Japan - The Fragile Superpower [antikvár]

Foreword to the Third Revised Edition The first Japanese I ever tallied to, in his own language, was a Superior Private who had survived the virtual annihilation of the Japanese Army unit defending one of the Marshall Islands in 1944. We sat in a thin wooden interrogation shack inside the remote reservation near Pearl Harbor that housed a prisoner-of-war facility, facing each other across a table with one well-used map on it. He was very frightened at the encounter and so was I. If I learned little about what military secrets he possessed, it was still no trick to realize that he was an average citizen like myself, who had gone to school, looked forward to vacation times, fallen in love with a girl, and not liked it much when he was drafted—one man among a nation of individuals, who were variously bad, good, indifferent, truthful, lying, cowardly, brave, bright, dumb. Through the war years and immediately after, I met hundreds of others like him. It was an odd introduction to a country and its people, but it led to much. My unexpected wartime career as a Navy intelligence officer not only changed my own occupational existence, from a Greek major at Yale College with ambitions to study law, to a journalist who has lately been editing a Japanese-language encyclopedia. It also rescued me, without realizing it at the time, from the tendency of most of my fellow countrymen to see the Japanese either in terms of heedless human wave attacks— whether military or economic—or cloyingly friendly reception committees, altemately part of an "inscrutable" yellow peril or the animated furnishings of an Oriental curio shop. In short, as masses, not people. This