached, with the intention of shaking Willoughby's; Willoughby started to put out his hand too, but he suddenly thought better and jerkily pulled it back. As far as he was concerned, the war wasn't over enough for hand-shaking.Two features of the welcome banquet I have never forgotten. We were served an ancient sake, ice-cold, that tasted like a dry white wine, but four times as alcoholic. It was the only sake I have ever enjoyed. Notable also was the silent presence of two or three geishas, elaborately dressed, their faces covered with thick white cosmetics in the usual geisha way. As for the rest of the meal, memory vaguely recalls rice.Fifty years ago when we drove along minor roads in the countryside near Sendai, we would often meet a curious sort of single-file procession. A plodding ox led the way, drawing a narrow cart, on which stood two tall narrow wooden casks, one behind the other. Then followed a farmer, encouraging the beast with a long bamboo pole. Five paces behind him walked his wife, and at orderly intervals children in descending sizes. Their progress, measured and silent, suggested a ritual ceremony.The purpose of such processions, as we discovered, was intensely practical. Such carts carried ``night soil,'' human fertilizer being moved from farmhouse to rice paddy or vegetable patch.It struck me as a great paradox. Here was a country whose industries had produced the ships, planes, and armaments that won at Pearl Harbor, Singapore, New Guinea, and all the rest. But here was a primitive agriculture carried out by landless peasants, working generation after generation bent over and barefoot in the flooded paddies. It was an example of the paradox, more common since, of countries whose governments artificially force industrialization in the belief that it is the true road to affluence or to durable military might.During my second visit I found the rice paddies still there, watered as always by the short rivers that flow down from the central spine of mountains into the surrounding seas. Paddies cover much of the rural coastal plains and the low hills behind. Landscape permitting, paddies are perfect squares, roughly uniform in size, seldom larger than an acre or two. Each of the squares is separated from its neighbors by narrow earthen dikes that keep the water in and form lanes for coming and going.Otherwise the cultivation of rice has changed dramatically. Occupation authorities transformed landless peasants into small-holding farmers. Mechanization has worked another transformation. Now paddies are cultivated by agile little tractors which have freed farmers to hold jobs in the small factories dotting the rural plains. The peasants are now semi-urbanized land-owning industrial workers.The wife submissively walking behind the husband is now vanishing. The phenomenon can still be seen, even in cities, among couples over 60 or so. But among the younger people, who grew up since the Occupation, women walk beside their men and are treated with a degree of chivalry. The leading expert on such matters told me that Japanese women have been effectively liberated in all basic ways, and there is plenty of visible evidence to that effect. It is, however, also commonly reported that women are prey to flagrant sexual harassment at work, and there is still a widespread and wide-open market for pornography. But, as far as I could make out, there is not yet any positive discrimination in favor of women, or for that matter in favor of anyone else.In 1945, a Japanese entrepreneur on the most modest scale set up a tiny shop near our headquarters. The shop consisted of an open-sided hut pieced together of debris, four wooden posts supporting a galvanized metal roof above an earthen floor. Here the shopkeeper offered assorted junk and the kinds of second-hand goods that Japanese were then selling in order to pay their way through the troubled postwar time. As the shop was the only social center in that neighborhood, and Americans could be seen there, it attracted a constant cluster of bystanders. One time when I went into the shop, I was attracted by a wooden box and plate designed for the Japanese tea ceremony. The shopkeeper told me their prices -- in Japanese, of course. Luckily I had learned, during my training at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, the names of numbers from one to a hundred. I added up the two prices, mentioned the sum, and started to count out the money. The shopkeeper took up his abacus and, after nimbly twiddling the discs, confirmed my addition. At which point the watching bystanders clapped their hands loudly, by way, as I assumed, of lauding my mathematical prowess.It scarcely need be said that during the intervening fifty years the abacus has become virtually extinct. The Japanese people love all things electronic, and calculators and computers have taken over. But the world-class excellence of Japanese engineers suggests that the Japanese do not easily sink into the depths of calculator-dependency now all too common at American colleges. Yet some do. An otherwise clever travel agent in Tokyo hauled out a large calculator in order to multiply 10,200 by 2, and then she did it twice more to make sure. Had there been bystanders this time, I might have been applauded again for getting the answer in my unaided head.Sendai, as it was then, offered little to