Postwar Japan
Bronfenbrenner, Martin
RECENT BOOKS by Progressive Contributors The World of Carnegie Hall, by Richard Schickel. An illustrated social history of the concert hall and its world of music. (Messner. $6.95) My Wilderness:...
...It adds rather little to such a volume as Harry Emerson Wildes' Typhoon in Tokyo, which covers much the same ground somewhat more episodically...
...Putnam...
...5.95...
...As for Kishi's Japan, Kurzman introduces us to a pro-American land grateful to Eisenhower for modifying the Security Treaty at Kishi's behest, but prevented by a wild-eyed mob of student Communists from showing its appreciation in a hospitable welcome...
...Ballantine...
...An account of "the Montgomery story...
...The anti-Kishi view (accepted by perhaps ninety per cent of the Japanese public as of 1960) is never examined, let alone refuted...
...95 cents) Island in the City, by Dan Wakefield...
...Whether he rises or falls makes little difference, and probably never did...
...One period of Kishi's life is treated surprisingly well: his years as war criminal and purgee (1945-1952), first in Sugamo prison and later as business man...
...Kurzman's biography of Prime Minister Kishi has the makings of a better than average pot-boiler by a better than average correspondent...
...Reviewed by Martin Bronfenbrenner HHhe definitive history of Japan's relations with America since World War II, during and after the Occupation, has yet to be written...
...Paperback...
...For this a simple-minded explanation is: each side had been terrified of the other by its own war propaganda...
...However, Kawai proceeds to seek ever profounder explanations in Japanese history, philosophy, psychology, theology, child training, and so on...
...A first-hand report on Puerto Ricans in New York...
...Paperback...
...1.95) Postwar Japan Japan's American Interlude, by Kazuo Kawai...
...Kawai is a political scientist, American-born and American-trained but of Japanese descent...
...University of Chicago Press...
...There are only the sketchiest pictures of Kishi's associates and enemies (with the exceptions of General Tojo, Prime Minister Yo-shida, and Foreign Minister Fujiyama) and only a superficial glimpse of the post-Occupation world of Kishi's rise to power...
...Each side started the Occupation on its best behavior to avoid irritating the man-eating dragons on the other...
...The result reduces to Kishi-as-seen-by-Kishi, a campaign biography dedicated to the proposition that Kishi's lifetime of twistings and turnings represent not opportunism but pragmatism...
...2.75) Stride Toward Freedom, by Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Paperback...
...When and if it is written, the writer will probably be a Japanese, since the relationship meant much more to Japan than to America...
...The history will be compounded in part of evidence winnowed from memoirs and biographies such as these two volumes...
...Evergreen...
...394 pp...
...The war caught him in Japan...
...6.95) My Wilderness: The Pacific West, by William O. Douglas...
...Kawai first deals with the Japanese attitude toward the early Occupation...
...Paperback...
...In some places, including the naval port of Sasebo where the reviewer landed in mid-September, the whole process of terror, flight, return, and fraternization took for the Japanese less than twelve hours...
...Obo-lensky...
...A few hours or days of good behavior convinced each side of the sheer racist nonsense of its own propaganda...
...Doubleday...
...Why did an era of good feeling spring up between Americans and Japanese from September through December, 1945, instead of the expected resistance and guerrilla warfare...
...His book comes off well (and the Occupation comes1 off badly...
...Doubleday...
...It is not well enough written for good journalism, not balanced enough for good scholarship...
...He engaged in English-language journalism in Tokyo until 1949 and now teaches at Ohio State...
...It illustrates the love of so many contemporary sociologists and anthropologists for making simple matters difficult...
...There is some chance for confusion in connection with the misleading title of Kazuo Kawai's study...
...An eye-witness report...
...Kishi and Japan: The Search for the Sun, by Dan Kurzman...
...The result is some fifteen unimpressive pages of "scholarship...
...It needed another year of work, but Kishi may not remain newsworthy for another year...
...On the specific issue of the Security Pact, Japan is not only neutralist but "neutralist against us" in everything except the print and signatures on assorted scraps of paper, and is likely to remain so until the Russians and Chinese commit more blunders comparable in frequency and magnitude to those of Congress and the Pentagon...
...The fact seems to be that Japanese voters are even more repelled by the irresponsibility of Socialist leaders than by the Liberal-Democratic stands on the major issues of the day...
...The resulting reaction went temporarily to the other extreme...
...257 pp...
...A book for Americans of pre-voting age on "the most important questions of survival...
...95 cents) Working Men, by Sidney Lens...
...Where he generalizes beyond his immediate experience—in eight of the twelve chapters—the result falls between the two stools of journalism and scholarship...
...Corinth...
...control of the financial oligarchy (Zaibatsu), revision of the educational system, and particularly control of the press...
...On most specific issues, therefore, the street mobs come closer to the voice of the people than the democratically-chosen Parliament and Cabinet...
...He is unusually, sometimes uniquely, equipped to deal with a few aspects of Occupation policy...
...Yet neither book should be confused with the definitive history still to come...
...Reviewed by Hal Borland in the December issue...
...Whatever this volume may be, it is not the standard history of the Occupation that its title leads the unsuspecting to expect...
...50 cents) Revolt in the South, by Dan Wakefield...
...Here Kawai's book makes closest contact with events he saw and in which he participated...
...Kishi himself, whether pragma-tist or opportunist, diplomat or "fixer," has never shown sufficient power or acumen to change that bit of status quo...
...A story for younger readers (ages 10-14) of the development of the labor movement...
...4.95) Reveille for Rebels, by James P. Warburg...
Vol. 25 • January 1961 • No. 1
