Correspondents' Correspondence DONALD KIRK \ JOSEPH ALBRIGHT

...Japan's New Love Tokyo—"Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, I adore you"—the popular song of a generation ago irresistibly comes to mind as you travel about this country today and see the face of Leonardo da Vinci's celebrated lady gazing benignly from subway posters, magazine covers, jigsaw puzzles, department store windows, and television commercials...

...Similarly, as people here have become more affluent in recent years, they have turned into connoisseurs of Occidental art, scouring the galleries and shops of Europe and America, bidding the highest prices and returning with some of the world's most renowned treasures...

...Thus the peculiar appeal of the Mona Lisa...

...Certainly this would explain the burst in industrial and technological prowess here after the Meiji restoration—and many other aspects of the mania for modernization as well...

...Whatever her psychological problems, this girl was in effect saying she did not want to be "Japanese," but was eager to change races and assume the appearance of a foreigner...

...Yet the phenomenon reflects far more about modern Japan than just a passing interest in European Renaissance painting...

...Indeed, the Japanese themselves do not seem to recognize the oddity of what is happening here...

...One concludes that the Japanese, for all their national and ethnic pride, are afflicted by a deep sense of inferiority and failure, by the feeling that they still must look up to other civilizations for inspiration and that "things Japanese" are not completely satisfactory...

...Lesser businessmen, exploiting the upwardly mobile aspirations of the middle class, peddle all manner of imitations and copies—or else the output of minor painters...

...In addition, there is an entire school of Japanese artists influenced by the European masters, notably the French impressionists...

...Corporation executives seem to compete with each other to display the most exquisite Matisse or Picasso in their homes, and major companies regularly unveil expensive works in their board rooms...

...Japan's passion for the Mona Lisa appears to be inextricably related to its love for such Western innovations as baseball and bowling, the jitterbug and the twist, French fashions and Hollywood movies—all aspects of a foreign culture adapted completely to the Japanese taste...

...It is as if the Japanese, despite the richness of their own cultural and intellectual tradition, somehow fear it may not be good enough: that the rest of the world may have done better and that they must catch up by sheer imitation...

...On a mass scale, millions of her fellow citizens are conveying the same message by prostrating themselves before European art and culture, as epitomized in the popular mind by the timeless, mysterious smile of the Mona Lisa.—Donald Kirk...

...The fact that the painting went on display at the National Museum in Ueno April 20 and will be there through June 10 does not suffice to explain why the Japanese, individually and collectively, have gone so absolutely crazy over it...

...Nor can the fad be convincingly attributed to the supreme artistic beauty of the masterpiece or to a mass fascination with its subject's famed, enigmatic smile...

...All of which leads the foreign observer to wonder whether Japan is not suffering from a serious case of national schizophrenia...

...In one widely publicized case, a Japanese girl went to the extreme of having plastic surgery done on her face so she would look just like the Leonardo portrait...

...But something compels this society on the one hand to reject totally any alien influence, to show the utmost personal distaste for outsiders, and then on the other hand to crave foreign art and technology in every form and minute detail...

...The Japanese, whose artistic tradition derives in part from Chinese culture and dates back several centuries before Leonardo, hardly need turn to the West for esthetic inspiration...