amuse us in the evenings. After supper, we settled down in our quarters, formerly a club for bachelor army officers. Some of the men played high-stakes poker far into the night. Others, like me, talked, wrote letters, and read. When that palled, I would retire to the billiard room to amuse myself by practicing three-cushion shots. One evening an elderly Japanese civilian, dressed in a worn tweed suit, entered discreetly, bowed deeply, and watched silently. Presently I asked whether he would care to play, but obviously he understood no English. He replied in Japanese, to no avail. I tried German, but that was Greek to him. And then, my last resource, I tried French. Miracle of miracles, he replied in French, even more broken than mine but good enough to make out. It emerged that he had learned the language while working in Indochina before the war, and that during the war he had served as billiard professional of the club.From that evening on we played billiards whenever he turned up, at intervals of a week or two; I thought that it wasn't the low standard of my game that kept him away, but delicacy about not outstaying his welcome. Delicate too were the hints he gave me about how to improve, his subtle near-misses that saved me from utter disgrace, and his reserved bow when he had once again scored a lop-sided victory. I learned a lot from him, but little about him. His French did not allow for much conversation.By early 1946 I had accumulated enough ``points'' for military duty to be demobilized. The first leg homeward was by slow train overnight to Yokohama. Seats in the train, designed to provide minimal space for the Japanese, who in those days tended to be shorter than Americans, were shallow from front to back, low to the floor, and close to the row ahead. I, at five feet eight no giant, felt like one. Only half of my substructure could fit on the hard seat, and my legs couldn't stretch forward. Whenever I dozed off, I started slipping out of the seat, which tangled my bones and smartly woke me. One such time the train was passing slowly through a compact village, every one of whose houses was going up in roaring flames. The train went on; there was nothing to be done about the blaze.Fire has always been one of Japan's great enemies. For centuries the typical house of Honshu, the main island, was built of wood, and the movable inner walls were wooden frames covered with rice paper. They were cheap, because wood and paper were plentiful. Interiors were uncluttered, furnished with cushions rather than upholstered chairs, light straw mats covering wood floors, futon beds that could be hung out to air or stowed away during the day, and little else. But even so such houses were terribly liable to burn. One ember, one coal dropped from a brazier, could quickly ignite the whole of a densely settled place. Our firestorm bombing raids made the most of the opportunity. In Yokohama, when we came, there was nothing left standing for miles except ancestor shrines built of bricks, and the hearths of houses that had left no other trace, not even ashes.Since then housing has changed. Even low-rise buildings are clad in concrete blocks, making for boring boxes scarcely distinguishable from similar boxes anywhere else. Inside they retain distinctively Japanese features; outside they make a human landscape devoid of grace or interest.One thing that has not changed very much in fifty years is Japanese attitudes toward the question of war guilt. Was Japan the aggressor? Did Japan behave barbarically during the Pacific war and during its previous wars in Korea, Manchuria, and China? Should Japan express remorse? Although Japanese opinion is deeply divided, the prevalent view is that each of those questions should be answered, No. Only a minority, represented by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, leader of the minority Social Democratic Party, believe that an official apology is in order.The three questions and the typical answers would make more sense if they did not refer to the behavior of ``Japan.'' Japan is a place. It cannot do anything, and cannot be responsible for anything. What happened during the war was done by Japanese individuals, acting singly or in groups. If, as I believe, the war was caused by naked aggression and at times prosecuted with inhuman cruelty, the moral responsibility rests on those particular leaders who made culpable decisions, those individuals who carried out the decisions enthusiastically or complaisantly, and those individuals who acted badly on their own initiative. Less responsibility rests on those who followed reluctantly, and little if any on those who dissented or resisted. What ``Japan'' should say or do now is the responsibility of Japanese leaders and citizens of today.The dominant Japanese view is that ``Japan'' did not start the war but was forced into it. (More or less the same view is held by the ``revisionist'' American historians who defended the original Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian.) Here is the history as they interpret it.Modern imperialism was a Western invention. From 1500 until 1914, practically every Western power built overseas empires by engaging in or threatening armed conquest. By the nineteenth century Japan had been hemmed in by British, Russian, and other Western establishments and spheres of influence in China, by the Russian presence in Manchuria, by Dutch dominance of Indonesia and New Guinea, by French control of Indochina, and by colonies, chiefly British, American, and German, in western Pacific archipelagos.Moreover, Western imperialism in East Asia was racist. Western governments felt justified in taking over because they were convinced that Orientals were inferior: uncouth, uneducated, incapable of governing themselves or behaving peaceably. Western views were manifest in mocking references to ``Celestials'' and the ``yellow peril,'' by lampoons such as The Mikado, and far more seriously by Commodore Perry's virtual invasion of 1854, which forcibly opened Japan to American traders, while the Exclusion policy cynically closed the United States to Japanese and Chinese immigrants.When Japan became a world power during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it followed the Western imperial model. Japan too deserved secure markets for its exports, privileged access to the raw materials and foodstuffs that it badly needed, and buffer zones to protect the home islands against invasion by potential Western aggressors, among which Russia was then the most threatening. Japan's first step, in 1894, was to invade Korea and to move from there to southern Manchuria and Port Arthur. But Russia, France, and Germany combined to defend their various imperialistic designs by forcing Japan to relinquish the territories it had won. By 1904 Russia had taken effective control of Manchuria and Korea (which Japan saw as a ``dagger pointed at the home islands''). Japan launched a defensive war which ended in a peace conference under American auspices, the U.S. Government having recognized the justice of Japan's cause. Then, during World War I, Japan, one of the Allies, took over German possessions in China and in several island chains of the Pacific.Then and after, Japan's intention was not only to satisfy its own legitimate aims but also to liberate Asians from white exploitation by founding a ``Greater East Asian Economic Co-Prosperity Sphere.'' Further moves to extend that Sphere began in 1931, when Chinese forces tried to oust the Japanese army stationed in Manchuria in accordance with previous treaties. After successfully resisting, Japan transformed Manchuria into the independent state of Manchukuo, ruled by Pu-yi, whose legitimacy derived from his having been, before he was deposed, Emperor of China. The League of Nations, dominated by the European imperial powers, condemned Japan, whereupon Japan withdrew from the League.Again in 1937, China's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, tried to expel Japanese troops legitimately stationed in China, thus setting off the Sino-Japanese War. The Western powers sided with the Chinese government, whose notable weakness enabled them to extract concessions that would no longer be available once China was incorporated into the Co-Prosperity Sphere. But aside from protesting, the Western powers did nothing on China's behalf.However, when Japanese armies moved into Indochina in July 1941, with the consent of the Vichy government, the West, particularly the United States, reacted aggressively, imposing an embargo on shipments to Japan of oil and steel. Faced with this stranglehold, and with America's intransigent insistence that it would not lift the embargo until Japan withdrew from Indochina and China as well, Japan was forced into declaring war.That version of history, which has apparently dominated Japanese thinking during the past fifty years, concludes in short that Japan has always been on the defensive and that other interpretations of Japan's conduct either are based on superficial appearances or are willfully biased.We come now to the second question, which concerns the allegation that Japan behaved cruelly in war and in treatment of prisoners and innocent civilians. Here the prevalent Japanese view is that whatever cruelty the Japanese may have inflicted is as nothing compared with the horrors perpetrated on the Japanese people. Japan's innocent civilians, masses of them, were the war's principal victims, victims of apocalyptic American cruelty.TO MY mind, the apologetic case that I have outlined collapses for a variety of reasons.First, the argument that Japan's imperial design was justified by Western precedents is flimsy. It would be as logical for a murderer to maintain that his murder was justified by the murderous activities of others in the past. Granted that much evil had been done in the course of establishing Western empires, Western moral attitudes toward empire-building had changed radically by the 1920s. After the bloodbath of World War I, peace and international order were at a premium -- too much so, as it appeared on retrospective consideration of Western responses to Hitler before 1939. When, in the moral environment of the Twenties and Thirties, a Western power undertook to extend its empire by armed force, as Italy did in Ethiopia, world opinion, as expressed in the League of Nations, condemned it and proposed sanctions against it. Japan had little reason to be surprised or antagonized that its foray into Indochina provoked the American embargo. The Japanese misgauged America's determination, just as America misgauged Japan's; it was one of the many misunderstandings, serious or trivial, that have resulted from the gulf between two very different civilizations.I do not believe that expansion of the Co-Prosperity Sphere after 1937 was defensive -- that is, necessary in order to defend Japan's home islands. Nor was war against the United States defensive in that sense; Japan could have avoided it by withdrawing from China and Indochina, but it was not willing to give up the fruits of its aggressions there. The war that Japan declared on December 7, 1941, was not a separate war but part of a war that Japan had started in 1937, a war that cannot convincingly be portrayed as innocent or just.As for cruelty, was Japan more sinned against than sinning? Large-scale cruelty does not lend itself to statistical computation. But nobody can point to actions during the Pacific war by America and its allies that paralleled the death marches from Bataan and Singapore or the wantonly harsh treatment and arbitrary executions of prisoners of war, not to mention the rape of Nanking and numerous similar atrocities visited on Chinese civilians in order to terrorize them in what Japan's commanders labeled a ``war of punishment.'' It is true, perhaps, that American saturation bombing in the last phase of the war, which killed and injured masses of innocent civilians or made them homeless, is difficult to forgive. Yet Japan did not refrain from bombing civilians -- in Shanghai, for instance -- and if it never bombed American cities that was because it lacked the means rather than the will.But of course the main Japanese charge is about the singular total cruelty of atomic bombs. Certainly they killed. But that is not the point at all. Sudden death, whether caused by a rifle, a ``conventional'' bomb, or an atomic bomb, is sudden death. No instant death is more cruel than another. Cruelty is a sin of those who choose weapons that will impose prolonged suffering, weapons such as dum-dum bullets or chlorine gas. If the men who made and the men who launched the atomic bombs had wanted to inflict as much prolonged suffering as possible, they would indeed have been cruel, as cruel as sadistic torturers. But that was not their intention. The deaths and suffering caused by the atomic bomb do not make the Japanese people the war's principal victims; too many other victims died and suffered as badly. Nor can the notion that Japanese people were the principal victims wipe out the responsibility of other Japanese people for their cruel and inhumane actions from 1937 onward. YET ALL that belongs to a past that cannot be undone. What should today's Japanese say and think about that past? Of course most of the Japanese alive now were born since the war or were too young to play any part in it, and no doubt many who were then adults opposed the war while it was going on. They cannot be held or hold themselves morally responsible for Japan's aggression or the dirty deeds it entailed. But that is not the end of the story.People who have not been guilty themselves need not and should not shoulder the burden of guilt for actions of others. Doing so is most often a sentimentalized attempt to rectify sins too old to be rectified, an attempt that is either futile or destructive. But that is not to say that we should not candidly recognize and regret the sins of people to whom we are closely bound. A simple analogy may make this clear: If I choose to inherit my father's estate, can I justifiably refuse to pay the estate's outstanding debts? For that sort of reason, Japanese today, who benefit from and take just pride in their patrimony, should clearly recognize that many of their ancestors and fellow countrymen behaved very badly. Pretending that the sins were not sins, or that they were somebody else's fault, is moral cowardice.Furthermore, I do not believe that the apology statement drafted by the Japanese parliament this June, over objections from the governing coalition's largest party, the Liberal Democrats (roughly akin to our Republican Party), meets a high standard of moral candor. Its key passage reads as follows:Looking back at the various instances of colonial rule and acts of aggression in modern world history and recognizing the fact that we carried out both such acts and the suffering we brought to the citizens of other nations, especially in Asia, the Diet [the Japanese equivalent of the House of Representatives] expresses deep regret.That amounts to saying, ``Like all the other villains, we too behaved villainously,'' while implicitly adding, ``but not a bit more villainously than any other.'' It is a far cry from straight confession untainted by any attempt to vindicate oneself. However, the Diet's statement closes the epoch that opened with the Emperor's surrender message. Imperfect as it was (by its tone and by its omission of any offer to make amends), and overdue as it was, that statement will help to lay the war finally to rest.I too have a confession to make. On my second visit to Japan I came bearing prejudices. Experiences during the war (when I occasionally helped interrogate prisoners) and during the Occupation had led me to believe that the Japanese were a grim people, always on guard, unwilling to make human contact by as much as a faint smile. It was understandable, of course, that they should be wary of us. But I believed that the wariness we encountered was merely an overlay on traits fundamental in the Japanese character, traits that could be summarized as inscrutability plus generalized suspicion of strangers.As to inscrutability, today's Japanese showed me at once how mistaken I had been. On arrival at Tokyo airport, I bought a bus ticket into town (because the taxi ride costs $250). The young woman who sold the ticket smiled to me and merrily answered my questions. The receptionist at the hotel, the bellboy, the waiter -- all smiled genuinely. Even sober middle-aged men, evidently discussing business, used their faces, hands, and bodies to express shades of meaning. A solitary contrasting episode heightened my general impression. Sitting at a table next to mine were two stiff elderly gentlemen who ate their way stolidly through a long meal without exchanging a word; then came a brief flurry of conversation, which turned out to concern nothing other than choice of dessert, which was again eaten in silence.As to distrust of strangers, however, my earlier view changed less radically. Unlike the common American practice of greeting a stranger by his first name and as if he were an old friend, the Japanese approach is courteous and cool. The Japanese do not assume that the stranger is probably a good guy, and it may well be that the tenor of Japanese business life makes that a safer rule of thumb. But foreign strangers are not singled out for especial distrust, though the Japanese are for good reason puzzled by the strange manners of Western visitors.The second great prejudice with which I lately arrived was that the Japanese tend to oppress or even suppress Nature. Evidence was, I thought, provided by bonsai culture. A bonsai is a tree that is raised to be a midget by planting it originally in an inch or two of soil on a flat plate, and then regularly trimming its roots. It is trained moreover into a contorted shape by twisting wire around the trunk and branches as well as by stern pruning. Similar but less drastic treatment turns garden shrubs into perfect hemispheres or widespread umbrellas. Most drastically controlled, however, are the so-called ``dry landscape'' gardens. They consist exclusively of a bed of gravel raked into graceful geometrical shapes. Instead of taming Nature the gardener has expelled it. This, I thought, symbolized a deep Japanese attitude toward living things.This turned out like many prejudices to be not totally unfounded but ill founded. As the Occupation authorities had neglected to organize any garden visits, it was only this time around that I was able to see a number and variety of gardens. Most of them turned out to be as ``natural'' as American gardens and, for that matter, more natural than formal gardens in the French mode. Those that pleased me most concentrated on rich arrays of exotic flowering trees and bushes, with a rock or two skillfully placed among them and a waterfall or rivulet besides. The more I saw, the more my prejudice abated. All that remains is a vague feeling that some Japanese art forms (such as the tea ceremony), like Japanese courtesies (such as bowing), are more formalized, and in that way less natural, than their nearest Western counterparts.The greatest change undergone by Japan during the past fifty years, as everyone knows, has been its economic miracle. Having catastrophically failed to create a euphemistically named Co-Prosperity Sphere by force of arms, Japan is doing much to create a genuine Co-Prosperity Sphere by peaceable economic efficiency. Sometimes the machine is mightier than the sword.But, in the past few years, the Japanese economic miracle seems to have been running out of steam. The Japanese government's Economic Planning Agency has just issued a warning that the economy faces stagnation unless sharp and difficult changes are made. Recession has already brought about developments that may be dangerous in the long run. For instance, some companies have abandoned the established policy of granting loyal employees life tenure. Deprived of the security this had promised them, employees will press for government grants such as unemployment insurance and more social security. Increased government spending, which will have to be financed by increased taxation, will depress the rate of voluntary private savings and consequently of investment, thus limiting economic growth.Another hitch is that affluence can diminish the appetite for additional income. Instead of pressing for yet more pay, workers very reasonably opt for more leisure -- shorter hours, longer holidays, earlier retirement -- and, so far as they can prevail, for a more relaxed pace of work. Though additional leisure enhances the quality of life, it limits economic growth.And finally Japan may be overtaken by China well within the next fifty years. For the time being, China and Japan are well-matched trading partners, the raw materials and fabricated products of the one being exchanged for the high-tech and heavy-industry products of the other. But as the Chinese economy develops, in response to privatization and liberalization, Japan may sink into the condition of junior partner. Such demotion would badly dent the long-cherished belief of the Japanese that they are intrinsically superior to all other Asians, whom they ought therefore to lead.Japan's next fifty years may be less gratifying than the last fifty. It comforts me that I will not be here to be blamed if my forecast is mistaken.